Malcolm Gladwell on engineering hits - The New Yorker Festival

it all started last summer when I was I was out in Los Angeles and I was at some event and I was chatting with someone who worked for for a major movie studio and I can't tell you the name of the movie studio which is another fact that you'll have to keep in mind which is that all of the really crucial details in this story I either don't know or I can't tell you or in fact cannot be known at all anyway so these people from this unnamed studio we're talking on a non bird excitedly about a man named dick who was famous for his 17 page emails and so naturally I said well who's dick and they the head of this unnamed studio looks at me and he has this big smile on his face and he says dick oh my god you have to meet dick so I might think and I I call him up and I we have lunch at that fabulous restaurant on the Upper East Side called Daniel Danielle I don't know how you present because that's the sort of place where you go when you're on expense account in New Yorkers paying and dicks name is dick a pagan and he he turns out to be this for many many years he was a partner at this big white shoe law firm in Washington DC Covington and Burling and he said that fact will become briefly important later um and he's a short guide he's got thinning white hair and he's got this large kind of pink Charlie Brown head and he's immaculate dressed always in the starched white button-down in the blue blazer and he likes to talk which is another fact that will become important later and he um when I called up his best friend his best friend said the first thing out of his mouth was you have to understand that dick is relentless and he really is relentless and that was meant by the way as a compliment and he he's a man of obsessions and he's obsessed about his grandchildren far as I can tell first and foremost a nice obsessed about international law and most of all he's obsessed with the movies he just you have not met in your life someone who cares more about about so here we are at Daniel and remember when little booth on the side and I don't know any about this guy so I'm chatting with him and he is the sort who he has he orders the salad and he picks at it and then he feels so virtuous did he orders the five thousand calorie chocolate souffle for dessert give you a little flavor of what he thinks and we're there for three and a half hours and I say nothing I just the tape recorders running I all I do is to check to make sure that I have enough battery life and he's talking talking and the movie he keeps coming back to is a movie called dear Frankie now I don't know how many of you have seen dear Frankie I imagine not many of you it was a movie that came out a couple years ago sameer max movie and takes place in Scotland and it's about a a woman engine she's fled an abusive relationship with her young son and they're living they move around a myth they end up settling a little port town in in Scotland and the boy grows up and he's deaf and he really truly misses his father and so his mother tells him this story which is that your father is a sailor on a ship and the ship rarely comes to port but you know you can write him letters and he'll respond so the little boy writes his father letters and the mother intercepts the letters and responds posing as the father right and this ruse goes on for many years and then the little boy realizes it his mother has told him the name of his father's ship and the real ship and that ship is in fact coming to port it there to shore at their town and the mother panics right she filled the reel the father she's made up it's actually coming in and so she has to do something and she finds some man to stand in for the father and of course she falls in love with that man and then the real father resurfaces in the midst of all of this and she realizes oh my goodness I have a dilemma and then the little boy reveals his secret and that is that he'd known all along that his mother was standing in place of his father now Co pegan tells me the story he says the first time he saw that movie he was on a flight cross-country across Atlantic flight on Virgin Atlantic and he's just in tears by the end of it and you know completely and utterly moved by this and he's so moved by it when he gets home he thankful maybe you know how sometimes when you see a movie on the plane you cry because there's no oxygen and you just think it's a it's a physiological effect so he rents the movie and he he comes home and he sees it again you know it's sea level to see whether and he starts crying again even though he knows exactly how it's going to turn out and then he's relating the story to me and I look at him and I realize he's crying a third time he's all choked up and look and you know I'm getting a little bit choked up and you know here he is I mean it's quite possible that Danielle how many of you've ever been there it's quite possible it is the most emotionally repressed restaurant in all of in all of New York and yet here is this high-powered corporate lawyer sitting across from me weeping into his five thousand calorie chocolate souffle so I say why are you crying I mean that's the question right why are you crying any he starts to tries to explain and he says well you know that's a story about a little boy and he has a grandson about the same age so maybe there's something there and then he says it's also a story about absent parents and for him he says it the whole idea of an absent parent is an enormous significant a significant fact and he launches into this long complicated story about how once years ago he was representing the Marshall Islands who were trying to restructure their relationship with the United States and he's the lawyer for the Marshall Islands and it's an enormous ly critical negotiation because there is a very important missile range on the Marshall Islands and so the course in the course of this negotiation there are like five countries and fifty federal agencies involved in the negotiation and he realizes when they schedule the final we're going to sit down and work this out that it falls that his daughter's sixth grade production of dorothy and lewis falls right in the middle of the negotiation and the negotiation is in hawaii his daughters in washington c so he calls up the president of the marshall islands and says i can't go i have to go to my daughter's performance with Dorothy and the Wiz and then he gets half an hour passes he gets a frantic call from the State Department and they say you mean to tell me that you were going to imperil the national security the United States because because of Dorothy the whiz and he says I'm sorry yeah that's just that's who I am and anyway the point is that there are certain and actually end up postponing the negotiation by the way he flies back so clearly this is a story then he says it touches some hot buttons for him little boys and absent parents and but then he kind of stops and I can see that he doesn't find that that explanation satisfactory because after all you know what is 50% of all movies that come out of Hollywood are about little boys and absent parents and he doesn't burst into tears in the middle of emotionally repressed restaurants whenever he thinks