annals of entertainment the formula

What if you built a machine to predict hit movies? by malcolm gladwell

ne sunny afternoon not long ago, at Daniel he was talking about a movie collect himself. “I can’t even retell the Dick Copaken sat in a booth at that touched him as much as any he’d damn story without getting emotional.” Daniel,O one of those hushed, exclusive ever seen. He tried to explain why he was crying. restaurants on Manhattan’s Upper East “Nobody’s heard of it,” he said, and There was the little boy, first of all. He Side where the waiters glide spectrally he clearly regarded this fact as a minor was just about the same age as Copaken’s from table to table. He was wearing a tragedy. “It’s called ‘Dear Frankie.’ I grandson Jacob. So maybe that was part starched button-down shirt and a blue watched it on a Virgin Atlantic flight of it. Perhaps, as well, he was reacting blazer. Every strand of his thinning hair because it was the only movie they had to the idea of an absent parent. His own was in place, and he spoke calmly and that I hadn’t already seen. I had very low parents, Albert and Silvia, ran a modest slowly, his large pink Charlie Brown head expectations. But I was blown away.” He community-law practice in Kansas City, bobbing along evenly as he did. Copaken began, in his lawyer-like manner, to lay and would shut down their office when- spent many years as a partner at the white- out the plot. It takes place in Scotland. ever Copaken or his brother had any shoe Washington, D.C., firm Covington & A woman has fled an abusive relation- kind of school activity or performance. In Burling, and he has a lawyer’s gravitas. ship with her infant son and is living the Copaken world, it was an iron law One of his best friends calls him, admir- in a port town. The boy, now nine, is that parents had to be present. He told ingly, “relentless.” He likes to tell stories. deaf, and misses the father he has never a story about representing the Marshall Yet he is not, strictly, a storyteller, because known. His mother has told him that Islands in negotiations with the U.S. storytellers are people who know when his father is a sailor on a ship that rarely government during the Cold War. A to leave things out, and Copaken never comes to shore, and has suggested that missile-testing range on the island was leaves anything out: each detail is ad- he write his father letters. These she in- considered to be strategically critical. The duced, considered, and laid on the table— tercepts, and replies to, writing as if she case was enormously complex—involv- and then adjusted and readjusted so that were the father. One day, the boy finds ing something like fifty federal agencies the corners of the new fact are flush with out that what he thinks is his father’s and five countries—and, just as the ne- the corners of the fact that preceded it. ship is coming to shore. The mother has gotiations were scheduled to begin, Co- This is especially true when Copaken is to find a man to stand in for the father. paken learned of a conflict: his eldest talking about things that he really cares She does. The two fall in love. Unex- daughter was performing the lead role in about, such as questions of international pectedly, the real father reëmerges. He’s a sixth-grade production of “The Wiz.” law or his grandchildren or, most of all, dying, and demands to see his son. The “I made an instant decision,” Copaken the movies. mother panics. Then the little boy re- said. He told the President of the Mar- Dick Copaken loves the movies. His veals his secret: he knew about his moth- shall Islands that his daughter had to friend Richard Light, a statistician at er’s ruse all along. come first. Half an hour passed. “I get a Harvard, remembers summer vacations “I was in tears over this movie,” frantic call from the State Department, on Cape Cod with the Copakens, when Copaken said. “You know, sometimes very high levels: ‘Dick, I got a call from Copaken would take his children and the when you see a movie in the air you’re the President of the Marshall Islands. Light children to the movies every day. in such an out-of-body mood that things What’s going on?’ I told him. He said, “Fourteen nights out of fourteen,” Light get exaggerated. So when I got home I ‘Dick, are you putting in jeopardy the na- said. “Dick would say at seven o’clock, sat down and saw it another time. I was tional security of the United States for a ‘Hey, who’s up for the movies?’ And, all bawling again, even though I knew what sixth-grade production?’ ” In the end, the by himself, he would take the six kids to was coming.” Copaken shook his head, negotiations were suspended while Co- the movies. The kids had the time of and then looked away. His cheeks were paken flew home from Hawaii. “The their lives. And Dick would come back flushed. His voice was suddenly thick. point is,” Copaken said, “that absence at and give, with a completely straight face, There he was, a buttoned-down corpo- crucial moments has been a worry to me, a rigorous analysis of how each movie rate lawyer, in a hushed restaurant where and maybe this movie just grabbed at was put together, and the direction and there is practically a sign on the wall for- that issue.” the special effects and the animation.” bidding displays of human emotion— He stopped, seemingly dissatisfied. This is a man who has seen two or three and he was crying, a third time. “That Was that really why he’d cried? Holly- movies a week for the past fifty years, absolutely hits me,” he said, his face still wood is awash in stories of bad fathers who has filed hundreds of plots and char- turned away. “He knew all along what and abandoned children, and Copaken acters and scenes away in his mind, and the mother was doing.” He stopped to doesn’t cry in fancy restaurants every SEYMOUR CHWAST

138 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 16, 2006

TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 138—133SC. The mavens at Epagogix use a neural-network system to estimate a screenplay’s box-office performance before it gets made.

TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 139—133SC.—live art r15534.eps gether an international team of story ex- perts. Do you think you could figure it out?

