What’s New Podcast Transcript Episode 6: The Secrets of Hollywood Storytelling November 28, 2017 Host: Dan Cohen, Dean of Libraries and Vice Provost for Information Collaboration at Northeastern University. Guest: Bobette Buster, Professor of the Practice of Digital Storytelling, Northeastern University.

Dan Cohen, Host: For over 100 years, movies have been synonymous with entertainment. But outside of the film industry, few people really understand how they are made, [00:00:30] and especially how the best movies engross us through careful attention to good storytelling, encoded in dialogue and images and, most obviously, sound. Today on What's New, the secrets of Hollywood storytelling.

I'm Dan Cohen, and this is What's New. With me today to talk about Hollywood storytelling is Bobette Buster, a screenwriter and film producer who has also [00:01:00] worked as a story consultant with major studios such as Disney, Pixar and Sony. She has just been appointed Professor of the Practice of Digital Storytelling here at Northeastern. So, welcome, Bobette.

Bobette Buster: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Dan Cohen, Host: It's great to have you here. So, Bobette, when people think about film, they of course think about moving pictures, but movies, of course, begin as words on a page and as story ideas at their inception. Can you talk about where these movies come from at that early stage of just a story?

[00:01:30] Bobette Buster: Well, they begin sort of preverbal. They're ideas, and they're a vision of how you want to express your ideas in sight and sound. You think of somebody like J. R. R. Tolkien who was just a young soldier in World War I, in the impasse of trench warfare, and what a scandal it really is in history of how many young men lost their lives by the entrenchment of that war. He was so overwhelmed with the [00:02:00] loss of humanity in that era and perspective that he set about writing Lord of the Rings. For him, the ring was the symbol of this gloating sense of power and glory. He ended up dedicating his life's work to this big idea in the same way that George Lucas had this big idea of creating a worldwide non-religion religion, the [00:02:30] force. He embedded that in this wonderful intergalactic story, Star Wars, and it's become the franchise business of our times. It's a metaphor for all that we're going through in our lives. Baby Boomers and all their children and grandchildren now are still mesmerized by this big idea. What is it to have the force in you?

But in with these grand stories, as well as Academy Award winning stories or art house films ... everybody has a favorite film. Behind it is another story, the story [00:03:00] of how you orchestrate the emotions. You do that because cinema is sight and

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sound. We have been trained to think just visually, as moving pictures, but, in fact, there's been a quantum leap in storytelling since the '60s and understanding the power of sound to move us at a very subliminal level.

Dan Cohen, Host: I want to come back to sound later in the program. But just sticking with the [00:03:30] words for a second, you mentioned some literature, Tolkien, for instance. George Lucas, of course, drew from mythology. We know that when he was working on Star Wars, he was reading great works of literature to understand how to translate this idea of the force into something that looks like a script. What is that process? For someone who's never written a screenplay before, how does that translation happen from idea to an actual script?

Bobette Buster: Well, first of all, cinema is more akin to music than a narrative form like novel [00:04:00] because it's in a time-based medium. So each page of a script is worth one minute of screen time. When you're creating a script, you are taught not just the idea of character development and then plot and then dialogue, you are literally taught how to think in terms of time and pacing. You have to know the format of a script. It's more than just buying a copy of Final Draft. You have to know how to [00:04:30] orchestrate that in time on each page. The very discipline of writing a screenplay is multi leveled, and I often think it's much more akin to learning how to write a symphony, for example.

Dan Cohen, Host: For someone new, let's say a student ... I know you've taught many students how to go from story idea to a screenplay. What are the key differences, say, from writing a novel that you tell them about because this is so time-based? How do they start to change their skills into this new format?

[00:05:00] Bobette Buster: The important thing is to say what is the big idea of your story. For example, to take Star Wars, George Lucas was talking about what he called the used future. In every scene of Star Wars, you have a sense of a futuristic world, but it feels real to us. The Millennium Falcon is a beaten up hot rod. You see the bumps and [00:05:30] bruises and the crashes. You experience reality in that world in a whole other way, and that's very important to the sound design. When you're making a story that you hope to translate onto the screen, you have to think in terms of what is my key image. What is the metaphor I'm telling with that image? With that, you construct, in a very well-organized way, an entire universe that relates to that [00:06:00] image. You also do that in terms of the sound design and in the style and tone of the world you create and the world you build so that there's an integration, all with this big idea.

Dan Cohen, Host: How does dialogue relate to this? I love that notion of the used future. I'm not sure I've heard that before in relation to Star Wars, but as soon as you hear that phrase, it's so true, the Millennium Falcon, the beat up robots, this world that was very different than other science fiction of the age. How then do you add in [00:06:30] dialogue to this imagined world?

