CONNECTION Hollywood Storytelling meets Critical Thinking RANDY OLSON DORIE BARTON BRIAN PALERMO Prairie Starfish Productions CONNECTION Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking Randy Olson, Dorie Barton, Brian Palermo Copyright © 2013 by Prairie Starfish Productions September 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below. Prairie Starfish Productions 5254 Melrose Ave. #D-112 Los Angeles, CA 90038 www.cnxnstory.com Cover and interior design by Vanessa Maynard Edited by Debra Almgren-Horwitz LCCN: 2013915698 ISBN-978-0615872384 (Print) Printed in the United States of America Table of Contents Connection Praise for “Connection” The Making of Stories Introduction RANDY OLSON 1. Overview: Roughing It DORIE BARTON 2. Narrative: Heroes of Hollywood THE LOGLINE MAKER BRIAN PALERMO 3. Improv: Make it Relatable 4. Action: Applying the WSP Model 5. The Ultimate Sophistication: Simplicity Appendix 1: The Connection Storymaker App Appendix 2: Improv Exercises Acknowledgments End Notes Index THE MAKING OF STORIES “A story begins when something happens.” — Randy Olson “It’s all the same story.” — Dorie Barton “Make your story relatable.” — Brian Palermo Because this book is about the power of simplicity in broad communication, we begin with these three individual statements. We, of course, have a lot more to say than just this. But if each of us had to choose just one thing for you to take away, these would be our simple messages. INTRODUCTION by Randy Olson ollywood has gone flat. You see it everywhere today. And by “flat” I don’t mean like a H can of Coke that’s been left out. I mean in the sense of Thomas Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat. He refers to the way the playing field of the planet has been leveled by the internet and modern commerce. The same thing has happened with Hollywood. There used to be a whole Hollywood way of life of fast talking, fast living, and fast job changes. You can read about it in books from the 1980s and 90s. Oscar-winning producer Julia Phillips painted a perfect portrait of that lifestyle with her autobiography, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Hollywood used to be such a different, crazy, and alien place. But then the internet and other technology came along, and things went flat. Suddenly, people in Peoria, Illinois were building websites, shooting videos, doing lunches, creating productions, and ending up with the same fast pace as Hollywood. People living in the rarefied air of the Hollywood Hills were brought down in stature to the same level as the folks in Shawnee, Kansas. In the sense of Friedman, relative to the rest of society, Hollywood went flat. We open with that as our basic premise. Today everyone is Hollywood. So why not make use of the same tools for mass communication perfected in the movie business over the past century, even though you don’t live anywhere near Tinseltown. THE STORYTELLING CONNECTION his book is about telling stories. It’s about you telling stories, me telling stories, your Tneighbor telling stories, the President telling stories—everyone telling stories. Why are we all telling stories? Because they are a fundamental part of communication, and because they can be a powerful part of persuasion. It is our nature, as Nancy Duarte explained in Resonate and Jonathan Gottschall took further in The Storytelling Animal. From the lawyer in Alliance, Nebraska, to the travel agent in Owensboro, Kentucky, to the public health worker in Mesa, Arizona—everyone has a need to tell stories. The lawyer tells stories to persuade a jury, the travel agent tells stories to vacationers to get them excited about a destination, and the public health worker tells stories to patients to warn them of risky behavior. They all need to tell stories. This is what we are here to help with—to make this “connection” between the non- Hollywood and Hollywood in a way that goes beyond the glitter, noise, and nonsense. We’re interested in helping you, the reader, bring the power of storytelling to your daily life. The way we do this is not just by raving about the joys and power of storytelling, but by getting down to how you do it—specifically by using a set of templates we’re going to introduce. The content of what we offer arises primarily from a workshop we organized following the publication of my first book, Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style. I left a career as a scientist and ventured to Hollywood in an effort to better understand the basic principles of mass communication. With that book, I was reporting back to the science world what I had learned. To implement my message, I recruited two Hollywood professionals, Dorie Barton and Brian Palermo, as co-instructors in what came to be known as our “Connection Storymaking Workshop.” Over the past three years we conducted it with a number of organizations, including the National Park Service, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography. Out of those experiences we advanced our knowledge of storytelling and eventually worked our way down to one simple storytelling tool that we call the “WSP Model,” which stands for Word, Sentence, Paragraph. Our overall message is not complicated. So many people have big stories to tell but are lost in the details and complexities. We have developed this simple process to shrink down your story at the start so you know what it is you’re trying to say. Then through elements of improv training, you can make your story more human and “relatable” to the general audience. That’s pretty much it. Yes, we’re going to draw it out for an entire book because there’s a lot of associated information for you to know; plus, we have many important (and fun) stories we want to tell you. Furthermore, our workshop is really entertaining, so we’ve done our best to write this book in a way that gives you the feeling you’re experiencing the workshop yourself. We hope that by the end of this book you’ll feel at least a little bit like you spent the day with us, living and breathing storytelling. here’s a lot to the telling of stories, but in the end, we mostly just want to keep things as simple as possible. That’s crucial in today’s world. It’s the reason Twitter was created. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and no longer just an option – it is essential to survival. That’s what we’re here to help you with. RANDY OLSON RANDY OLSON is the writer/director of the feature films Flock of Dodos: The Evolution- Intelligent Design Circus, (Tribeca ‘06, Showtime ‘07), Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy (Outfest ‘08), and author of Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style (Island Press ‘09). His work focuses on the challenges involved in communicating science to the general public and on the current attacks on mainstream science in fields such as evolution and climate science. He is a former marine biologist (Ph.D. Harvard University) who achieved tenure at the University of New Hampshire before changing careers to filmmaking by obtaining an M.F.A. in Cinema from the University of Southern California. He is an adjunct faculty member with the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies at USC. His production company, Prairie Starfish Productions, is based at Raleigh Studios in Los Angeles. 1. OVERVIEW: ROUGHING IT 1. ONCE UPON A STORYTELLING WORKSHOP i, everybody. Welcome to our workshop! Glad you could join us. I’ve got a couple of H great co-instructors here with me—Dorie and Brian. I’ll introduce them in detail shortly, but for starters, we have one simple message for you… YOU CAN ALL BE GREAT STORYTELLERS! hat’s our opening premise. And it’s true. I was once a pretty lousy storyteller. Just ask Tmy mother. She says that when I was five, I used to watch television shows, then regurgitate their contents to her. While she was doing the house cleaning, I would go on and on, following her from one room to the next, telling her about the show I had just watched, not really knowing myself what the point of the story was. I’ve gotten better. I promise. And if I can get better, so can you. We have a lot of work ahead of us. We hope you will make the “connection” with what we have to say. What we mean by “connection” is the idea of separate minds coming together to enlighten each other in new ways. When we put the workshop together we just sort of thought we’d teach a bunch of stuff separately. It never occurred to us the extent to which we would end up learning so much from each other because of our three different backgrounds. I think you’ll sense this as you read along. One aspect of our level of connection is our continuous references to each other’s sections. This is not a contrivance. We really have taught each other a great deal and hit these “connection moments” repeatedly as we’ve gotten to know our own material better through each other’s insights.