The Benshi

INNOVATION. It’s becoming a bit like “greenwashing.” Everyone is discovering it’s easy to say you support it — “Yeah, we’re all about innovation here.” Nobody is going to test whether it’s true. And you’re not likely to find any organizations who are willing to say they are against it — “No, we do our best to squelch innovation here.”

But if you truly believe in innovation, then you should be a huge fan of improv acting. I know I am. As soon as I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, a friend took me to an improv comedy show at the Groundlings Theater on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood and I was smitten. I began attending their shows regularly, and seven years later introduced myself to Jeremy Rowley as well as other members of their main stage cast. Jeremy is one of the all-time greats, having been a performer for many years as well as a veteran instructor. The repertoire of characters he created as a Groundling is among the best — right up there with Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, Phil Hartman, Kristen Wiig, and all the other legendary comic actors who have passed through the Groundlings in the past few decades. He’s a popular comic actor on television, appearing frequently in everything from Comedy Central’s “Reno 911!” to the wildly popular kids show, “iCarly.” On top of all that, he’s very smart and through years of conducting improv workshops with corporate leaders has learned exactly how powerful this training can be, even to non-actors. Even to scientists.

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When I was a graduate student I once asked the great evolution popularizer Dr. Stephen Jay Gould about his monthly column in Natural History Magazine — how in the world did he manage to come up with a new topic every month? At the time of my question he had been writing the column for five years. He said that when he first made the deal with the magazine to write the column he presented them with a list of twenty five essays he wanted to write, but that five years later he still had not written a single one of them. In fact the list had grown to more than fifty because every month when he sat down to write he already had several new topics that had come to mind. Well, I’m no Steve Gould, but I’m starting to feel the same way with this exercise. I have a growing list of things to address, and more importantly, interesting people to interview. But I also continue to see on-going elements of previous essays. So for today I want to run through three examples in recent weeks of previous essays brought to life in our society.

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Chris Keane was the starting point for my journey into the world of narrative fiction. In October of 1989, when I was an utterly movie-clueless professor of marine biology at the University of New Hampshire, I began developing an interest in feature filmmaking. Back then there existed in Boston an amazing (but now gone) resource called the Boston Film and Video Foundation which was a cooperative that hosted workshops and provided resources to struggling filmmakers. I took a couple of workshops there and heard everyone buzzing about Christopher Keane’s Weekend Screenwriting Workshop. Without a clue of what it might consist of, I just blindly signed up, paid my $200, and showed up early Saturday morning for two very long days of lectures and exercise by the man. It was truly amazing. Best workshop ever. And when I headed off to USC Cinema School in 1994 I did the math — if I learned that much in a two day workshop, imagine how much I would learn in 3 years. But last year I flashed back and realized there was never another learning experience as great. Part of it probably had to do with my mind being a blank slate, but most of it had to do with Chris being an outstanding instructor.

Last March I tracked him down, twenty years later, and we team taught a workshop on storytelling at The Monterey Institute for International Studies. He’s tremendous and the students loved him.

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This Sunday will be the 44th annual Super Bowl, the most widely viewed television event of the year. What that means for advertisers is lots and lots of “eyeballs,” as they like to call it. Traditionally it’s the ultimate testing ground for television commercials, but in recent years, people with agendas have slowly woken up and said to themselves, “Hey, if corporations can ‘message’ about their beer or soft drink, why can’t we also ‘message’ about our political issue?” In this essay I share a few thoughts on this, going back to 2002, when the environmental world could have had a chance to make a mark, if there had been anyone with the money brave enough.

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This is the first in an on-going series of short interviews I’ll be doing here on The Benshi with people whom I think have unique insights to offer the world of science communication.

In 1998, just after finishing film school, I made a 20 minute video titled, “Talking Science: The Elusive Art of the Science Talk.” I interviewed a number USC faculty in Theater, Communications, Cinema and the sciences. My favorite character in all the interviews was Tom Hollihan, Professor of Communication, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He came out with this little snippet of “arouse and fulfill” (in the clip below) that has stuck with me as I’ve used it in talks and in my book. People seem to really connect with the simplicity and punchiness of the phrase. His area of expertise is more in the world of politics, as evidenced by his books, “Uncivil Wars: Political Campaigns in a Media Age” (2001), “Argument at Century’s End: Reflecting on the Past and Envisioning the Future“ (2000). But he also has worked with groups of scientists over the years from Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Department of Defense and several universities. In this chat I was looking for his perspective on the importance of storytelling in the world of science, and it’s relevance to current discussions and debates around global warming.

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The assumed success of issue-oriented documentaries like “An Inconvenient Truth” has left a lot of activists thinking it’s some sort of panacea — make a documentary feature film and suddenly the world will show up in droves to learn the details of your cause.  If only it were that easy.  First off, the polls have shown “An Inconvenient Truth” produced no net increase in support or concern about global warming as an issue.  Secondly, the movie made a lot of noise, but they had a lot of money behind it.  And third, what the polls do show is that the vast majority of people who saw it at theaters were the “already converted,” and mostly supporters of Al Gore.  It didn’t manage to do much in terms of reaching the non-converted.

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What makes for a good slogan? They are, of course, incredibly important in crystallizing and simplifying a message for the mass audience. Over the ages you can find countless slogans that have helped spearhead entire mass movements as well as sell products. Wikipedia has plenty of examples of the good slogans from the worlds of politics and advertising. And yet, you can also find lots of utterly vacuous slogans that leave nothing behind when finally abandoned for having not worked. In this essay I offer up a few thoughts on slogans following on from what I had to say in my book.

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Okay, where were we?  Oh, that’s right, likeability and celebrity — their importance in selecting a spokesperson.  For starters, yes, I think Sean Carroll (the evolutionist who was on 60 Minutes last week and pictured in the previous installment) is a very good spokesperson (pleasant, likeable, and smart).  And guess what, because he is, that’s why 60 Minutes chose him.  All of which is a bit circular — the good people get picked more.  But see below*.

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“Location, location, location.” Ever heard that expression? It’s what people say in real estate. What it means is that you can scrutinize and haggle about the size of the bedrooms, the width of the driveway, the length of the patio in the house you’re buying, but in the end, there’s only one major thing that matters — the location. The same is true for selecting a spokesperson to appear on television representing your cause. You can bring in a team of gifted writers and agonize over whether to have your spokesperson say, “SOME species will suffer,” versus, “MANY species will suffer,” but in the end, if the words emerge from the mouth of the wrong spokesperson, you might as well have not bothered. Selecting the spokesperson isn’t one of many parts of communicating, it is the TOP THREE things that matter — just like location, location, location (the origin of which is explored here by the late William Safire of the NY Times).

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I’ve come to the conclusion that storytelling is the single most important dynamic in mass communication.  A few years from now I may change this opinion.  I can’t offer any guarantees.  I can only say that at this point in my journey, having gone from the world of science to the world of cinema, storytelling is what now stands out to me as the most important element.  Why?  You can begin with the fact that about 85 percent of the world gets their beliefs through stories.  Try listening to this very compelling recent segment titled, “God’s Green Earth,” about the importance of the religious masses in addressing the environmental future — he talks about storytelling.  We can also look to Joseph Campbell, who late in life captured the ears and minds of the intelligentsia with his persuasive arguments about the universality of storytelling through the ages.  And think about the greatest talks you’ve ever heard — most of them were probably well told stories.

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