he most famous dictum about Hol- lywood belongs to the screenwriter WilliamT Goldman. “Nobody knows any- thing,” Goldman wrote in “Adventures in the Screen Trade” a couple of decades ago. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess.” One of the highest-grossing movies in history, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was offered to every studio in Hollywood, Goldman writes, and every one of them turned it down except Paramount: “Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars? . . . Because nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.” What Goldman was saying was a ver- sion of something that has long been ar- gued about art: that there is no way of getting beyond one’s own impressions to arrive at some larger, objective truth. There are no rules to art, only the infinite variety of subjective experience. “Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” the “You were the one who wanted to colonize another planet.” eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. “It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and •• each mind perceives a different beauty.” Hume might as well have said that no- time he thinks of one of them. When he that she was chased by motorbikes, and body knows anything. tried to remember the last time he cried that she was blond and her lover was But Hume had a Scottish counterpart, at the movies, he was stumped. So he dark—because each one of those addi- Lord Kames, and Lord Kames was equally must have been responding to some- tional narrative details has complicated convinced that traits like beauty, sublim- thing else, too—some detail, some un- emotional associations, and it is the sub- ity, and grandeur were indeed reducible to conscious emotional trigger in the com- tle combination of all these associations a rational system of rules and precepts. He bination of the mother and the boy and that makes us laugh or choke up when devised principles of congruity, propriety, the Scottish seaside town and the ship we remember a certain movie, every sin- and perspicuity: an elevated subject, for and the hired surrogate and the dying gle time, even when we’re sitting in a instance, must be expressed in elevated father. To say that he cried at “Dear fancy restaurant. language; sound and signification should Frankie” because of that lonely father- Of course, the optimal combination be in concordance; a woman was most less boy was as inadequate as saying that of all those elements is a mystery. That’s attractive when in distress; depicted mis- people cried at the death of Princess why it’s so hard to make a really memo- fortunes must never occur by chance. He Diana because she was a beautiful prin- rable movie, and why we reward so richly genuinely thought that the superiority of cess. Surely it mattered as well that she the few people who can. But suppose Virgil’s hexameters to Horace’s could be was killed in the company of her lover, you really, really loved the movies, and demonstrated with Euclidean precision, a man distrusted by the Royal Family. suppose you were a relentless type, and and for every Hume, it seems, there has Wasn’t this “Romeo and Juliet”? And suppose you used all of the skills you’d always been a Kames—someone arguing surely it mattered that she died in a tun- learned during the course of your career that if nobody knows anything it is only nel, and that the tunnel was in Paris, and at the highest rungs of the law to put to- because nobody’s looking hard enough.

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TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 140—133SC.140—133SC.—live opi art—a 11671 In a small New York loft, just below The screen went from an undifferentiated Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful,” and Ashanti’s Union Square, for example, there is a tech cloud to sixty discrete clusters. This is “Baby,” as well as older hits like “Let Me startup called Platinum Blue that consults what the universe of hit songs from the Be There,” by Olivia Newton-John, and for companies in the music business. Rec­ past five years looks like structurally; “One Sweet Day,” by Mariah Carey, so ord executives have tended to be Hum­ hits come out of a small, predictable, and that listeners who liked any of those songs ean: though they can tell you how they highly conserved set of mathematical pat- would probably like “Crazy,” too. Finally, feel when they listen to a song, they don’t terns. “We take a new CD far in advance the computer gave “Crazy” a Periodicity believe anyone can know with confidence of its release date,” McCready said. “We Grade—which refers to the fact that, at whether a song is going to be a hit, and, analyze all twelve tracks. Then we overlay any given time, only twelve to fifteen hit historically, fewer than twenty per cent of them on top of the already existing hit clusters are “active,” because from month the songs picked as hits by music execu- clusters, and what we can tell a record to month the particular mathematical tives have fulfilled those expectations. company is which of those songs conform patterns that excite music listeners will Platinum Blue thinks it can do better. It to the mathematical pattern of past hits. shift around. “Crazy” ’s periodicity score has a proprietary computer program that Now, that doesn’t mean that they will be was 658—which suggested a very good uses “spectral deconvolution software” to hits. But what we are saying is that, almost fit with current tastes. The data said, measure the mathematical relationships certainly, songs that fall outside these in other words, that “Crazy” was almost among all of a song’s structural compo- clusters will not be hits—regardless of certainly going to be huge—and, sure nents: melody, harmony, beat, tempo, how much they sound and feel like hit enough, it was. rhythm, octave, pitch, chord progression, songs, and regardless of how positive your If “Crazy” hadn’t scored so high, cadence, sonic brilliance, frequency, and call-out research or focus-group research though, the Platinum Blue people would so on. On the basis of that analysis, the is.” Four years ago, when McCready was have given the song’s producers broad firm believes it can predict whether a song working with a similar version of the pro- suggestions for fixing it. McCready said, is likely to become a hit with eighty-per- gram at a firm in Barcelona, he ran thirty “We can tell a producer, ‘These are the el- cent accuracy. Platinum Blue is staunchly just-released albums, chosen at random, ements that seem to be pushing your song Kamesian, and, if you have a field domi- through his system. One stood out. The into the hit cluster. These are the variables nated by those who say there are no rules, computer said that nine of the fourteen that are pulling your song away from the it is almost inevitable that someone will songs on the album had clear hit poten- hit cluster. The problem seems to be in come along and say that there are. The tial—which was unheard of. Nobody in your bass line.’ And the producer will head of Platinum Blue is a man named his group knew much about the artist make a bunch of mixes, where they do Mike McCready, and the service he is or had even listened to the record before, something different with the bass lines— providing for the music business is an but the numbers said the album was going increase the decibel level, or muddy it exact model of what Dick Copaken would to be big, and McCready and his crew up. Then they come back to us. And we like to do for the movie business. were of the belief that numbers do not lie. say, ‘Whatever you were doing with mix McCready is in his thirties, baldish “Right around that time, a local newspa- No. 3, do a little bit more of that and you’ll and laconic, with rectangular hipster per came by and asked us what we were be back inside the hit cluster.’ ” glasses. His offices are in a large, open doing,” McCready said. “We explained McCready stressed that his system room, with a row of windows looking the hit-prediction thing, and that we were didn’t take the art out of hit-making. east, across the rooftops of downtown really turned on to a record by this artist Someone still had to figure out what to do Manhattan. In the middle of the room is called Norah Jones.” The record was with mix No. 3, and it was entirely possi- a conference table, and one morning re- “Come Away with Me.” It went on to sell ble that whatever needed to be done to cently McCready sat down and opened twenty million copies and win eight put the song in the hit cluster wouldn’t his laptop to demonstrate the Platinum Grammy awards. work, because it would make the song Blue technology. On his screen was a sound wrong—and in order to be a hit a cluster of thousands of white dots, resem- he strength of McCready’s analysis song had to sound right. Still, for the first bling a cloud. This was a “map” of the is its precision. This past spring, for time you wouldn’t be guessing about what songs his group had run through its soft- instance,T he analyzed “Crazy,” by Gnarls needed to be done. You would know. ware: each dot represented a single song, Barkley. The computer calculated, first of And what you needed to know in order and each song was positioned in the cloud all, the song’s Hit Grade—that is, how to fix the song was much simpler than according to its particular mathematical close it was to the center of any of those anyone would have thought. McCready signature. “You could have one piano so- sixty hit clusters. Its Hit Grade was 755, didn’t care about who the artist was, or nata by Beethoven at this end and another on a scale where anything above 700 is the cleverness of the lyrics. He didn’t even one here,” McCready said, pointing at the exceptional. The computer also found have a way of feeding lyrics into his com- opposite end, “as long as they have com- that “Crazy” belonged to the same hit puter. He cared only about a song’s under- pletely different chord progressions and cluster as Dido’s “Thank You,” James lying mathematical structure. “If you go completely different melodic structures.” back to the popular melodies written by McCready then hit a button on his Beethoven and Mozart three hundred computer, which had the effect of elimi- years ago,” he went on, “they conform to nating all the songs that had not made the the same mathematical patterns that we Billboard Top 30 in the past five years. are looking at today. What sounded like a

