Screenplays or Statistics – Can algorithms make hit films?

Photo by Volumetric
Photo by Volumetric

It’s taken me several days to gather my thoughts on the subject of computer algorithms being used to analyze screenplays for the right DNA that spawns a hit movie.  That’s the focus of this article in the New York Times about Worldwide Motion Picture Group and its CEO/”mad scientist” Vinny Bruzzese.  Like the writers and film professionals interviewed for the article, my reaction is mixed.  At first blush, of course, words like sacrilege and abomination come to mind and then give way to feisty paragraphs about the humanity in the craft, the beauty in uncertainty synthesized through each writer’s soul and unique voice.  Naturally, I do believe all that and have even seen it manifest on screen — but not always.

There’s no avoiding the truth:  every criticism one might sling at the notion of computer analysis of a screenplay can just as easily apply to the longstanding human analysis that produces a tremendous volume of motion picture entertainment.  To be fair, cinema, and especially American cinema, is probably the most derivative and formulaic of all popular media; and that’s only sometimes a bad thing.  When Pauline Kael reviewed Star Wars, her criticism was that it was composed entirely of successful scenes from other movies, and she was absolutely right — but that is also precisely why it was such a hit.  Star Wars is basically every great western and war film we’ve ever seen set in a galaxy far far away; and as revolutionary as its approach was for its time, it’s narrative and characters are equally dependent on tapping into nearly every ritual known to our subconscious film literacy.

For as long as there have been motion picture executives, there has been a persistent faith in the ability to crack the code for a hit movie. And for as long as there have been great filmmakers, there has been an understanding (often unspoken) that such a code is a figment of wishful thinking. It should be no surprise of course to find computer scientists insisting that indeed such a code exists and that it can be understood if we lift the fog of human, let alone writerly, emotion from the analysis.  Meanwhile, there is no denying that throughout film history, many surefire hits have flopped like suffocating mackerels on fishing trawlers, and many risky bets have redefined the medium.  Among the latter, of course, is Star Wars.

Today, the industry is far more bifurcated than it was in the 1970s.  Hollywood  studios produce almost exclusively “safe bets” in the form of $100 million blockbusters, while independents of varying size raise relative drippings to produce a much broader range of fare, still mostly operating on human instinct. Studio films, which must certainly be described as formulaic, continue to yield a mixed bag of finished products that run the gamut in my opinion from quite good to really, really not.  I thought, for instance, that the first Iron Man was very solid within the context of an action, comic book movie; that Green Lantern was forgettable; and that Sherlock Holmes, which banks on many of the elements that work in Iron Man, was also soporific. Regardless of my opinions, though, Holmes and Iron Man both grossed about a half-billion dollars while Green Lantern barely broke even on its $200 million budget.  All of these films are based on what we can call formulaic scripts, so where might computer analysis have played a role in predicting success or failure?  One might be tempted to say the winning ingredient in this data set is Robert Downey, Jr., which would be a reasonable assumption; and there’s no question stars bring the investments.  Even I went to see Holmes, fully expecting not to like it, solely because Downey was playing the lead.

So, if there are 20 million or so viewers out there just like me, producers can analyze the scripts all they want; we’re still ponying up the price of a ticket to see a performer we like in a classic role just out of curiosity. Meanwhile, I very much doubt script analysis alone could have predicted the financial success of Holmes and Iron Man or necessarily the failure of Green Lantern.  Any filmmaker knows that the action and structure on paper represents only the barest of bones for the finished film. Guy Ritchie didn’t bring Sherlock Holmes to life in a way that worked for me personally, but it clearly worked for plenty of fans; and Bruzzese’s analysis cannot see the production design or style of shooting or cutting or even Robert Downey Jr.‘s insouciant charm. And it is the combination of these and other disparate elements, all wrangled by a team of professionals making dozens of choices a day, that make hit movies.  This is true whether they’re huge spectacles or tiny glimpses into a single moment in a life.