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Bobette Buster: Well, in film school ... I went to USC Graduate School of Cinema, and we take an entire year of courses which is just visual storytelling. You have to be able to tell your story visually without any dialogue. Then, eventually, you add in sound effects and maybe music, and then the last thing you add in is dialogue. It's very important that you learn how to make the story rest on that. Dialogue is like the [00:07:00] jewel in the crown. It's a lot of fun. It can advance a story, absolutely. You think of Quentin Tarantino. He's the master of these long, winding dialogue moments on his screen, but he's unique because he has a unique voice. Most dialogue has to happen in a very clipped way so that you can cut around it and also so that you can put subtitles with it, internationally.

Dan Cohen, Host: That's an interesting point. It's not real dialogue, right?

Bobette Buster: No.

[00:07:30] Dan Cohen, Host: Even Quentin Tarantino is writing a kind of artifice of dialogue that you add into these stories.

Bobette Buster: Dialogue is subtext. It's really what we would all like to say or wish we had said. When you're in the moment with someone, most of us, in reality, are just speaking in a very polite framework, or we're frustrated. We can't find the words to say what we want to say. People on the big screen or in television are literally living out the inner life revealed.

[00:08:00] Dan Cohen, Host: How does a script get polished up into something that actually is compelling, that doesn't have long, boring stretches? It's interesting to think about the script as actually being a kind of time-based media because we think of writing in the novelistic form, where you're in your chair and you're reading it at whatever pace you want. But since it is a page per minute, how do you tell students this is enough of this scene, or we need to move on, or we need to create a new dynamic for the script to actually make it a good story?

[00:08:30] Bobette Buster: Well, it's a time-honored understanding in screenwriting that you have a foundation of eight sequences, which are around 11 minutes. Now longer films will have 12 sequences. Each one of those sequences must relate to an aspect of the central character's development. It's a time-honored thing that you know the story has to shift, and there's a reason for that sequence, what has to happen in that sequence. For example, by the time you get through one-third of the [00:09:00] screenplay, the central character will experience what we call free fall. The world will fall out from under them. They never expected this. In Star Wars, what happens to Luke Skywalker? Excuse me, spoiler alert, but he is suddenly taken away by Obi-Wan Kenobi because of a tragedy that happened on his farm. He's taken to a universe he never expected to be in, and that's plot point one.

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You have to strike these moments, much like you would if you were writing [00:09:30] music. You have to know the sequences. It's perhaps closer to the sonata form. Certain things happen in each sequence for a reason. Now a lot of people think, oh, that's formula writing, but I also equate screenwriting as much closer to, say, a world class game of soccer or baseball. Do you want to watch children play the game? Well, that can be cute. Or do you want to watch a world class game? You're still playing by the same rules, but you're dealing with it with characters [00:10:00] who are highly trained and highly orchestrated. So in actual fact, writing a screenplay takes place in many, many, many iterations. We often say you write to rewrite. You have to be willing to keep polishing. A script like Braveheart didn't even go out till after Randall Wallace had done 12 drafts.

Dan Cohen, Host: Then how long did that take? How long does the average script sit in development?

Bobette Buster: Well, development is the lifeblood of Hollywood. Easily, over a billion dollars a year is spent there in story development. Many screenplays will go through [00:10:30] rewrite and rewrite, and then there'll be a change in leadership at the studios or a director will fall off or a writer will be replaced. That's what we call development hell. It's hard to say how long. I would say the minimum is two years, but many great scripts that become the Academy Award winning scripts were in development for 10 or 20 years.

Dan Cohen, Host: That's really incredible. I mean, in some ways it's a longer time horizon than your average novel writing and publication.

[00:11:00] Bobette Buster: Oh, you have to be very much committed to the process, all the way through. But the big ideas are worth a commitment.

Dan Cohen, Host: Where do things go wrong in the development of a script?

Bobette Buster: Well, I just used the phrase development hell. That is a very real thing. Where things go wrong is you have too many cooks on the broth. You have too many people with too many different points of view. What you originally loved about the story gets lost in the writing with too many people overseeing it. Also, scripts [00:11:30] will suddenly just languish because people get exhausted. It is the cheapest part of the process of filmmaking but the most demanding because storytelling is actually a very high art.

Dan Cohen, Host: Let's go from this storytelling moment to the actual filming. If you get out of development hell, I'm sure there's-

Bobette Buster: That's what everybody wants to do, get out of development hell.

Dan Cohen, Host: ... great cheer at that moment. After your 5 or 10 or 20 years and you get to the [00:12:00] set and you begin filming, does the story change on the set at all?