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TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 141—133SC.—live spot art r15543_D—pls inspect and report on quality beautiful melody to them sounds like a bench. (Hume was born and reared in float and re-form, and I sat there totally beautiful melody to us. What has changed Edinburgh.) His early published work transfixed. My father called me, and I is simply that we have come up with new was about law and its history, but he soon didn’t hear him. Finally, he comes in. styles and new instruments. Our brains wandered into morality, religion, anthro- ‘Son. What the . . . are you all right?’ I are wired in a way—we assume—that pology, soil chemistry, plant nutrition, said, ‘Bubbles, Dad, look what they do.’ keeps us coming back, again and again, to and the physical sciences, and once asked He said, ‘Son, if you’re going to waste the same answers, the same pleasure cen- his friend Benjamin Franklin to explain your time, waste it on something that may ters.” He had sales data and Top 30 lists the movement of smoke in chimneys. have some future consequence.’ Well, I and deconvolution software, and it seemed Those who believe in the power of broad kind of rose to the challenge. That sum- to him that if you put them together you patterns and rules, rather than the author- mer, I bicycled a couple of miles to a li- had an objective way of measuring some- ity of individuals or institutions, are not brary in Kansas City and I spent every day thing like beauty. “We think we’ve figured intimidated by the boundaries and hierar- reading every book and article I could find out how the brain works regarding musi- chies of knowledge. They don’t defer to on bubbles.” cal taste,” McCready said. the superior expertise of insiders; they set Bubbles looked completely random, It requires a very particular kind of per- up shop in a small loft somewhere down- but young Copaken wasn’t convinced. He son, of course, to see the world as a code town and take on the whole music indus- built a bubble-making device involving an waiting to be broken. Hume once called try at once. The difference between Hume aerator from a fish tank, and at school he Kames “the most arrogant man in the and Kames is, finally, a difference in kind, pleaded with the math department to world,” and to take this side of the argu- not degree.You’re either a Kamesian or teach him the quadratic equations he ment you have to be. Kames was also a you’re not. And if you were to create an needed to show why the bubbles formed brilliant lawyer, and no doubt that matters archetypal Kamesian—to combine law- the way they did. Then he devised an ex- as well, because to be a good lawyer is to yerliness, outsiderness, and supreme self- periment, and ended up with a bronze be invested with a reverence for rules. confidence in one dapper, Charlie Brown- medal at the International Science Fair. (Hume defied his family’s efforts to make headed combination? You’d end up with His interest in bubbles was genuine, but him a lawyer.) And to think like Kames Dick Copaken. the truth is that almost anything could you probably have to be an outsider. “I remember when I was a sophomore have caught Copaken’s eye: pop songs, Kames was born Henry Home, to a farm- in high school and I went into the bath- movies, the movement of chimney smoke. ing family, and grew up in the sparsely room once to wash my hands,” Copaken What drew him was not so much solving populated cropping-and-fishing county said. “I noticed the bubbles on the sink, this particular problem as the general of Berwickshire; he became Lord Kames and it fascinated me the way these bub- principle that problems were solvable— late in life, after he was elevated to the bles would form and move around and that he, little Dick Copaken from Kansas City, could climb on his bicycle and ride to the library and figure out something that his father thought wasn’t worth figuring out. Copaken has written a memoir of his experience defending the tiny Puerto Rican islands of Culebra and Vieques against the U.S. Navy, which had been using their beaches for target practice. It is a riveting story. Copaken takes on the vast Navy bureaucracy, armed only with arcane provisions of environmental law. He investigates the nesting grounds of the endangered hawksbill turtle, and the mat- ing habits of a tiny yet extremely loud tree frog known as the coqui, and at one point he transports four frozen whale heads from the Bahamas to Harvard Medical School. Copaken wins. The Navy loses. The memoir reads like a David-and- Goliath story. It isn’t. David changed the rules on Goliath. He brought a sling- shot to a sword fight. People like Co- paken, though, don’t change the rules; they believe in rules. Copaken would have agreed to sword-on-sword combat. But then he would have asked the referee for “Whatever it is, he’s been watching it all afternoon.” a stay, deposed Goliath and his team at

TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 142—133SC.—live opi art—a 11612 great length, and papered him with brief after brief until he conceded that his weapon did not qualify as a sword under §48(B)(6)(e) of the Samaria Convention of 321 B.C. (The Philistines would have settled.) And whereas David knew that he couldn’t win a conventional fight with Goliath, the conviction that sustained Copaken’s long battle with the Navy was, to the contrary, that so long as the battle remained conventional—so long as it fol- lowed the familiar pathways of the law and of due process—he really could win. Dick Copaken didn’t think he was an un- derdog at all. If you believe in rules, Goli- ath is just another Philistine, and the Navy is just another plaintiff. As for the ineffable mystery of the Hollywood block- buster? Well, Mr. Goldman, you may not know anything. But I do.

