The long tail of everything

Yesterday, I noted that we’re living in a golden age for podcasting, and it isn’t hard to see why. If there’s a sweet spot for production and distribution, we’re in it right now: with the available software and recording tools, it’s easier than ever to put together a podcast at minimal cost, and just about every potential listener owns a laptop or mobile device capable of streaming this kind of content. Many of us are more likely to spend an hour listening to a show online than reading an article that takes the same amount of time to finish, perhaps because we can do it while driving or washing the dishes, or perhaps because the ratio of effort to entertainment seems more attractive. And the podcasts themselves—at least the ones that break through to draw a large audience—are better than ever. No matter what your interests are, there’s probably a show just for you, whether it’s a retrospective commentary on every episode of The X-Files or interviews with obscure supporting actors or advice on your career in customer support. And if you can’t find the podcast of your dreams, there’s nothing stopping you from jumping in and making it yourself.

Of course, in reality, the universe of podcasting looks like most other forms of creative expression: a long tail with a few big blockbusters at one end and thousands of niche offerings at the other. Serial may rack up five million downloads on iTunes, but it’s the outlier of outliers, and efforts by media companies to create “the next Serial” have about as much a chance of succeeding as the looming attempt by movie studios to make the next American Sniper. Both are going to inspire a lot of imitators, but few, if any, are likely to recapture the intangible qualities that made either such a success. In the meantime, for most podcasters, the medium doesn’t make for a viable day job—which only means that it’s like every other medium ever. Its relative novelty and low barriers to entry make it alluring in the same way that blogging or self-publishing once were, but it doesn’t make doing it for a living any easier. It simply creates another long tail parallel to, or embedded within, the traditional one, with a handful of breakout hits holding out the promise of success for the rest. Getting in on the rightmost side of the curve has never been simpler, but making it to the left is as hard as ever.

This is part of the reason why I’ve never been attracted to self-publishing, which looks at first like a way of circumventing the gatekeepers who are keeping your book out of stores, but really only pushes the same set of challenges a little further down the line. And the long tail is as close to a constant as we’ll ever see in any creative field, no matter how the marketplace changes. (Or, to put it another way, distribution won’t change the distribution.) It exists for the same reason crack dealers are willing to work for less than minimum wage: lured in by the promise of outsized success or recognition, people will spend years slaving away in community theater or writing short stories for nothing, when a job that offered less enticing rewards would have lost their interest long ago. Going in, we’re all irrational optimists, and we’ll always be more likely to compare ourselves to the few famous names we recognize while ignoring the invisible tail end. On the individual level, it’s a flaw of reasoning, but it’s also essential for keeping the whole enterprise alive. Without that subterranean world of aspiring artists who are basically paying for the privilege of doing the work they love, nothing big would ever emerge.

And each part of the curve depends on every other. It’s often been said that blockbusters are what make the rest possible, whether it’s Buzzfeed financing serious journalism with listicles about cats or The Hunger Games enabling Lionsgate to release the twenty smaller movies it distributes each year. And it’s equally hard to imagine anyone trying to make art for a living without the psychological incentive that the outliers provide. Yet the long tail is also what props up the success stories, and not just for companies, like Amazon, that bake it into their business models. On a cultural level, art is a matter of statistics because its underlying factors are so unpredictable: a masterpiece or great popular entertainment is so unlikely to emerge out of pure calculation that we have no choice but to entrust it to chance and large numbers. The odds of a given work of art breaking out are so low that our best bet is to increase the pool of candidates, even if any individual player operates at a net loss. That may not be much consolation to the writer or podcaster whose sphere of concern is limited to his or her life. But that’s a long tale of its own.

The hero paradox

Every year, the Academy Awards telecast makes us sit through a bunch of pointless montages, and every year, we get to complain about it. As I mentioned last week, I’ve long since gotten over most of the weird choices made by the Oscars—I like to remind myself that the ceremony isn’t designed for the television audience, but for the movers and shakers sitting in the auditorium itself—and I’ve resigned myself to the prospect of a few pointless production numbers. But the montages always seem particularly strange. They don’t add much in the way of entertainment value, and the opportunity cost for what is already an overlong show is unforgivably high: one fewer montage, and perhaps we might have had room for Dennis Farina in the In Memoriam reel, not to mention the canceled appearance by Batkid. This year’s ceremony, with its “salute to heroes” theme, resulted in an even more random assortment of clips than usual: here’s Gandhi, and Lawrence of Arabia, and just as we start to think there’s a pattern emerging, here’s Sidney Poitier as Mr. Tibbs. (I actually had to look up In the Heat of the Night to reassure myself that it hadn’t been based on a true story.)

The result was inexplicable enough that it inspired Todd VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club to tweet: “Next year: A tribute to protagonists!” But it also raises the larger question of what a hero really is, at least in terms of what we look for in storytelling. From a producer’s point of view, the answer is simple: a hero is the actor with the greatest amount of screen time, or whose face takes up the most room on the poster. (Or as the producer Scott Rudin once said when asked what a movie was about: “It’s about two movie stars.”) A writer might put it somewhat differently. The protagonist of a movie is the character whose actions and decisions drive the plot, and if he or she happens to embody qualities that we associate with heroism—courage, integrity, selflessness, resourcefulness—it’s because these attributes lend themselves both to wishful identification from the audience and to interesting choices and behavior within the confines of the story. All things being equal, a brave, committed individual will end up doing things on camera that we’ll hopefully want to watch. It has nothing to do with morality; it’s a logistical choice that results in more entertaining narratives. Or at least it should be.