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Bobette Buster: Absolutely. There are all kinds of reasons why. A lot of writers are there on the set. Part of the reason is that maybe there were limitations on the day of shooting the scene. Maybe you just can't execute what you had hoped for in the shot. Maybe the actor can't really read the lines, say the lines, do what you want it to do, or it's just simply not working as you had planned it. So as you're putting the whole story together, you're beginning to say, oh, my gosh, this scene needs [00:12:30] to be reworked in a whole new way. Now, ideally, you have worked this through before you get to the set, and there are many scripts that, by the time they go there, there has been a reading period. They've had table reads, and you're just very committed. Hitchcock would have storyboarded his entire film, and so he said the actual shooting of it was boring because he'd already seen it on the page in a graphic design novel kind of way.

[00:13:00] Dan Cohen, Host: It's really incredibly when you actually see those panels to see, for instance, the shower scene of Psycho actually being storyboarded out. All those shots, as short as they were, were already on the page in some format. I want to talk about the sound design and these other elements of a film which have a more unconscious effect on us than the dialogue that we hear. You have worked on a documentary [00:13:30] about the history of sound design called Making Waves. It is an increasingly important part of our cinematic world. We go to theaters now with big screens, but even more sophisticated sound systems that I think affect us in unconscious ways.

If we could go back a little bit in the history of sound design, maybe all the way back ... Obviously, there were silent films, and then sound came into play into cinema. Can you walk us through, say, what happened in those early years of [00:14:00] sound and then how that changed radically with movies like Star Wars that I remember so vividly had really unique sounds, Chewbacca, the laser shooting, all of those things and those new sound effects, but also the overall sound design?

Bobette Buster: Well, first of all, the documentary is Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, and we are in post-production and hoping to finish it in the spring. It will go out in the festival circuit. Really, when sound recording was discovered and [00:14:30] harnessed, Thomas Edison said that he wanted to do ... He had already created the phonograph, and he was partially deaf. When he died, when he was asked, of all of his inventions, what was his favorite, he said, without hesitation, "The phonograph." Capturing sound was considered to be an ephemeral thing like perfume in the air; it was that remarkable. Then he worked on bringing the [00:15:00] visual element to it, which was the projector and the camera. But then they didn't have the technology to know how to record sound, and when that finally ... And there was a big race by many people around the world to record sound. When that happened in the late '20s, 1927, famous ... there were little instances of it, but it hadn't really locked in until the film The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson, which was a Warner Bros. film.

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Actually, they thought, oh, the sound will be for music, and Al Jolson was a [00:15:30] famous Borscht Belt vaudeville singer. But he accidentally said, in the recording session, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet!" That absolutely galvanized audiences all over the world to want to hear dialogue. You can hear how people speak. It was electrifying. In fact, all the studios had to [00:16:00] write down over $100 million worth of silent movies in 1927. Of course, the crash was just two years later. They did not know how to record sound, so the first time they started making movies, they had just a mic in the middle of the room. It sounded terrible. There was a hiss. Then they started creating these Jimmy Cagney movies, with all the ... it's a gangster movie, and he's being shot at by machine guns. Well, where do you find those sounds? You can't do it when [00:16:30] you're recording it. Suddenly, they realized, oh, we have to record those sounds elsewhere, and then we have to create a system by which we mix it in. So it created the sense of a whole new art form, which is called rerecording.

Well, the real breakthrough was King Kong, 1933, when a sound designer named ... well, he wasn't even called a sound designer, a sound engineer who was very creative named Murray Spivack said, "Well, what is King Kong? What is the T. rex [00:17:00] that he fights? Where are those sounds?" They have to be created. " You have to have an imagination," as Ben Burtt said, famously. So he went to the zoo and recorded the sounds of tigers and lions, et cetera, and he rerecorded them backwards and forwards and mixed them, and those became the breakthrough sounds that we now create in Hollywood, rerecording.

In Hollywood there are two Oscars for sound: There's sound mixing and sound [00:17:30] rerecording because, eventually, what we realized is that sound is 50% of the experience, and yet we are not conscious of it. The first sense that we get when we are in our mother's womb is our ears. It is the last sense to go when we die. Our ears are on 24/7, but when we're born, of course, our eyes are in the front of our heads. We see the world visually. We think in visual terms. There are [00:18:00] actually very few words for the aural experience. We can say, well, listen up, or hear this, but there's tons of words for the vision experience.