ick Copaken has a friend named Nick Meaney. They met on a case yearsD ago. Meaney has thick dark hair. “I feel like Doris is divorcing me for all the wrong reasons.” He is younger and much taller than Co- paken, and seems to regard his friend with affectionate amusement. Meaney’s back- •• ground is in risk management, and for years he’d been wanting to bring the prin- was unclear whether he was talking about gression, cadence, sonic brilliance, and ciples of that world to the movie business. Mr. Pink or Mr. Brown or possibly some frequency. In 2003, Meaney and Copaken were driv- Obi-Wan Kenobi figure from whom Copaken and Meaney brought in a ing through the English countryside to Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown first learned former colleague of Meaney’s named Durham when Meaney told Copaken their trade. “You know, the star wears a Sean Verity, and the three of them signed about a friend of his from college. The blue shirt. The star doesn’t zip up his up Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown. They called friend and his business partner were stu- pants. Whatever. So he put all these fac- their company Epagogix—a reference dents of popular narrative: the sort who tors up and began moving them around as to Aristotle’s discussion of epagogic, or write essays for obscure journals serving the scripts were either successful or unsuc- inductive, learning—and they started the small band of people who think deeply cessful, and he began grouping them and with a “training set” of screenplays that about, say, the evolution of the pilot epi- eventually this evolved to a kind of ad-hoc Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown had graded. sode in transnational TV crime dramas. analytical system. He had no theory as to Copaken and Meaney won’t disclose how And, for some time, they had been devel- what would work, he just wanted to know many scripts were in the training set. oping a system for evaluating the com- what did work.” But let’s say it was two hundred. Those mercial potential of stories. The two men, Copaken and Meaney also shared a scores—along with the U.S. box-office Meaney told Copaken, had broken down fascination with a powerful kind of com- receipts for each of the films made from the elements of screenplay narrative into puterized learning system called an arti- those screenplays—were fed into a neural multiple categories, and then drawn on ficial neural network. Neural networks network built by a computer scientist of their encyclopedic knowledge of televi- are used for data mining—to look for pat- Meaney’s acquaintance. “I can’t tell you sion and film to assign scripts a score in terns in very large amounts of data. In re- his name,” Meaney said, “but he’s English each of those categories—creating a giant cent years, they have become a critical tool to his bootstraps.” Mr. Bootstraps then screenplay report card. The system was in many industries, and what Copaken went to work, trying to use Mr. Pink and extraordinarily elaborate. It was under and Meaney realized, when they thought Mr. Brown’s scoring data to predict the constant refinement. It was also top se- about Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown, was that box-office receipts of every movie in cret. Henceforth, Copaken and Meaney it might now be possible to bring neural the training set. He started with the first would refer to the two men publicly only networks to Hollywood. They could treat film and had the neural network make a as “Mr. Pink” and “Mr. Brown,” an hom- screenplays as mathematical propositions, guess: maybe it said that the hero’s moral age to “Reservoir Dogs.” using Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown’s catego- crisis in act one, which rated a 7 on the “The guy had a big wall, and he started ries and scores as the motion-picture 10-point moral-crisis scale, was worth putting up little Post-its covering every- equivalents of melody, harmony, beat, $7 million, and having a gorgeous red- thing you can think of,” Copaken said. It tempo, rhythm, octave, pitch, chord pro- headed eighteen-year-old female lead

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TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 143—133SC.143—133SC.—live opi art a11426 •• whose characterization came in at 6.5 was movies again, through hundreds of thou- what it thinks the American box-office worth $3 million and a 9-point bonding sands of iterations, until it had worked out will be. A number comes out.” moment between the male lead and a a formula that did the best possible job of The way the neural network thinks is four-year-old boy in act three was worth predicting the financial success of every not that different from the way a Holly- $2 million, and so on, putting a dollar one of the movies in its database. wood executive thinks: if you pitch a figure on every grade on Mr. Pink and That formula, the theory goes, can movie to a studio, the executive uses an Mr. Brown’s report card until the system then be applied to new scripts. If you were ad-hoc algorithm—perfected through came up with a prediction. Then it com- developing a $75-million buddy picture years of trial and error—to put a value on pared its guess with how that movie actu- for Bruce Willis and Colin Farrell, Epa- all the components in the story. Neural ally did. Was it close? Of course not. The gogix says, it can tell you, based on past networks, though, can handle problems neural network then went back and tried experience, what that script’s particular that have a great many variables, and they again. If it had guessed $20 million and combination of narrative elements can be never play favorites—which means (at the movie actually made $110 million, it expected to make at the box office. If the least in theory) that as long as you can give would reweight the movie’s Pink/Brown formula says it’s a $50-million script, you the neural network the same range of in- scores and run the numbers a second time. pull the plug. “We shoot turkeys,” Meaney formation that a human decision-maker And then it would take the formula that said. He had seen Mr. Bootstraps and the has, it ought to come out ahead. That’s worked best on Movie One and apply it neural network in action: “It can some- what the University of Arizona computer to Movie Two, and tweak that until it had times go on for hours. If you look at the scientist Hsinchun Chen demonstrated a formula that worked on Movies One computer, you see lots of flashing num- ten years ago, when he built a neural net- and Two, and take that formula to Movie bers in a gigantic grid. It’s like ‘The Ma- work to predict winners at the dog track. Three, and then to four and five, and on trix.’ There are a lot of computations. The Chen used the ten variables that grey- through all two hundred movies, where- guy is there, the whole time, looking at it. hound experts told him they used in mak- upon it would go back through all the It eventually stops flashing, and it tells us ing their bets—like fastest time and win-