But I’m avoiding the ontological question.  Is Mr. Bruzzese’s magic machine a relatively benign tool for certain film producers to do more of what they’re already doing, or is it yet another step toward removing the humanity from the creative process? It’s hard to say in this case whether this technology is truly disruptive or just another false idol for executives seeking the elusive promised land of the sure thing. Most of the films I and likeminded viewers consider great work barely register in the world of “blockbuster hits,” and I expect these works will continue to be produced, warts and all, without the aid of algorithmic analysis.  Meanwhile, if major producers want to spend many thousands of dollars to discover, as I predict, that hit-making is still a crapshoot, so be it.

I asked my friend, screenwriter Craig Fernandez, for his take on the whole thing, and his response sums it up well…

A lot of what passes as screenwriting in Hollywood is by the numbers/work by committee, but not work worth watching, not work that will ever be remembered, not work that begins with a broken person sitting at a typewriter telling a story that was telling itself.  If I may paraphrase Mark Twain, the difference between a script written by an invested writer and one written by an algorithm is ‘the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.’

It’s interesting that Fernandez describes the writer as a “broken person.” In so many ways, art is about wrestling with something that is fundamentally flawed in us, and this is an endeavor that neither computers nor many executives understand.

Why do progressives still love the new oligarchy?

Ever since I began paying attention to issues related to the digital age, I have been scratching my head as to why, of all people, it is political progressives who revere Big Tech, even while appropriately mistrusting just about all other powerful, corporate interests.  Why the most powerful of powerful gets a free pass is something of a mystery, but perhaps more stories like this one from The Daily Beast will help.  I understand many view the internet and social media as an extension of themselves, but this psychological phenomenon is precisely how an oligarchy can get away with just about anything — by convincing the public that it’s all for the greater good.

“Today’s tech moguls don’t employ many Americans, they don’t pay very much in taxes or tend to share much of their wealth, and they live in a separate world that few of us could ever hope to enter.”

See article at The Daily Beast.

Major Publishers Aim to Compete with TV

I remember telling a corporate client years ago that over time websites would begin to be treated as niche TV channels. Video communications would complement or replace written word content, and static websites would give way first to the opportunity and later to a demand to program new material on a regular basis.  Of course, I was trying to sell this client production services, but I did believe what I was saying would come to pass for many entities.  Today, video on the web has obviously expanded dramatically although it is still in its relative infancy.  For many viewers there is now little distinction between TV viewing and WebTV viewing, and the younger the audience, the more viewing tends to be web only and on devices other than television monitors.

In this recent article on PaidContent, Jeff Roberts reports on traditional print publications trying to figure out the formula for successful use of video on the web.  Highlighting the Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast, Roberts discusses the prospect of these major brands taking a bite out of the rich advertising pie that historically belongs solely to television. These publishers hope to attract sponsors on the strength of their brands and are investing in new video programs and hiring production professionals to grow marketshare in this space.

On the one hand, as prefaced, this is an inevitable development now that streaming video is high quality and digital production is an affordable add-on to a media organization like a magazine or newspaper.  In principle, an in-house staff of fewer than five people can produce a steady stream of solid video entertainment or news content.  And if the programming complements the brand, then viewership should increase and sponsors will follow.  The right mix, however, is essential, and I suspect it will be inherently harder for some producers than others to grow a whole new appendage into the world of television production.

It’s pretty easy to imagine a loyal reader of the WSJ becoming an equally loyal viewer of its videos. The WSJ provides a very specific type of content for a well-defined audience, one that likely considers consumption of its daily fare a necessity more than a luxury.  But the more video content can be described as optional entertainment/information, the more competition it has — not just with similar TV programming, but with EVERYTHING.

It is already well understood that competition for consumer attention is now geometric.  Any bit of content, from a multi-million-dollar TV series to a blog to a meme, vies for “eyeballs,” as the marketing wonks say, on a theoretically even playing field in a world of devices that are always on and connected. In short, because distribution of nearly everything is nearly everywhere, all media compete 24/7 for any prospective viewer’s still-limited time. And, of course, as volume increases, as more brands produce more content, the competition for viewer time increases as well. What has always been true will remain true — the most popular stuff will win, and the less popular stuff will disappear. That said, in the digital age, popularity can be very fleeting, and this is not how brands build relationships with customers.