about them in fact he's not even a crier he told me that he likes violent movies he's not some sappy sentimentalist so there must be something else that sets him off that causes him to cry and and I think is an important a really really critical question so think about for example one of the most emotionally powerful stories of the last 25 years the death of a princess Diana now why is that story so incredibly powerful well you can say that well it's a story a tragic it's the tragic death of a beautiful princess right but in the end if you think about that that's about as unsatisfying as saying that dico pagan cried because it was a story about an absent father and a little boy there's clearly a lot more going on there that sets this story apart from other kind of similar stories so you know surely it matters for instance that Princess Di was killed in the presence of her lover who was a man who was greatly disliked by her family its Romeo and Juliet right it's tapping into a not just a fairy tale about the tragic death of beautiful princesses but another fairy tale an even more powerful one about star-crossed lovers right well then we can go further with this we can say surely it matters as well that she died in a tunnel right what is the tunnel it's the underworld and how did she get into the tunnel pursued by men on motorbikes by the hounds of hell right they chased her into the underworld and where was this underworld situated well it was below the city of Paris right the wrote that the romantic center of the world right the the absolutes reigning symbol in our minds of everything that is that is romantic and you know and we can go on and on with the story every single detail actually has some kind of great emotional significance she's blonde her lover's dark what she and she's in a black limousine I submit to you that if Princess Diana had been driving a white rental car from Sacramento and it skidded on some ice right and had died because she ran into a telephone pole right that story would not have had the same emotional impact it's something about die but it's also something about this extraordinarily confluence of emotionally charged details so that's what a great story is then right what a really powerful story is it's some kind of of general narrative married with some complex arrangement of things that have real meaningful associations for us now we don't know what that combination of meaningful Association what the optimal come a combination of meaningful associations are and that's why it's so rare that a movie will move us to tears and that's why we pay so much to people who can write successful movies right because it's a very very scarce skill well what if you could figure it out what if you found some way to actually come up with a formula that would describe the way to get people to cry or to laugh or to experience some profound emotion in a movie theater you know wouldn't that be an enormous ly powerful and useful not to mention lucrative thing well that's what they kept Aegon set out to do that's what his life has been about over the last three or four years now I realize this sounds crazy right you know I'm sure many of you are familiar with the famous dictum of William Goldman when he wrote his book about adventures in the screen trade he said in Hollywood no one knows anything nobody knows anything right and that is um you know there's a whole in fact school of economic analysis about Hollywood which is based on that principle Hollywood is what economists like to call a ah Tech marketless it is a marketplace that is not predictable you have no clue whether something's going to be big or something's going to be small you know right after golden points out Raiders of the Lost Ark was a movie that every single studio in Hollywood passed on except for Paramount and do you know why Paramount accepted that movie no one knows right they just thought it sounded cool and it ended up making them billions of dollars he'll visit Goldman quotes this head of former head of United Artists who said if he had said yes to every project he said no to and no to every project he said yes to his career would have turned out exactly the same what these guys are saying is is something that that philosophers have been saying for years and years and years about art that is that art is necessarily a subjective experience and there's no way to kind of derive from your own subjective experience some larger rules about the what constitutes beauty or what constitutes the sublime now simultaneously well there has been a group of people who say that art is necessarily subjected that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder there is another group of people who say actually know that you know in reaction to those who say nobody knows anything there's always a kind of rearguard that says actually you know if you look hard enough you'd figure out that it is possible so for example to give an example the music business talked to a the head of a record company you tell that person ask that person do you know whether something is going to be a hit they'll always say the same thing they'll say well I have a gut feeling about it but if I'm perfectly honest I'll tell you that I'm usually wrong in fact we're all usually wrong and it's almost impossible to predict what the public is going to like in a piece of music in any given time but they believe in their heart of hearts at the end of the day that what they do is they're trying to navigate the unknowable in their business well in a couple of years in the last couple of years there's been a an upstart movement that has arisen and this is a group of people who say actually that's wrong you actually can predict on hits I went to see when I was register I would see this guy who died got Mike McCready who runs a little company at Union Square called platinum blue and platinum blue is based on a software program and what the software program does is it measures the mathematical relationships among all the structural components of a song so you know melody harmony beat tempo rhythm octopus chord progression cadence sonic brilliance I don't anything that can be measured mathematically in this song they measure and on the basis of analyzing those relationships they come up with a kind of mathematical signature of a song and they say that if you know the mathematical signature of a song you can predict its likelihood of becoming a hit that is of reaching the top 30 Billboard Top Duty you can do that with about a success rate of about 80% um so I go to see McCready and he's you know he's got this big loft office and he just sits me down in front of his laptop and on the screen is what looks like a cloud and what that is is he has measured the kind of mathematical signature of thousands and thousands of songs and they are you know each song is a point in this cloud and every song is a different mathematical signature right so you just see this huge mass cuz every song is different in some way and then he what he does is he hit the button and what the button does is it removes all the songs that did not make the Billboard top 30 and what happens when he does that is that you go from this one big large differential into 60 discrete clusters and what he