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TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 144—133SC.—live opi art a11835 ning percentage and results for the past show you how to count cards in Vegas.’ It ple on the inside, people who had spent seven races—and trained his system with had that sort of quality.” a lifetime in the motion-picture business, the results of two hundred races. Then he Copaken then approached another didn’t. “They called, and they said they went to the greyhound track in Tucson Hollywood studio. He was given nine had a way of predicting box-office success and challenged three dog-racing handi- unreleased movies to analyze. Mr. Pink, or failure, which is everyone’s fantasy,” cappers to a contest. Everyone picked Mr. Brown, and Mr. Bootstraps worked one former studio chief recalled. “I said winners in a hundred races, at a modest only from the script—without reference to them, ‘I hope you’re right.’ ” The ex- two dollars a bet. The experts lost $71.40, to the stars or the director or the mar- ecutive seemed to think of the Epagogix $61.20, and $70.20, respectively. Chen keting budget or the producer. On three team as a small band of Martians who had won $124.80. It wasn’t close, and one of of the films—two of which were low- somehow slipped their U.F.O. past secu- the main reasons was the special interest budget—the Epagogix estimates were rity. “In reality, there are so many circum- the neural network showed in something way off. On the remaining six—includ- stances that can affect a movie’s success,” called “race grade”: greyhounds are moved ing two of the studio’s biggest-budget the executive went on. “Maybe the actor up and down through a number of divi- productions—they correctly identified or actress has an external problem. Or this sions, according to their ability, and dogs whether the film would make or lose great actor, for whatever reason, just fails. have a big edge when they’ve just been money. On one film, the studio thought it You have to fire a director. Or Septem- bumped down a level and a big handicap had a picture that would make a good deal ber 11th or some other thing happens. when they’ve just been bumped up. “The more than $100 million. Epagogix said There are many people who have come experts know race grade exists, but they $49 million. The movie made less than forward saying they have a way of predict- don’t weight it sufficiently,” Chen said. $40 million. On another, a big-budget ing box-office success, but so far nobody “They are all looking at win percentage, picture, the team’s estimate came within has been able to do it. I think we know place percentage, or thinking about the $1.2 million of the final gross. On a num- something. We just don’t know enough. I dogs’ times.” ber of films, they were surprisingly close. still believe in something called that mag- Copaken and Meaney figured that “They were basically within a few mil- ical thing—talent, the unexpected. The Hollywood’s experts also had biases and lion,” a senior executive at the studio said. movie god has to shine on you.” You were skipped over things that really mattered. “It was shocking. It was kind of weird.” either a Kamesian or you weren’t, and this If a neural network won at the track, why Had the studio used Epagogix on those person wasn’t: “My first reaction to those not Hollywood? “One of the most pow- nine scripts before filming started, it could guys? Bullshit.” erful aspects of what we do is the ruthless have saved tens of millions of dollars. “I objectivity of our system,” Copaken said. was impressed by a couple of things,” an- few months ago, Dick Copaken “It doesn’t care about maintaining rela- other executive at the same studio said. “I agreed to lift the cloud of unknow- tionships with stars or agents or getting was impressed by the things they thought ingA surrounding Epagogix, at least in part. invited to someone’s party. It doesn’t care mattered to a movie. They weren’t the He laid down three conditions: the meet- about climbing the corporate ladder. It things that we typically give credit to. ing was to be in London, Mr. Pink and has one master and one master only: how They cared about the venue, and whether Mr. Brown would continue to be known do you get to bigger box-office? Nobody it was a love story, and very specific things only as Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown, and no else in Hollywood is like that.” about the plot that they were convinced mention was to be made of the team’s cur- In the summer of 2003, Copaken ap- determined the outcome more than any- rent projects. After much discussion, an proached Josh Berger, a senior execu- thing else. It felt very objective. And they agreement was reached. Epagogix would tive at Warner Bros. in Europe. Meaney could care less about whether the lead was analyze the 2005 movie “The Interpreter,” was opposed to the idea: in his mind, it Tom Cruise or Tom Jones.” which was directed by Sydney Pollack and was too early. “I just screamed at Dick,” The Epagogix team knocked on other starred Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. he said. But Copaken was adamant. He doors that weren’t quite so welcoming. “The Interpreter” had a complicated his- had Mr. Bootstraps, Mr. Pink, and This was the problem with being a Kames­ tory, having gone through countless revi- Mr. Brown run sixteen television pi- ian. Your belief in a rule-bound universe sions, and there was a feeling that it could lots through the neural network, and try was what gave you, an outsider, a claim to have done much better at the box office. to predict the size of each show’s even- real expertise. But you were still an out- If ever there was an ideal case study for the tual audience. “I told Josh, ‘Stick this in sider. You were still Dick Copaken, the alleged wizardry of Epagogix, this was it. a drawer, and I’ll come back at the end of blue-blazered corporate lawyer who ma- The first draft of the movie was writ- the season and we can check to see how jored in bubbles as a little boy in Kansas ten by Charles Randolph, a philosophy we did,’ ” Copaken said. In January of City, and a couple of guys from the risk- professor turned screenwriter. It opened 2004, Copaken tabulated the results. In management business, and three men in the fictional African country of Ma- six cases, Epagogix guessed the number called Pink, Brown, and Bootstraps— tobo. Two men in a Land Rover pull up of American homes that would tune in to and none of you had ever made a movie to a soccer stadium. A group of children a show to within .06 per cent. In thirteen in your life. And what were you saying? lead them to a room inside the building. of the sixteen cases, its predictions were That stars didn’t matter, that the direc- On the ground is a row of corpses. within two per cent. Berger was floored. tor didn’t matter, and that all that mat- Cut to the United Nations, where we “It was incredible,” he recalls. “It was like tered was story—and, by the way, that meet Silvia Broome, a young woman who someone saying to you, ‘We’re going to you understood story the way the peo- works as an interpreter. She goes to the

