Deconstructing the Master Filmmakers – the True Innovators in Storytelling

-For the first-time ever, Bobette Buster will be making her storytelling secrets available to the SSN audience in an exclusive speaker series. “Deconstructing the Masters” will be the first event held on Tuesday, June 2 at FOX Studios. Click here for tickets and to learn more.-

“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” -Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was more than a great visionary whose Apple products have certainly made a “dent in our universe." When the world mourned his passing in 2011, I always felt Steve deserved as much credit for his innovative leadership in ushering in a whole new Golden Era of cinema storytelling. After all, for a five million dollar purchase from George Lucas, Steve bought into Ed Catmull’s (co-founder and President) and John Lasseter’s (co-founder and director) vision for the storytelling potential of Pixar, when the market thought their only value was their Renderman hardware.

Steve went on to personally spend over $75 million (half of his personal fortune) for ten years to cover Pixar’s story development process. Steve’s only caveat: “Make it insanely great.” Then came the release of John Lasseter’s first masterpiece, Toy Story in 1995. Catmull, who had the original vision for the first CGI feature film some 20 years prior, said, “When Toy Story made the cover of TIME magazine what I was most proud of was that the first line of the article said, ‘Toy Story, a CGI film: at last storytelling is back. They never mentioned CGI again.”

Upon Toy Story’s release, Steve insisted Pixar go public – to huge success. It was on that day Steve became a billionaire. Not from Apple. When he masterminded the Disney-Pixar merger in 2006 – catapulting both Ed Catmull and John Lasseter as the new heads of Disney – apparently Steve left the announcement celebration for his office. When once he was alone, he wept. When he died, two-thirds of his wealth came from Disney stock.

IT ALL COMES DOWN TO STORY

As John Lasseter said. “art inspires technology and technology inspires art. But it all comes down to story, story, story.” Every technologically wondrous moment in Pixar’s films has all been at the service of story. Every department, from animation, lighting, color, art direction to sound and voice talent, must “plus” the story – a Walt Disney term John often cites.

The Pixar “brain trust” famously collaborates on all aspects of the story, also importantly insisting the humor hits both of their two target audiences: children and parents. That’s why when Mr. Potato Head loses his face parts and puts them back on all wrong, he says, “Look, Ma, I’m a Picasso.” The kids laugh because he looks funny. The adults laugh because, well, it’s funny. At the same time, each Pixar film pushes the envelope of their software design (how do you make loveable Sulley’s fur believable in Monsters Inc, or create the feeling of the deep ocean in Finding Nemo?) Along with their Oscars and box office prowess, they boast a bevy of patents. While they also hold the record for longest streak of box office hits.

Great cinema storytellers are visionaries. They don’t design the technology first and then find the story to fit it. Instead they hit the wall of the story, and have to figure out how to make the technology work for them.

Alfonso Cuarón said after he and his son, Jonás, wrote Gravity, “it took over three years for the technology to come up to my vision.” James Cameron wrote an 80 page treatment for Avatar in 1994, and planned to film it after Titanic. But, he said, the “necessary motion capture techniques” were not perfected until 2006 when he began screenwriting and pre-production. Avatar’s release in 2009 broke all box-office records.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, THE STORY INNOVATOR

Perhaps the greatest story innovator of our times has been Francis Ford Coppola who dared to set-up his own studio, American Zoetrope, in San Francisco, with George Lucas, in 1969. They were early adopters of digital filmmaking, including the earliest use of HDTV. Francis flew to Denmark where he bought a KEM, the latest in European sound mixing equipment and had it shipped back to Zoetrope – often reciting the mantra, “Sound is fifty percent of the experience.”

Francis invented the term ‘Sound Designer’ for his creative collaborator, Walter Murch (The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, Godfather II) whom he also proclaimed the “other director of the film.” It was Francis’s vision for 5.1 sound Walter executed with the ground-breaking Apocalypse Now, setting the standard for the immersive storytelling world that is now the industry norm.

But Francis will always be renowned for his breakthrough masterpiece, The Godfather in 1972, a job he reluctantly took because he owed Warner Bros. over $300,000, a huge sum, to him, at that time, for their initial financing of American Zoetrope. Then, WB called in their loan. At first, Francis dismissed The Godfather novel as a ridiculous “telenovela,” and insulting to his Italian-American heritage. But then, Francis realized he had no other options for re-paying that loan. So he re-read the book and had an epiphany.

He said he’d always wanted to bring the story values of Kurasawa and the French New Wave to a Hollywood studio budget. This project was it. Francis innovated the idea of casting authentic talent – real Italians! While Paramount wanted to cast Laurence Olivier as Vito Corleone, and possibly Robert Redford as Vito’s son, Michael, Francis insisted on Al Pacino and John Cazale, whom he’d seen Off-Broadway. This was a horror to Paramount’s marketing department who said, “But they’re ugly! Besides, who knows them in the Midwest?” Of course, he also dared to bring Marlon Brando out of his Tahiti seclusion – when Brando had been all but forgotten.

But, perhaps, more importantly, Francis took apart the novel’s story and found the epic BIG IDEA. He telegramed Robert Evans, then Paramount’s Head of Production, “I’ve figured it out. The story will be about the Dark Side of the American Dream.” Evans reportedly replied, “Whatever. Just get me the film.” After all, the novel had been a New York Times Bestseller for 67 weeks. Francis went on to elevate the drama from just a “gangster” movie into legendary Shakespearean family saga. He wrote one of cinema’s most brilliant transformation stories in Michael Corleone, Vito’s beloved third son who was the embodiment of the All-American World War II hero.

Over 2 hours, 53 minutes, Francis magnified Michael’s character choice to give up his original All-American dream to not be a member of this family, all in order to protect “the family”. We are mesmerized at the film’s climax, when Michael orchestrates the fall of all the other mafia families and his rise to become the uber-Godfather of them all.

Every shot in The Godfather is a “plus” by every department in the film, insofar as story. From Gordon Willis, the “Prince of Darkness” director of cinematography’s lighting of the film as almost a black-and-white film with splashes of red, and the occasional yellow to Walter Murch’s genius sound design mid-act. As Michael agonizes, we hear an L train screeching. Murch said, “It’s as if Michael’s very neurons are screaming as he must discover the courage to kill his own American dream, when he kills Solozzo.”  From the art director, costumes, props, to casting, each department head advanced the story with their expertise – of course, under the genius direction of the maestro himself, Francis Ford Coppola.

Great storytellers are visionaries who possess the immense imagination to show the audience what stories they really want, and will come to love and cherish as their own stories. As Steve Jobs also said, “Here’s to the crazy ones.” Think different.

We’ll be discussing all this — and more — over the next few days and in my up-coming SSN Storyteller lecture series, “Deconstructing the Masters,” starting June 2. Click here for tickets and to learn more.

Bobette Buster has served on the guest faculty of Pixar, Disney Animation, Sony and Fox where she’s taught screenwriting through her acclaimed lecture series. Previously she served as an Adj. Professor in the USC Peter Stark Producing Program where she created the first MFA curriculum for film and TV development. She’s currently producing the feature documentary, Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound. Her book, DO STORY: How To Tell Your Story So The World Listens, is available on Amazon now. Find out more at www.bobettebuster.com or follow her on Twitter.

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