says is it this is what hit songs look like the universe of hit songs looks like 60 distinct highly predictable hit clusters and when you have a new song what you do is you run it through your little software progression and you see whether it fits into one of these clusters right that in fact what you thought of as being this sort of confusing and unknowable thing is actually something that follows some fairly consistent mathematical principles he was most famous when he was just starting out mccreaney got famous because he was just playing with his software for the first time they went to the store and he got thirty albums at random that had just been released like that day he runs them all to the computer and the computer loves one album and it so happened that called him up that day and they said what are you doing and told them is it will go what is it but what does your computer like and McCree said well it's this it's this album and it's um I've never heard of this artist no one has it's your first album but I this the computer just think it's going to be the biggest hit maybe ever what's the album it's the artist is Norah Jones the album has come away with me it's sold 22 million copies what is McCready doing McCready is doing precisely what dico pagon wants to do for Hollywood the simplest way to explain what Ditka pagon set out to do is that he looked at people like McCready and said I can take that approach and I can ply that to movies turns out Dickie Baker as a friend named Nick Meany and mean he loves the movies too and they're driving up to through England one summer a couple years ago and Minnie tells kapenga that he has a friend from college and this friend is in business with this other guy and they are students of narrative and what they do is they we'd like scripts and thousands of them they analyze them and they write papers for really obscure journals on you know the evolution of the police drama in South American you know cable television and they've developed this whole system for analyzing screenplays and they've kind of broken down screenplays into they're kind of basic elements and they give them a create a kind of report card right so you know you you might say that they might say that that the conflict between the lead and some other character in act 1 rates a 7 on the 10-point first-act conflict scale right and they have this kind of very very now I can't go in to any more detail about the system because it's a secret and no one will tell me anything more about it and in fact go pagan won't even tell me the names of these two guys he'll only refer to them as mr. pink and mr. brown and halfway through the story actually parenthetically I figured out who mr. pink and mr. brown were but I couldn't tell okay because I thought it would really freak him out and I can't tell you either because I'm worried I'm worried it would blow your mind but Co pagan and many are also as it turns out obsessed with a very particular kind of computer program called a neural network now a neural network is this kind of a artificial intelligence system that's used through all kinds of industries it's a kind of a computer system that learns through trial and error when you write a check and you send it to the bank that check is read by a computer not a bad person and that computer has learned how to read handwriting through endless complex rounds of trial and error it's learned using what's called a neural network anyway Copiague and emini they're talking about mr. pink and mr. brown and all of a sudden Co pegan has this kind of brainstorms brainwave anythings oh my goodness this system this report card they've got will allow us to use a neural network to analyze screenplays because otherwise the big problem with using a computer on Street plays is how do you get the computer to read the screenplay if you can't read right but now we have a system for reducing a screen play to a set of numbers a set of scores and all we have to do is feed the scores into the computer so instead of this company it's called up ago Jaques and they bring in investors and they have mr. pink and mr. brown grade a whole number of screenplays like I don't I don't no idea how many but you for the sake of argument say it's a hundred and they give these scores to a computer scientist whose name they also won't tell me but meanie once referred to him as being English to his bootstraps so let's just call him mr. bootstraps and they feed the computer he is a neural network and he feeds in all of the scores from the from from mr. pink and mr. brown and also the box office total that these scripts ended up making right what the computer does is it starts out and it assigns a value to every one of the of the categories on the screen place so you've got a car chase in act 1 and it says that's a and that car chase is a 7 on it out of 10 on the car chase scale and it says that's worth 10 million dollars and you have a beautiful redheaded heroine who dies a horrible death in act 2 and they say that's worth you know fifteen million dollars right and they go through an a assign a value at random to everything in the screenplay and they go and they say the movies going to make fifty million dollars and then they compare it to how much the movie actually made and of course it's wrong in the beginning right then they go back and they reweighed all the variables and try again and they get a little closer they try again and they'll go through thousands hundreds of thousands of iterations until they've precisely weighted every variable so that it matches the actual box-office then they go on to the second movie and they do the same thing with the second movie until they come up with a formula which works for both movies one and two and then they go to the third one and the fourth one and the computer program will go through millions and millions and millions of iterations until what you've got is a formula which you can use on a new screenplay which is a reliable predictor of how these form these different narrative elements add up when it comes to a movies box-office now you think about that the way that moves that mineral Network is working it's working like a human does right that's what we do a movie studio head if he's analyzing a screenplay what he does is he thinks about all the screenplays he's known in the past and he knows that this element worked really well here and this element didn't work he doesn't kind of informal formula in his head right he says well I think putting all those pieces together this looks to me like a thirty million dollar movie but the thing that we know about human beings is that when they do those kinds of formulas in their heads they don't do a very good job they can't handle all those different variables and they have biases and and the thing that's great about a computer when it thinks that way is it doesn't have any biases and it's it can handle 50 variables as effortlessly as it can handle two variables so there's a real possibility in other words that if you use a computer in this way to end to break down the elements of a screenplay you might do a better job than a human so they come up with her formula and Copiague and decides to conduct an experiment and he goes like two thousand four he