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TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 145—133SC. U.N. Security Service and relates a ter­ But he wanted to make a commercial order to justify his attacks on his enemies rifying story. The previous night, while movie, and parts of the script didn’t feel back home. Zuwanie hires a man to shoot working late in the interpreter’s booth, she right to him. He didn’t like the twist at him, and then another of Zuwanie’s men overheard two people plotting the assassi- the end, for instance. “I felt like I had shoots the assassin before he can do the nation of Matobo’s murderous dictator, been tricked, because in fact there was no job—and in the chaos Broome ends up Edmund Zuwanie, who is coming to threat,” Pollack said. “As much as I liked with a gun in her hand, training it on Zu- New York to address the General Assem- the original script, I felt like an audience wanie. “The end was the hardest part,” bly. She says that the plotters saw her, and would somehow, at the end, feel cheated.” Frank said. “All these balls were in the air. that her life may be in danger. The officer Pollack also felt that audiences would But I couldn’t find a satisfying way to re- assigned to her case, Tobin Keller, is want much more from Silvia Broome’s solve it. We had to put a gun in the hand skeptical, particularly when he learns that relationship with Tobin Keller. “I’ve of a pacifist. I couldn’t quite sew it up in she, too, is from Matobo, and that her never been able to do a movie without a the right way. Sydney kept saying, ‘You’re parents were killed in the country’s civil love story in it,” he said. “For me, the so close.’ But I kept saying, ‘Yeah, but I war. But after Broome suffers a series of heart of it is always the man and the don’t believe what I’m writing.’ I wonder threatening incidents Keller starts to be- woman and who they are and what they if I did a disservice to ‘The Interpreter.’ I lieve her. His job is to protect Zuwanie, are going through.” Pollack brought don’t know that I made it better. I may but he now feels moved to act as Broome’s Randolph back for rewrites. He then have just made it different.” bodyguard as well. A quiet, slightly am- hired Scott Frank and Steven Zaillian, This, then, was the question for Epa- biguous romantic attraction begins to de- two of the most highly sought-after gogix: If Pollack’s goal was to make “The velop between them. Zuwanie’s visit screenwriters in Hollywood—and after Interpreter” a more commercial movie, draws closer. Broome’s job is to be his several months the story was turned how well did he succeed? And could he interpreter. On the day of the speech, inside out. Now Broome didn’t tell the have done better? Broome ends up in the greenroom with story of overhearing that conversation. It Zuwanie. Keller suddenly realizes the actually happened. She wasn’t a terrorist he debriefing took place in central truth: that she has made up the whole anymore. She was a victim. She wasn’t an London, behind the glass walls of story as a way of bringing Zuwanie to jus- isolated figure. She was given a social life. theT private dining room of a Mayfair res- tice. He rushes to the greenroom. Broome, She wasn’t manipulating Keller. Their taurant. The waiters came in waves, mur- it seems, has poisoned Zuwanie and is relationship was more prominent. A muring their announcements of the lat- withholding the antidote unless he goes series of new characters—political al- est arrival from the kitchen. The table onstage and confesses to the murder of his lies and opponents of Zuwanie’s—were was round. Copaken, dapper as always in countrymen. He does. Broome escapes. added, as was a scene in Brooklyn where his navy blazer, sat next to Sean Verity, A doctor takes a look at the poison. It’s a bus explodes, almost killing Broome. “I followed by Meaney, Mr. Brown, and harmless. The doctor turns to the dicta- remember when I came on ‘Minority Mr. Pink. Mr. Brown was very tall, and tor, who has just been tricked into writing Report,’ and started over,” said Frank, seemed to have a northern English accent. his own prison sentence: “You were never who wrote many of the new scenes for Mr. Pink was slender and graying, and in danger, Mr. Zuwanie.” “The Interpreter.” “There weren’t many had an air of authority about him. His ac- Randolph says that the film he was characters. When I finished, there were ademic training was in biochemistry. He thinking of while he was writing “The two mysteries and a hundred characters. said he thought that, in the highly emo- Interpreter” was Francis Ford Coppola’s I have diarrhea of the plot. This movie tional business of Hollywood, having a classic “The Conversation.” He wanted to cried out for that. There are never enough scientific background was quite useful. make a spare, stark movie about an iso- suspects and red herrings.” There was no sign of Mr. Bootstraps. lated figure. “She’s a terrorist,” Randolph The lingering problem, though, was Mr. Pink began by explaining the ori- said of Silvia Broome. “She comes to this the ending. If Broome wasn’t after Zu- gins of their system. “There were certain country to do a very specific task, and wanie, who was? “We struggled,” Pollack historical events that allowed us to go when that task is done she’s gone again. I said. “It was a long process, to the point back and test how appealing one film was wanted to write about this idea of a noble where we almost gave up.” In the end, against another,” he said. “The very sim- terrorist, who tried to achieve her ends Zuwanie was made the engineer of the ple one is that in the English market, in with a character assassination, not a real plot: he fakes the attempt on his life in the sixties on Sunday night, religious pro- assassination.” Randolph realized that gramming aired on the major networks. most moviegoers—and most Hollywood Nobody watched it. And, as soon as that executives—prefer characters who have finished, movies came on. There were no psychological motivations. But he wasn’t lead-ins, and only two competing chan- trying to make “Die Hard.” “Look, I’m nels. Plus, across the country you had a the son of a preacher,” he said. “I believe situation where the commercial sector was that ideology motivates people.” playing a whole variety of movies against In 2004, Sydney Pollack signed on to the standard, the BBC. It might be a John direct the project. He loved the idea of an Wayne movie in Yorkshire, and a musical interpreter at the United Nations and the in Somerset, and the BBC would be the conceit of an overheard conversation. same movie everywhere. So you had a