So what happened was that George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, the great director of the Godfather, moved to Northern California in the late 1960s. They wanted to get out of the Hollywood studio system, which was really ruled by the guilds, the unions. They wanted to make the films they wanted to make. It was [00:18:30] considered you got more bang for your buck if you had good sound design. It was cheaper that way. They couldn't do all the special things like special effects, and especially George Lucas decided to create a universe because he was creating a galaxy far, far away. How do you create the sounds of that galaxy? He said, "The way to anchor this used future sensibility is for all the sounds to be from our world, and they're real."

[00:19:00] Along came Ben Burtt, just a graduate from USC who loved sound and recording, and he went around LA just recording. He'd strike a power line with a wrench, and that was the sound of the light saber. He accidentally walked past the back

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of a big old television and heard the feedback buzz, and he married those two sounds, rerecorded them, and created the light saber we now have today. Kylo [00:19:30] Ren's light saber, for example, that is now in Star Wars VII and following, is created by literally ... We went to a machine shop, and we were hearing the grinding, sparking sound of metal on metal. That is Kylo Ren's sound.

The biggest challenge for Ben Burtt, for example, was the voice of R2-D2, and he said that was the hardest thing for George Lucas and himself to discover because all the sounds of science fiction were always these other worldly, ooh!, kind of [00:20:00] electronic sounds. George did not want that. He wanted it to sound like real stuff, and he wanted R2-D2 to have a soul. They finally figured out that they had to create a language of squeaks and beeps. R2-D2 didn't even have a light that sunk up with his sound. You just had to believe that he was speaking a language. It took them a long time to figure that out, but when they did and they mixed it [00:20:30] together, it was the scariest thing because the opening scene is C-3PO and R2-D2 talking to each other. Finally, C-3PO gets mad and kicks R2-D2, and R2-D2 has a long whistling moment, in which you intuitively understand that he's saying, "Come with me. We're going on a big adventure." C-3PO says very angrily, "No more adventures!" which I always love because that was the beginning of the Star Wars story. We've been on an adventure ever since. But on opening night, [00:21:00] George Lucas was terrified that the audience wouldn't accept it. They just didn't know because it was so fresh and new.

On the other side, you have Francis Ford Coppola deciding to take the values of European film storytelling and put them into the Godfather. Then his great sound designer, Walter Murch, who was heavily influenced by John Cage, [00:21:30] created this whole other appreciation for the subtext to the sound of the Godfather. The ultimate breakthrough was Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, in which he created and invented, his team did, the first computerized mix board. It took them over almost two years to do the sound mix and design, which is unheard of now, for Apocalypse Now. But it created the ground standard that we have today with Dolby Atmos.

[00:22:00] Dan Cohen, Host: Wow, it's incredible that these two film makers who I think everybody knows, but they often think about the visuals, for instance, the visuals in Star Wars, the flying spaceships, or in Francis Ford Coppola's film, you think about the cinematography. Some of the scenes are so memorable just because of the visuals. To know that they were also innovating on the sound side and that we may have not appreciated that as much as we did when we first saw those films.

Bobette Buster: Well, our hope is, of course, that the documentary will open people's minds and [00:22:30] give them new ears to hear in a whole new way because you really have to be led into an appreciation of that. Then you have an a-ha moment around it. Subsequently, great, great directors like David Lynch and Steven Spielberg and Ang Lee and Christopher Nolan, so many people have employed the state of the art of sound design in the most masterful ways in their storytelling. When you go

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in and you're having an immersive experience when you're watching a movie on [00:23:00] the big screen, ideally, you're in a good cinema with good speakers all around you. The actual visuals are on a 2D plane in front of you, but the sound is 3D, and it's wrapping around you. You think, oh, I've had a great experience because of the visual effects, or I was moved by the music, but you were actually enveloped in a whole design space.

Dan Cohen, Host: You talk about that analog aspect of these great sound designers. You have a [00:23:30] great photo that we'll link to from our show notes for this episode of the recording of Chewbacca's sound from Pooh, the bear. Ben Burtt actually recorded a small bear roaring after eating a sandwich of bread and milk to get that sound. But I assume, afterwards ... And you mention Francis Ford Coppola created this mix board. I assume everything kind of went digital in the '80s and [00:24:00] '90s. What was the post-Lucas world like?

Bobette Buster: Well, first of all, thanks to George Lucas and Star Wars, he input his very considerable personal fortune into the digital age. We have George Lucas to thank. He's the Edison of the digital age because he had the money and the will to invest in state of the art sound studio. It's a gorgeous place called Skywalker Sound. By the way, he also invested in this little company called Pixar because he [00:24:30] saw the future of computer generated animation. He created, also, the EditDroid, which was the visual side of editing. It was eventually bought out and became Avid and then Final Cut Pro.