goes and he gets sixteen of the television pilots that were it just been produced it's August 2004 and he runs each pilot through the system eight week set so they're not predicting box-office but they're predicting their ratings it comes up with an estimate for what the ratings of every one of those shows would be at the end of the seat at the end of December three months into the season it writes them all down into paper he goes to a guy at Warner Brothers and he says top Cuyler Brothers he says I had made his predictions I would like you to put this piece of paper in a drawer I'm gonna come back in January we're gonna see how accurate they are I says okay comes back in January the opening envelope turns out that in six cases they are right within half a sharepoint that is to say they have correctly guessed the percentage of American homes that were watching that show within point zero six percent in 13 of the 16 cases they're right within two share points and by the way in this world everyone does these predictions no one's ever that way within it's like a mind-boggling amount and the executive the guy from one of us he just can't believe it he's just kind of Wow then they they go to another Hollywood studio and the studio gives them nine movies to analyze and these are all movies that have been made but not released and all they give co pagan is the screenplay don't tell anything else about it it gives the screen plated pink and brown and they score it they give it to mr. bootstraps mr. bootstraps comes back and of the nine cases there's two very very low-budget films they don't do a good job which doesn't really matter because it's almost no money it's a the third one they miss on which they're troubled by and they kind of but on six of them they're so close it's scary they're basically we had a couple of million dollars right remember they're not factoring in the director when it's produced the promotional budget the stars nothing just the screenplay right and when they I call up the guy who at this unnamed studio who asked for this particular experiment to be done and he wrote he would he was just he was almost speechless he would just say it's really really we ok so now it's July and I have this problem I had this great story but they won't tell me anything right I mean you really want to say what the formula is so what do I do well so I start I have long negotiations with dico pagan that involves hundreds of dollars of expenditure in fancy restaurants and so we decide that I'm going to take a movie that's already come out and you're going to run it through your system and ceases all right so I choose the movie the interpreter I don't know if and if you ever saw this movie but on the Sydney film it comes out last year it stars the cult given in Sean Penn and it's a private reason it shows it it's a problem film it goes to a zillion rewrites they spend the budget for repurchase for screenwriting on this film six million dollars wrap your mind around that one that's just for the Writers I can't tell you how much that fact fills my heart joy but it costs ninety million to make and it it only grows is 72 million so no one's particularly happy with the outcome see of the so that's a good one in other words for these guys to analyze and I want them to tell me all right what was wrong with it and how would you fix it okay movie had several drafts the first draft goes something like this we open in Africa guy drives up to a big soccer stadium they are led into the kind of basement area and they see rows and rows and rows of dead bodies there in this fictional country called African country called Matoba and it's ruled by this really evil murderous dictator called zu eeny then we cut to the United Nations and we meet this woman called Sylvia Broome who is an interpreter of United Nations and she relates he's relating to the security staff a terrifying story the previous night she was at work really late in the interpreters booth and the there's a malfunction in the kind of little buttons down on the floor and she overhears two men plotting the assassination of this dictator that would zoo any because he's about to come to New York to give a speech to the UN and they say it's going to happen in this room the assassination and then she fell inadvertently hits lights which they look up they she's convinced they saw her and she terrified she thinks her life is at stake so he's telling this to a guy named Tobin Keller and Tobin calories of security he's like one on the security force of the United Nations and so in a beginning he's skeptical he doesn't he thinks she's the story doesn't seem real to him he thinks that she's kind of making it up and but then a series of terrifying things happen to Silvia Broome and Keller slowly begins to things something's going on and simultaneously a kind of ambiguous love story develops between Keller and Broome and so any visit approaches and gets closer and closer and Keller is no closer cracking the case and finally the on the day of the speech he he broomed the interpreter ends up in the green room with Zoe knee I oh I forgot to tell you the critical fact which is that broom is from the same country is doing she's from the Toba she's a she's white but she's from this African country so she knows the language so she's assigned to be his interpreter and Keller finally realizes the truth and that is that she made the whole story up as a way of bringing Xue a knee to justice he runs to the green room and Broome has poisoned Delaney and she's withholding the antidote unless he goes out on stage and before the entire UN confesses to all these crimes of murdering his countrymen and he does that he goes out he confesses and reads all the names of the people he killed she escapes a doctor comes in analyzed looks at the poison and says it's harmless and then he turns to this dictator who's just been tricked into basically writing his own prison sentence and he says you were never in danger mr. Tsui great twist on universe so it's really stare as head of political it's all about terrorists essentially a woman who a non-violent terrorist who comes to this country with the express purpose of bringing this murderous man to justice through non conventional means now it's bought by Sydney famous director and he likes the premise but he hates the twist he thinks the audience will feel cheated and he also doesn't like the fact that the love story between Keller and Broome is ambiguous he actually wants them to really kind of get together so he brings in the original screenwriter again and he brings in higher to others screenwriters two of the most highly paid screenwriters in and they attack this script and they revise it and in the revised broom is no longer telling the story of overhearing that conversation we see it happen it actually happens she's not a terrace anymore she's now a full-on victim she's not an isolated figure she's now this kind of her become social they complicate the plot they had lots of villains they had buses blowing up in Brooklyn and they do all this kind of stuff to really make it into much more of a kind of big picture big budget and they face this problem which is okay if she's not trying to kills away any who is and they concoct this whole