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TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 146—133SC.—live spot art r15543_E—critical cut to be watched throughout entire press run the initial thing people say is ‘What do you know about our market?’ The as- on reading a newspaper for the sumption is that, say, Japan is different first time as an adult from us—that there has to be something else going on there. But, basically, they’re By evening, I am down to the last, just like us. It’s the consistency of these re- almost weightless, mineral-odored appearing things that I find amazing.” pages of the morning paper, and as I am “Biblical stories are a classic case,” Mr. letting fall what I have read, Brown put in. “There is something about and creasing what’s left lengthwise, the crackly what they’re telling and the message that’s rustle and the feathery grease remind me that coming out that seems to be so universal. what I am doing is what my then husband With Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion,’ people did, that sitting waltz with the paper, always say, ‘Who could have predicted undressing its layers, blowsing it, that?’ And the answer is, we could have.” opening and closing its delicate bellows, They had looked at “The Interpreter” folding till only a single column is un- scripts a few weeks earlier. The process taken in, a bone of print then typically takes them a day. They read, they gnawed from the top down, until the graded, and then they compared notes, layers of the paper-wasp nest lay around him by the because Mr. Pink was the sort who went couch in a grayish speckled dishevel. for “Yojimbo” and Mr. Brown’s favorite I left him to it, movie was “Alien” (the first one), so they the closest I wanted to get to the news was to didn’t always agree. Mr. Brown couldn’t start to sleep with him, slowly, while he was remember a single script he’d read where reading, the clouds of printed words he thought there wasn’t room for im- gradually becoming bedsheets around us. provement, and Mr. Pink, when asked When he left me, I thought If only I had read the same question, could come up with the paper, and vowed, In four years, just one: “Lethal Weapon.” “A friend of I will have the Times delivered, so here mine gave me the shooting script before it I am, leaning back on the couch, in the smell of ink’s came out, and I remember reading it and oil, its molecules like little thinking, It’s all there. It was all on the ammonites suspended in shale, page.” Once Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown lead’s dust silvering me. had scored “The Interpreter,” they gave I have a fnger, now, in the pie— their analyses to Mr. Bootstraps, who did count me as a reader of the earth’s gossip. fifteen runs through the neural network: I weep to feel how I love to be like the original Randolph script, the shooting my guy. I taste what he tastes each morning script, and certain variants of the plot that without moving my lips. Epagogix devised. Mr. Bootstraps then passed his results to Copaken, who wrote —Sharon Olds them up. The Epagogix reports are always written by Copaken, and they are models of lawyerly thoroughness. This one ran to control. It was very pure and very simple. they have at that point is whatever they’ve thirty-eight pages. He had finished the That was a unique opportunity to try and seen in TV Guide or on any trailer they’ve final draft the night before, very late. He make some guesstimates as to why mov- seen. We have to take a piece here and a looked fresh as a daisy. ies were doing what they were doing.” piece here. Take a couple of reference Mr. Pink started with the original Brown nodded. “We built a body of points. When I look at a story, there are script. “My pure reaction? I found it very evidence until we had something system- certain things I’m looking for—certain difficult to read. I got confused. I had to atic,” he said. themes, and characters you immediately reread bits. We do this a lot. If a project Pink estimated that they had analyzed focus on.” He thought for a moment. takes more than an hour to read, then thousands of movies. “The thing is that “That’s not to deny that it matters whether there’s something going on that I’m not not everything comes to you as a script. the lead character wears a hat,” he added, terribly keen on.” For a long period, we worked for a broad- in a way that suggested he and Mr. Brown “It didn’t feel to me like a mass-appeal caster who used to send us a couple of had actually thought long and hard about movie,” Mr. Brown added. “It seemed paragraphs. We made our predictions leads and hats. more niche.” based on that much. Having the script “There’s always a pattern,” he went on. When Mr. Bootstraps ran Randolph’s is actually too much information some- “There are certain stories that come back, original draft through the neural net- times. You’re trying to replicate what the time and time again, and that always work, the computer called it a $33-million audience is doing. They’re trying to make work. You know, whenever we go into a movie—an “intelligent” thriller, in the a choice between three movies, and all market—and we work in fifty markets— same commercial range as “The Constant

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TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 147—133SC. Gardener” or “Out of Sight.” According do not take advantage of it. We have a Mr. Brown changed the subject. “It’s to the formula, the final shooting script certain set of values that we attach to cer- amazing how often quite little things, was a $69-million picture (an estimate tain places.” quite small aspects, can spoil everything,” that came within $4 million of the actual Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown ticked off he said. “I remember seeing the trailer for box-office). Mr. Brown wasn’t surprised. the movies and television shows that ‘V for Vendetta’ and deciding against it The shooting script, he said, “felt more they thought understood the importance right there, for one very simple reason: like an American movie, where the first of locale: “Crimson Tide,” “Lawrence of there was a ridiculous mask on the main one seemed European in style.” Arabia,” “Lost,” “Survivor,” “Castaway,” character. If you can’t see the face of the Everyone agreed, though, that Pollack “Deliverance.” Mr. Pink said, “The des- character, you can’t tell what that per- could have done much better. There was, ert island is something that we have al- son is thinking. You can’t tell who they first of all, the matter of the United Na- ways recognized as a pungent backdrop, are. With ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘Superman,’ tions. “They had a unique opportunity to but it’s not used that often. In the same though, you do see the face, so you re- get inside the building,” Mr. Pink said. way, prisons can be a powerful environ- spond to them.” “But I came away thinking that it could ment, because they are so well defined.” The team once gave a studio a script have been set in any boxy office tower in The U.N. could have been like that, but analysis in which almost everything Manhattan. An opportunity was missed. it wasn’t. Then there was the problem of they suggested was, in Hollywood terms, That’s when we get irritated—when there starting, as both scripts did, in Africa— small. They wanted the lead to jump off are opportunities that could very easily be and not just Africa but a fictional coun- the page a little more. They wanted the turned into something that would actually try in Africa. The whole team found lead to have a young sidekick—a rela- have had an impact.” that crazy. “Audiences are pretty pa­ tively minor character—to connect with “Locale is an extra character,” Mr. rochial, by and large,” Mr. Pink said. a younger demographic, and they wanted Brown said. “But in this case it’s a very “If you start off by telling them, ‘We’re the city where the film was set to be bland character that didn’t really help.” going to begin this movie in Africa,’ much more of a presence. The neural In the Epagogix secret formula, it you’re going to lose them. They’ve bought network put the potential value of better seemed, locale matters a great deal. “You their tickets. But when they come out characterization at an extra $2.46 million know, there’s a big difference between they’re going to say, ‘It was all right. in U.S. box-office revenue; the value of city and countryside,” Mr. Pink said. But it was Africa.’ ” The whole thing locale adjustment at $4.92 million; the “It can have a huge effect on a movie’s abil- seemed to leave Mr. Pink quite distressed. value of a sidekick at $12.3 million—and ity to draw in viewers. And writers just He looked at Mr. Brown beseechingly. the value of all three together (given the resulting synergies) at $24.6 million. That’s another $25 million for a few weeks of rewrites and maybe a day or two of extra filming. Mr. Bootstraps, inci- dentally, ran the numbers and concluded that the script would make $47 million if the suggested changes were not made. The changes were not made. The movie made $50 million. Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown went on to discuss the second “Interpreter” screen- play, the shooting script. They thought the ending was implausible. Charles Randolph had originally suggested that the Tobin Keller character be black, not white, in order to create the frisson of bringing together a white African and a black American. Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown independently came to the same conclusion. Apparently, the neural network ran the numbers on movies that paired black and white leads—“Lethal Weapon,” “The Crying Game,” “Inde- pendence Day,” “Men in Black,” “Die Another Day,” “The Pelican Brief ”— and found that the black-white combina- tion could increase box-office revenue. The computer did the same kind of anal- ysis on Scott Frank’s “diarrhea of the plot,” “You’re breaking up, Gretchen!” and found that there were too many vil-