In theory, content doesn’t have to be as popular on the web as it traditionally does on television.  1,000 legitimate customers of a sponsor are more valuable than 10,000 viewers who will never be customers, and in principle, branded, online entertainment helps sponsors connect with those legitimate customers and even occasionally sell to them via point-of-purchase opportunities. Done right, web-based entertainment eliminates some of the waste in traditional TV advertising, but this concept is also why a great deal of branded entertainment is occasionally just this side of an infomercial.  Harkening back to the earliest days of single-sponsor television shows, branded online video often features the sponsoring brand or products as a subject or character within the program itself. This can be a tough needle to thread in the hope of attracting an audience that wants to be entertained and not sold.  Hence, one of the most popular formats for branded online video is the news-magazine.  This format is cheap and fast to produce, and the non-fiction content easily suits certain sponsors without creating a disconnect for the viewer.  For instance, it feels perfectly natural for Nike to sponsor a news-magazine series profiling athletes.

With the right combination of elements, branded entertainment can be a perfect opportunity for some clever production people, the newly developed network, and the sponsors; but as the overall market divides, replicates, and expands, I suspect getting that combination right will be trickier simply because the market becomes so saturated that brands are competing for incrementally less available attention from their prospective customers.  At the same time, both viewing habits and the technologies used to consume media are dynamic; and these factors actually dictate the style, format, and length of programming.  If the viewer is on his couch at home, a full-length show might be what he wants to see, but if he’s killing 20 minutes during a lunch break, he might be more inclined to watch a bunch of short comedy sketches produced by College Humor. So, despite the ubiquitous nature of web distribution, brands still do have to consider where their customers are when investing in new video programming.  In this sense, it’s actually a lot more complicated than knowing the target demographic is in front of the TV at 8pm on Thursdays to watch a hit show.

Ultimately, it will still come down to the bottom line, meaning sales for sponsors.  Since the early 1990s, the level of experimentation, theory, and faith in pure smoke vis a vis the web has been consistently high, even as the theories and lingo continue to change. You can sell a term like “engagement” to a marketing guy, but not to CFOs, who decide how to spend the money.  Clicks and shares of entertainment media are not the same as sales and and really not the same as building a relationship between a brand and customers through entertainment.  Additionally, some research indicates that building brand loyalty in the Internet Generation is harder than  a pre-digital-age market.

Oddly enough, I actually pitched the idea of creating a “TV” arm to a magazine once, so I’m a believer in the overall concept.  But as high-end TV entertainment on the web becomes increasingly more common, as more producers jump into the game, more brands experiment, and YouTube tries its hand at acting like a traditional media company, I believe we’ll see a massive expansion of production followed by a necessary contraction because even a global market of viewers can only support so many professional producers. Even as YouTube delves into the area of paid subscriptions, it is unclear first, whether or not consumers are already saturated by subscriptions to entertainment networks; and second, whether the producers of these shows can actually make a living in any of these models.

Once the line between web and TV is entirely erased, I suspect there may be a flattening out in the volume of professional production consumed. If, for instance, Conde Nast’s Traveler becomes a competitive network with The Travel Channel, this does not mean the target audience for travel content will then support a third, a fourth, and a fifth network producing the same kind of material.  Consider the number of cable channels you have, add to it the number of web-based portals you use for music, TV, or film, and consider how much of that total universe you have time to access. It is entirely possible that millions of us are still consuming the same hundred or so popular products and that broad demographic data still applies to marketing for sponsors.  And of course, from a cultural standpoint, as these venerable publishing brands branch out into TV production, we must hope they don’t fall into whatever molecular altering dimension that allows a network with a name like The Learning Channel to produce Honey Boo Boo.