scheme about how the waiting actually stages an assassination on himself to win sympathy for his cause and they have this ending which you've seen the movie DNA doesn't work right everyone pretty much concedes it doesn't work it's very complicated so I've FedEx the scripts two scripts the shooting script the revised one and the original script to Quebec he sends him to mr. penguin mr. brown like three weeks pass I'm like waiting by my phone I get a call meet me in London July 16 so I say all right it's very can Gustin it's like fly to London and I it's I've given these complicated erections to some like restaurant hidden away an alleyway and Mayfair and I get led through the son of alleyway and then we're in this private dining room and I walk in and you know the first thing I see is like little dick penguins big Charlie Brown head wearing his blue blazer and then I see this big huge burly guy it's mr. brown and I see this little skinny nerdy guy with like crazy gray Einstein hair and it's mr. pink now remember that cop Hagen is a lawyer so he has a kind of paranoid lawyer thing going on and he's also he thinks this idea that he has this company's form is going to make him millions of dollars right because imagine the people at the movie studio who hired him they realized it had they hired epic objects do the analysis before they made those movies they would have saved themselves hundreds of millions of dollars this is an incredibly valuable tool they've got so he wants to protect his investment so what he says it's all right we're going to discuss the interpreter but I have to be there to monitor everything and every time so we sit down to talk and you know I'm constantly looking over and go pagans like you've got both of his ears turned up to like ten to catch any nuance that might possibly give away and at one point you know we sit down and he opens his briefcase and he pulls out this huge 38 page document which is their analysis of just well what what went wrong with the interpreter right according to the computer so I mean I'm you can just imagine how excited I am this is this is a cabinet so I'm kind of nervous and I want to subscribe slow so I I start I want to tease out get mr. pink and mr. brown talking and pink goes first and he I say well you know how did this start and he points out this really cool thing had happened in England which is that back in the 60s they would have religious programming on Sundays which with the normal snow one launched it and then starting at around 7 o'clock at night the BBC would then show a movie and then as one other at that point there's one other commercial channel and all around the country the commercial channels there's a different one in every part of the country would also show a movie up against the BBC so what you've got is this perfect natural experiment to measure the popularity of movies right you've got the control the BBC you've got no leading audience and then you've got all these different people throwing a different movie up against and you can sit down you can measure what stories work and what stories don't right so we start to put together this kind of ad hoc system and they they start this to develop their ways of graving grading movies now the other thing they get really interested in is when you decide to watch a movie you haven't seen the movie right so your measure for deciding whether a movie is appealing to you or not is not based on the script it's based on some portion of the script in fact in a case of television it's based on the two lines you read about it in TV Guide so they're obsessed with the two lines in TV Guide but what they tell us about our art feelings about stories and so they build this whole database and they find out all kinds of weird things they start to work for people around the world and they begin to realize that everyone everywhere they go the new country will say well we know your system works in England but it won't work in our country you know and they discover actually does that the same thing that makes for a great story in England makes for a great story in like Tonga and also in the Ivory Coast and also in you know some small island off the coast of Japan right they've discovered a kind of universal system for what we like in stories and I got one point mr. Brown says you know remember when the passion of the christ' came out and everybody says you know mr. Brown says and everyone said that the success of that movie was just came out of nowhere nobody could have predicted that because we could've they're they're like he's kind of savant so the movie world so and I said well how long you know how does it work and they say it takes them about a day to read a script and then they compare notes and I say well did you ever read a script that you thought was perfect I needed no adjustments mr. brown thanks for like five minutes and says you know mr. pink thanks for another five minutes he goes only one lethal weapon so then so they're now they're talking about interpreter it's talking about the original script right and they scored it and they both find it a little bit heavy and difficult they think it's kind of a niche movie then they read the shooting script to revise when they think it's bad they say they've solved some of the problems and they go to boot straps and boot straps the previous weekend did 15 runs through his neural network lights flashing and like things getting out and people are going to shrink and what bootstrap says is the original script the one where they say you were never in danger of mr. zu Ani it's a 33 million dollar movie which is to say how many you saw Constant Gardener Constant Gardener made 33 million dollars what they're saying is it's in the constant gardener territory then they say the shooting script is a 69 million dollar movie which is interesting because the movie actually makes 72 million so that booths traps came within three million of the total deaths so far so good so then I say okay how much better could it have been what if these guys have brought you in earlier well how would you fixed it the first thing it turns out is these guys are obsessed obsessed with locale it's all they seem to care about right where is the movie set comes up again and again and again as they talk about movies they think that locale is a character of movie and movies only work when that character plays off against the human characters and so their first objection to this movie is it's said in the UN but it's not said in the UN you want to play something in the UN the UN must be a present in every single scene you must realize you they are not in some random nondescript office building right turns out that parenthetically they're obsessed with desert islands and prisons and I get the sense that if they were to make a movie it would be a movie that would go back and forth between two different stories one of which was set on desert island and one of which was set on in a prison or that it would be a movie about a prison on a desert island but so they get to the single whole thing about Africa and there it cannot believe the movie starts in Africa because they just say do these people know nothing it's an American audience you can't start a movie in Africa Americans see Africa