TNY—2006_10_16—PAGE 148—133SC.—live opi art a11863 lains. And if Silvia Broome was going to dor. She turns to Keller. “‘This time,’ she Frankie.” The neural network had one be in danger, Mr. Bootstraps made clear, notes with a wry smile . . . ‘you will have to master, the market, and answered one she really had to be in danger. protect me.’ ” Bootstraps’s verdict was that question: how do you get to bigger box- “Our feeling—and Dick, you may this version would result in a U.S. box- office? But once a movie had made you have to jump in here—is that the notion office of $111 million. vulnerable—once you couldn’t even re- of a woman in peril is a very powerful “It’s funny,” Mr. Pink said. “This past tell the damn story without getting emo- narrative element,” Mr. Pink said. He weekend, ‘The Bodyguard’ was on TV. tional—you couldn’t be content with just glanced apprehensively at Copaken, evi- Remember that piece of”—he winced— one master anymore. dently concerned that what he was about “entertainment? Which is about a body- That was the thing about the formula: to say might fall in the sensitive category guard and a woman. The final scene is it didn’t make the task of filmmaking eas- of the proprietary. “How powerful?” He that they are right back together. It is very ier. It made it harder. So long as nobody chose his words carefully. “Well above clearly and deliberately sown. That is the knows anything, you’ve got license to do average. And the problem is that we lack commercial way, if you want more bodies whatever you want. You can start a movie a sense of how much danger she is in, in the seats.” in Africa. You can have male and female so an opportunity is missed. There were “You have to either consummate it or leads not go off together—all in the name times when you were thinking, Is this allow for the possibility of that,” Copaken of making something new. Once you something she has created herself ? Is agreed. came to think that you knew something, someone actually after her? You are con- They were thinking now of what would though, you had to decide just how much fused. There is an element of doubt, and happen if they abandoned all fealty to the money you were willing to risk for your vi- that ambiguity makes it possible to doubt original, and simply pushed the movie’s sion. Did the Epagogix team know what the danger of the situation.” Of course, premise as far as they could possibly go. the answer to that question was? Of course all that ambiguity was there because in Mr. Pink went on, “If Dick had said, not. That question required imagination, the Randolph script she was making it all ‘You can take this project wherever you and they weren’t in the imagination busi- up, and we were supposed to doubt the want,’ we probably would have ended up ness. They were technicians with tools: danger of the situation. But Mr. Pink with something a lot closer to ‘The Body- computer programs and analytical sys- and Mr. Brown believed that, once you guard’—where you have a much more ro- tems and proprietary software that calcu- decided you weren’t going to make a mantic film, a much more powerful focus lated mathematical relationships among a European-style niche movie, you had to to the two characters—without all the po- laundry list of structural variables. At Plat- abandon ambiguity altogether. litical stuff going on in the background. inum Blue, Mike McCready could tell “You’ve got to make the peril real,” You go for the emotions on a very basic you that the bass line was pushing your Mr. Pink said. level. What would be the upper limit on song out of the center of hit cluster 31. The Epagogix revise of “The Inter- that? You know, the upper limit of any- But he couldn’t tell you exactly how to fix preter” starts with an upbeat Silvia Broome thing these days is probably still ‘Titanic.’ the bass line, and he couldn’t guarantee walking into the United Nations, flirting I’m not saying we could do six hundred that the redone version would still sound with the security guard. The two men million dollars. But it could be two hun- like a hit, and you didn’t see him releasing plotting the assassination later see her and dred million.” his own album of computer-validated pop chase her through the labyrinthine cor­ music. A Kamesian had only to read Lord ridors of what could only be the U.N. t was clear that the whole conversation Kames to appreciate the distinction. The building. The ambiguous threats to was beginning to make Mr. Pink un- most arrogant man in the world was a ter- Broome’s life are now explicit. At one comfortable.I He didn’t like “The Body- rible writer: clunky, dense, prolix. He point in the Epagogix version, a villain guard.” Even the title made him wince. knew the rules of art. But that didn’t make pushes Broome’s Vespa off one of Man- He was the sort who liked “Yojimbo,” him an artist. hattan’s iconic East River bridges. She after all. The question went around the Mr. Brown spoke last. “I don’t think it hangs on to her motorbike for dear life, as room: What would you do with “The In- needs to be a big-budget picture,” he said. it swings precariously over the edge of the terpreter”? Sean Verity wanted to juice “I think we do what we can with the orig- parapet. Tobin Keller, in a police helicop- up the action-adventure elements and inal script to make it a strong story, with ter, swoops into view: “As she clings to push it to the $150- to $160-million an ending that is memorable, and then do Tobin’s muscular body while the two of range. Meaney wanted to do without a slow release. A low-budget picture. One them are hoisted up into the hovering he- expensive stars: he didn’t think they were that builds through word of mouth— licopter, we sense that she is feeling more worth the money. Copaken wanted something like that.” He was confident than relief.” In the Epagogix ending, more violence, and he also favored mak- that he had the means to turn a $69-mil- Broome stabs one of Zuwanie’s security ing Keller black. But he didn’t want to go lion script into a $111-million movie, and men with a knife. Zuwanie storms of the all the way to “The Bodyguard,” either. then again into a $150- to $200-million stage, holds a press conference, and is shot This was a man who loved “Dear Frankie” blockbuster. But it had been a long after- dead by a friend of Broome’s brother. as much as any film he’d seen in recent noon, and part of him had a stubborn at- Broome cradles the dying man in her memory, and “Dear Frankie” had a do- tachment to “The Interpreter” in some- arms. He “dies peacefully,” with “a smile mestic box-office gross of $1.3 million. thing like its original form. Mr. Bootstraps on his blood-spattered face.” Then she If you followed the rules of Epagogix, might have disagreed. But Mr. Bootstraps gets appointed Matobo’s U.N. ambassa- there wouldn’t be any movies like “Dear was nowhere to be seen. 

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