But everyone will tell you it's not the equipment; it's the mindset of how you tell your story with the choices you make and the sounds and the mixing of those [00:25:00] sounds and then the remixing. There's many layers to that that are a very high art form. It's very collaborative. You need a circle of talent to work with you. The people who are in that world are just zealots about how immersive it can be creatively.

Dan Cohen, Host: I was really struck along these lines. There was an exhibit on Pixar here at the Museum of Science in Boston. There was a motto from the Pixar headquarters that said, "We exist to convert math into emotion," and I thought that that was [00:25:30] such a great way of framing, really, what they do, that there is a lot of technology behind it, but, ultimately, it loops back to where we start, which is it's in the service of storytelling. It is service of these basic emotions and ideas that they are trying to translate to the screen and also to the oral world around that and in the theater.

Bobette Buster: Yes, I mean, there's so much very high-end academic thought, software design, [00:26:00] incredible engineers. I mean, the Oscars is really the academy of arts and sciences. John Lasseter, who's the founder of Pixar, with Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs, said, "You know, art inspires technology; technology inspires art." I interviewed George Lucas, and he was saying, "You don't have art without technology. Somebody thought to pick up a piece of chalk or whatever in the cave and create the first drawing of horses. That is technology." You go to

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[00:26:30] Florence and you look at the beautiful Brunelleschi Dome over the cathedral in Florence. That took 20 years for them to figure out how in the world are we going to erect a dome. That's going to be so heavy. It could collapse and fall any minute. Now it's stood the test of time for over 500 years.

We have to think the creation of oil paints, that they could be portable. They're [00:27:00] like the laptops of their time. That's why we have the impressionist artists. Otherwise, you were stuck to making your painting in a fresco with plaster. Many of these technological innovations over time have liberated all of us and improved our lives, so you need both.

Dan Cohen, Host: I think the technology that people look at today that seems to be surpassing the movies is video games. I think, in fact, just a few years ago, just the market itself [00:27:30] for video games is now much larger, has surpassed the film industry. How is that affecting storytelling? What do you see in the future for the future of storytelling, considering that it is moving to this new form of a video game that's interactive versus a time-based media, film?

Bobette Buster: Well, video games appeal to a certain market, which is young males, and then the men grow up. It has not crossed over into middle class play. It is not a family- [00:28:00] oriented experience. So I think you have to say, what do you want from your market? Do you want something that is a common denominator that moves culture? Because that's what cinema does. Or do you want it to be an immersive sole experience, which is what video games are? Now you could be role playing with people from all over the world, but are you actually in a social experience? So you have to see that they're apples and oranges.

[00:28:30] But what video games have done to influence cinema is they've created worlds. The whole essence of world building and how they have really pushed the limits of 3D character design ... And there is the very compelling idea of interaction and how we can all feel more empowered when we're in the world of a story. But right now, I see this sort of interaction as being more plot driven, more action [00:29:00] driven, and therefore a lot of it is very violent. It gives you a false sense of empowerment. What I'd like to see is far more development in terms of character and shared experience.

Dan Cohen, Host: I totally agree. Maybe just one final question. If someone listening to this podcast was interesting in storytelling and maybe had a script in them or an idea for the force or an allegory about war and total power, how would they get started?

[00:29:30] Bobette Buster: Well, you have to believe in your idea. Everyone, I believe, is a storyteller. The power of ideas change the world. Make a commitment to it. I would advocate getting educated, and it's more than just buying a software program or a weekend course. It is worth your while to really spend time in the world of storytelling at great depth. There's some excellent programs online now, but

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[00:30:00] there are many, many schools that offer ... And I think it's very important to read great literature and great history. I don't think you should just become cinema- centric, if you want to write a screenplay.

You need to have a point of view, so believe in your own idea is the most important thing.

Dan Cohen, Host: Well, Bobette, it's been great having you on What's New. Thanks so much.

Bobette Buster: Thank you.

Dan Cohen, Host: What's New is a production of the Northeastern University Libraries. It is produced by Thomas Bary and engineering by Jonathan Iannone in Snell Library's [00:30:30] recording studios, with assistance from the library's podcast team, Evan Simpson, Debra Mandel, Jon Reed, Sarah Sweeney, Brooke Williams and Debra Smith. Our thanks to Northeastern's Marketing and Communications staff, as well as the advice and input from Northeastern's College of Arts, Media and Design.

You can subscribe and check out more episodes of What's New on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, as well as on the web at [00:31:00] WhatsNewPodcast.org. I'm Dan Cohen. See you next time on What's New.

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