and their eyes glaze over right so they're like and they said none of that you guys started in a fictional country in Africa compounding they literally think this cost millions and millions of dollars this decision right like pink actually says that one point goes well my favorite quotes in him he says they've bought their ticket but when they come out they're going to say it was alright but it was in Africa alright and he's upset I mean at this point pink I almost think things going to cry so and it turns out in fact that most of the things they care about are incredibly minor they're not central elements of plot but they go in this whole riff about V for Vendetta that movie with those guys in masks and all they can say is the mask cover the whole face you can't have a movie with the mask covers the whole face they go to riff about spider-man you can see his face you know Batman you can actually make out who Batman is the mass doesn't that give you can't have a massive goes on it's quite fascinating to me apparently Pinocchio and then they they talk about this movie they did once this analysis where they um they said three things to the studio they said first of all your lead character has got to have more personality if you put one more personality and you'll make two point four six million dollars more and then they said and you've got to make the locale the city where it's filmed more of a character and that's worth four point nine two million and if you give the lead character sidekick some little sidekick that's going to be worth twelve point three million dollars and if you do the sidekick the locale and the better characterization the synergy will make you twenty four point six million dollars but Lee does not major things but you can do that in a week right and they said any of you bootstrap says and if you don't do those three three things the movie will make thirty six million dollars they didn't do those three things you know much the movie may give you seven back to the interpreter so we have all these ideas they think they're really upset that the Tobin Keller character is white they say no nobody's got to be black they fully run the numbers on black/white pairings and they look really good and they they think there's too many characters they go chop off and they M they really are also obsessed with the idea of a woman in peril clearly is a huge thing and I think you've got a woman in peril but the peril is not perilous enough so they go on and on about how you know she has to be really really imperil for this thing to work and when actually peril is so huge that whenever pink and brown talk about woman in peril they're like glancing at Co pegging because they think he's going to step in and stop them because that's how big that is in their world so they rewrite the movie and their movie does not start in Africa it starts with the Sylvia broom like walking gaily into the United Nations and waving at the flirtatious security guard and they she overhears the conversation and she doesn't like you know run home she gets chased through the long labyrinth hallways of the UN by the two bad guys right and then she gets chased all over Manhattan in fact and at one point she's riding her motor scooter and they forced her off the road when she's riding over one of Manhattan's iconic bridges and the bike goes over the side and she's hanging on for dear life and Tobin in a helicopter comes right you know walk on what comes down to say Laura's the Rope and then here's my favorite line as she clings to Tobin's muscular body while the two of them are hoisted up into the hovering helicopter we sense that she is feeling more than relief now in the epic Oh defending Sylvia stabs wounds away knees screaming with a knife and then in the melee Zoe any storms out the stage and he holds a press conference and then he's shot by Sylvia's brother who a friend of Sylvia's brother who somehow was involved with blood and then Sylvia cradles a dying man in her lap and he quote dies peaceably with a smile of his blood spattered face and then she gets appointed in a plot twist I never fully understood matobo's ambassador the United Nations and at the end she turns to Keller with a kind of Wray for tatius smile and says now you'll have to protect me and then they run the numbers on their script and how much does it make 111 now so then I say this is all just blowing my mind and I think yeah but what if you guys were still adhering to the basic outlines of this plot let's go crazy just take the premise and tell me how much you can make just on the premise of an interpreter who's protected by a security guard at which point mr. pink says all right he starts talking about the bodyguard not if you member the bodyguard was a huge hit a couple years ago in which Kevin Costner is a bodyguard who's protecting Whitney Houston was a big star and they fall in love in the end and he says look you know this movie is basically the bodyguard and we could turn it into the bodyguard we just take out Africa entirely no more no more politics we'll have them fall in love and go off together I think it could do 200 million so now I'm making 200 billion 20 minutes ago it was a 33 million dollar movie right and then that was a children million dollar blockbuster and I you know I could feel the excitement in the air it's like wow this is like Commerce in action I'm getting carried away and I'm I practically my broker know kind of like you know let's buy you know all the Hollywood studios now and I and I look over at pink and brown and I realize they're not happy in fact mr. Pincus is big kind of frown on his face and I say what's wrong and mr. pink says I didn't like the bodyguard doesn't want to turn into the body so then I asked about a room because all is calm yep ago discussion okay so what would you do and turns out everyone is kind of a little ambivalent now and they think one of the best reserves as well he'd want to juice it up but only 250 million he wouldn't feel comfortable going that extra 50 million and Nene says he wouldn't make it with Shawn panin and and Nicole Kidman he'd wanted to do it with cheaper stars and and then I talked to cap Hagen and cap again says well he likes CD of making Tobin Keller black and he doesn't really want to go to 20 million either because you know he's the guy you love dear Frankie and you know what dear Frank he made in the box office 1.3 million if he knows that if Miramax had used his system back then they never would have made your Frankie and that you know it breaks his heart because he loves the movies and then mr. Brown says that what he would do is he would make the movie take really the original script and make it for 10 million but no stars at all and kind of releases an indie movie and hope that word of mouth gets them a maybe a prize at the New York Film Festival or something so you know here they are you know they they've started with his 33 million dollar movie they've shown how it could make 69 million dollars and then they turned 69 into 111 million dollars then they turned 111 into two hundred million dollars and they know you know how to do this they actually have the means to do to bring about this transformation and they can't bring themselves to accept it so here they are they've they've unlocked the secrets of the movie business and all this gun is it made them a little down in the mouth and that's when I realized something about people who believe in rules that they don't make the task of moviemaking easier they really make it harder because when you don't know anything then you can do whatever you want by even good conscience you can start a movie in in Africa and you can have ambiguity and you can talk about politics and you can make a woman in peril a subtle thing and not an unambiguous thing and no one's going to call you on it because nobody knows but once you have the formula you don't have any kind of freedom anymore and you have to you've got to decide right down to the exact dollar figure just how much money you're willing to sacrifice for your art in other words what the formula does is it makes you think the way that every other industry in America has to think and that at the end of the day just isn't that much fun if this gets adopted going forward by the implications for creativity also along the lines of the music clusters clearly all 60 of those than it exists simultaneously at the beginning of time so to speak clearly new clusters all the time you created how are those identified and in this kind of Applied mechanics of taking this approach to product development how we ever find these new create things and will they be totally repressed and never come to the forum where people can expand their consciousness and their artistic creation and share with the world so to speak yet a very good question um and I have a couple of things to say let's be clear that um I have no idea whether this thing works I mean it sounds like it does but I don't know and whether it will or if it does work whether it will keep working which is the question you're getting at and I think is a very good one that our tastes are sufficiently fluid that is it the case that formulas that are successful in the past will be successful in the future now what the abrogated sides will say is that's absolutely right which is why we keep changing our formula a but more important they will tell you we don't pretend to predict everything that there's always going to be outliers that are really significant that we're not so they say that we'll never be able to tell you that you've got a ten million dollar film that will do 200 million so a Big Fat Greek Wedding they're not going to what their sweet spot is is the 50 million dollar standard Hollywood drama or comedy with a that is to begin with fairly formulaic and everyone realizes formulae boy-meets-girl right they can do one boy meets girl bad guy heroic villain or heroic um a heroic spy they can figure that out for you to the extent that you are consciously being formulaic they'll help you be better at being one leg on the music thing is that it's funny I tell those two stories simultaneously there are some interesting differences MacCready is quite adamant that what he is done is topped into something absolutely Universal about human the human brain so he says he doesn't just limited his analysis to pop songs in the last 30 years he's got he's got Beethoven and he'll tell you that the Beethoven's best song is in one of his hip clusters and the stuff that by Beethoven that no one listens to isn't it right so he says again who knows right I haven't done this analysis I find it kind of fascinating I'm a little bit skeptical but not enough that would stop me from running strong about it that you know that he thinks that there is something he's tapped into something profound about the way our minds work and the way that the way that our brains register pleasure that's what he thinks he's and do I find it completely impossible or improbable that there is some fundamental way that almost all of us return to when it comes to seeking pleasure from some creative thing I hope I'm not impossible I you know I in principle I think that idea might have something to it it's a really good question sure okay my question is perhaps somewhat similar on a slightly different angle on it which is you mentioned that the Macready well he peels he's found something Universal also recognizes that other 60 clusters that are potential only 15 might be live at any point in time I wonder if the movie guys have used any of that same sort of time serious thinking to notice that certain types of movies or certain opportunities may come in a certain time and not of others yeah this is a big difference between Macready and Copiague and Kappa goons guys pink and brown don't believe in Hollywood they're obsessed with when you release if you'll say it feels like a that's a fall movie for me not a summer movie or that's a winter movie and the companion guys think that's complete hogwash and their story destroys a story so they'd been very they do all their analysis without any without any kind of periodicity issue built in now there's another periodicity issue which is are we more in love serious thriller in the three years after 9/11 then we were in at the end of the go-go 80s right now and I don't know whether they have built that in because of course I don't know what their algorithm is it doesn't sound to me so a huge part of you pick up little bits and pieces and because I figured out who they were I was able to go to these obscure journal didn't read a lot of what pink and brown write about and when you go back and you read the writings the original writings of mr. Pinker mr. Brown what you understand when you immerse yourself in the thought Ben Brown is them they're really really really really obsessed with biblical stories and they think those are the ER narratives and so that would suggest that they don't think you know it's not like the story of Goliath goes out of style or the story of Samson you know his only works in the 5th 7th and 12th centuries and not so much in the medieval grade but it couldn't be because they it couldn't be because they watched that early part of the TV show first and then the biblical lectures first and then the movies when they started yeah I've known you have no idea these men are like I said they're men of enormous mystery and I could only begin to grasp a bit of neural networking as being as good as the variables that you put into it so from the offset it sounds like there's certain obvious ones to me that would make a difference that they didn't consider at all such as the star power you sort of have the Tom Hanks effect or the Tom Cruise effect and they don't even consider that at all so why even you know well they that's it's this is the interesting thing they are radically uninterested in now it's not just them then who are uninterested in star power most Hollywood economists there's a whole very very strong school of thought among economists that the particular fixation of Hollywood executives with stars is ludicrous if you talk I've had a long term vision people how what about this what they will basically say is the star does two things for you three things number one you are a studio executive you're at Warner Bros there are 25 or 30 projects competing internally for small sum of money you don't have the money to make ten right how do you get your three to be one of those ten you get it through a star you get to go into the room and you say I've got Tom Cruise and the guy next to you says I am brilliant may see you win right so the star the star works has an internal function there's nothing to do with the outside world rule number reason number two is you think there's some evidence that suggests what a star does is it limits how much the movie can bomb so you have a stinker and it makes it cost you 100 million American it makes 10 million you have a stinker with Nicole Kidman it costs 100 million and it makes 15 million you feel a little bit better about having around as you think you think we don't know if so we think that's what it does third thing is with certain very specific kinds of movies to help with overseas sales but there's almost no one who thinks anymore that there is an appreciate that a star makes an appreciable difference in the domestic box-office of most movies just there's no evidence for it you can run all these regressions have been done you can't see aside from very very fleeting effects for certain stars it just isn't it doesn't it doesn't seem to have any effect and if it does the effect it does is swamped by the amount of money you pay them so maybe Tom Cruise is worth 10 million dollars to you movie but he cost you $29 that so requires a variable right to sort of way out yeah but you can but remember as well it's also in their interest their dad duniya analysis before the script is usually cast so they can't use it but their argument is we don't need it we can capture much of what needs to be captured without the use of that I think if you were to ask any person have you ever gone to a movie because it was Johnny Depp and even care about the premise of the movie but you think he's a terrific actor that most people can say at least once right in their experience they've gone to a movie solely because yeah well there is interesting because although I one way I would explain that is that certain well-known movie stars become their presence is a kind of encodes a narrative so if I say to you I'm going to go and see a movie called heart attack involving Harrison Ford do I need to tell you what the script is you know what the Scriptures you know middle-aged corporate executive with young attractive wife and two small children gets caught in you know some right so we other people have tried to game other industries like in the way you mentioned such as kamar development with the visual arts and Christopher Alexander with architecture why is it more successful with the movies and the use of music has several fewer variables but yeah movies are more successful the other would be you mentioned studio executives at the beginning of your talk yeah it seems like a crapshoot with well you know what what they approve and what doesn't approve and how much box office it makes what do pink and brown bring to the table that is Hollywood studio executives that have also been studying it for years don't seem to have damn well what they bring you right everyone there's always a kind of there's always been this strain in the arts of people who want to gain with various degrees of varying degrees of success I think that what I'm what these guys are bringing to the table is that Hollywood is going through it strikes me has been going through a period of a great kind of anti intellectual period or a period where they have turned their backs on rigor every now and again Hollywood is transformed by outside money and the outsiders come in and they think if only these guys ran their business like a business you know we could make a lot of money Sony buys MCA or whatever they bought pays billions of dollars loses their entire investment and runs home with their tail between your legs because in fact they couldn't pull it off and so after that Oliver goes back into this thinking that we are a cottage industry we deal with talent you can't bring in any kind of real crew and then that goes on for ten years none of people creep back again so what's going on right now is you know half of the money 50% of the money in Hollywood right now for movies comes from hedge funds call your broker damn why these guys involved because they think they can figure it out right so the hedge fund money and Epico Jaques my guess is where will they end up they will end up being a tool used by a series of hedge funds to analyze projects to which to invest in so when the pendulum has swung back towards now do I think it'll end happily no I mean at some point there'll be some massive you know blow up and there'll be some movie that's then they spent hundreds well you know and it'll tank and the hedge fund will run them but there is this kind of constant tension between these two extremes and I think that we're swinging towards and that's when you've had 10 years of it's just all art in the cottage industry it's very attractive when someone sits down and says I can help you identify I just wanted to ask you you last year you talked about did your precociousness and how you can predict genius and children and however genius is defined but I was just sort of thinking about that and how you charted the formulaic idea of music and art and creativity and just how you lose that organic maturation that you know I think you talked during that that speech about how this the sophomore hit is sometimes the bigger hit and as you let an artist or a write or develop you may get that what turns people on and I'm just sort of seeing the connection here I wonder if you could talk about that yeah you know the there's absolutely no question that these tools used in a unsubtle way what can have the effect of choking off true innovation you know you don't want the reason there's a reason why you want the pointman to remain a secret because you want to give everyone the formula because then you're going to get everything by the formula right and there's a reason why you don't want everyone to do this I mean I think that the thing that the epic objects guys say is like I said earlier that they they would like to see their tool used in that band of a particular band of movies if you look at the typical Hollywood studio loses most of its money on a very particular kind of movie on the 50 million they make a batch of 50 million dollar movies over you they make ten of them and that's where they are they sustain their worst losses that's what it need help the stuff at the low-end you can't use this tool to analyze independent film and you shouldn't stuff at the high-end you don't need it if you do Batman for do you really need someone to tell you what the formula is I would hope you know the formula by now right what they're saying is look if you're going to make your next you know Michelle Pfeiffer falls in love with you know William Hurt flick we can tell you how to move it from 35 million to 47 and you know I that does not offend my belief in the future of Hollywood creativity you know I feel like that's of a that's of a piece with Procter and Gamble coming up with new and improved Tide you

Channel: The New Yorker

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Keywords: festival 2006, Malcolm Gladwell, engineering, festival, nyer festival

Id: jrT6P3jiKZM

Length: 58min 14sec (3494 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 22 2014