The trouble, of course, is that when you’re not sure about your own story, you tend to fixate more on what the hero is than the more crucial matter of what he does. Screenwriters are always told to make their leading characters more heroic and likable, as if this were something that could be separated from the narrative itself. At worst, the movie simply serves up a chosen one, either explicitly or implicitly, which is often an excuse to give us a protagonist who is interesting and important just because we’re told he is. Sometimes, this problem can be a subtle one. Watching The Hunger Games: Catching Fire for the first time over the weekend, I felt that even though Jennifer Lawrence sells the hell out of the part, Katniss Everdeen herself is something of a wet blanket. This isn’t anyone’s fault: Katniss as written is almost unplayable, since she needs to be admirable enough to inspire a revolution and carry a franchise, vulnerable enough to serve as one corner of a love triangle, and a resourceful warrior who also hates the idea of killing. That’s a lot for any one character to shoulder, and it means that poor Katniss herself is often the least interesting person on the screen.

In general, though, it’s hard for a hero to come to life in the way a more incidental character can, simply because he’s under so much pressure to advance the plot. The great character actor Stephen Tobolowsky hinted at this last week on Reddit:

The difference between character actors and the leading men is that everything the leading men do is on film. Character actors have to invent that life off screen and bring that reality on screen. It’s much more imaginative work and the hours are better.

That’s why we often find ourselves wishing that we could spend more time with the supporting cast of a television show: they’re so much more full of life and vitality than the lead, whose every action is designed to carry forward a huge, creaking machine. Being a hero is a thankless role, both in fiction and in real life, and it inevitably leads to a loss of freedom, when in theory the hero should be more free than anyone else. As Harold Bloom observes of Hamlet, he could be anything in the world, but he’s doomed to play out the role in which he has been cast. Finding a way to balance a hero’s narrative burden with the freedom he needs to come alive in the imagination is one of a writer’s greatest challenges. And if the movies succeeded at this more often, those montages at the Oscars would have made a lot more sense.

What makes a great action scene?

For most of this week, anyone passing by my house would have seen a bright rectangular glow in the living room window, as the new Blu-ray of Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol played in a nonstop loop. While it doesn’t have the same visceral power as it did in IMAX, this is still a fun, expertly assembled action movie, the perfect sort of thing to have playing in the background while I’m working on other projects. Even after seeing it three or four times, however, I still have to drop everything and watch whenever the big scene in the Burj Khalifa comes up. I may not get as dizzy as I did when I first saw it, but even on the small screen, it’s still wonderfully exciting—and all the more terrifying when you know how it was actually filmed. (Incidentally, as much as I hate this sort of corporate extortion, it’s worth shelling out the extra money for the Best Buy exclusive edition, which contains some great bonus features that aren’t included in the version available on Amazon.)

In fact, I’d say that the Burj Khalifa climb in Ghost Protocol is my favorite action sequence of the past five years, on a short list that includes the Guggenheim shootout in The International and the opening chase scene in Drive. At first glance, these three scenes might not seem to have much in common—one is a death-defying ballet staged one hundred and thirty stories above the ground; one is lunatic, extended gunplay; and the last is the car chase as chess game—but they’re all executed with something of the same spirit, and it’s worth drilling down to figure out why they affect us so deeply. There’s something hugely pleasurable about these scenes that goes beyond their immediate impact, and which sets them apart, in my mind, even from such landmark sequences as the hallway fight in Inception, which I love, but find somewhat less interesting from a writer’s point of view. Because what the three scenes I’ve mentioned have in common is that they were all written first.

Here’s what I mean. Many action scenes, particularly car chases, come off as assemblages of second unit footage that have been pieced together in the editing room, and as a result, there’s something monotonous about the relentless similarity of action—just see any Michael Bay movie for an example. The action sequences in these three films, by contrast, were conceived on the printed page. They have a clear beginning, middle, and end. They make memorable use of their locations. They have small setups, payoffs, and surprises along the way, as when Ethan Hunt throws away his malfunctioning glove and finds it adhering to the side of the building a few stories later. Each is centered on the personality of the characters involved—indeed, each scene unfolds as a sequence of logical choices, which is something you’ll never hear said of Transformers. And these are all things that can only be planned at the screenplay stage.

And while this may seem obvious, it’s worth remembering in light of a movie like The Hunger Games, which has its good points, but to my eyes, despite the strength of its material, doesn’t know how to plan and carry out action. Instead, it relies on editing and camerawork to create the illusion of momentum, when all of this should have been laid out in the script. (Note that none of the three films I’ve mentioned ever use anything resembling a shakycam.) Full credit, then, to writers Eric Singer, Hossein Amini, and the platoon that worked on Ghost Protocol for giving us action scenes we’ll remember, which is something that ought to be celebrated. Because it appeals so shamelessly to our reptile brain, the ability to write a great action scene may never get the respect it deserves, but like any other narrative skill, it benefits from intelligence, ingenuity, and clarity of thought—and all of the editing tricks in the world won’t make up for their absence.

How The Hunger Games changed the world

The massive opening weekend of The Hunger Games, while impressive in itself, is also the clearest sign yet of a seismic shift in our popular culture, the effects of which will be felt in ways we can only begin to guess. Let’s start with the numbers. Like many movie nerds, I’ve been an avid consumer of box office data for most of my life, and a glance at the top opening weekends of all time—which is usually the least interesting of all movie lists, since it’s more about marketing excitement than true staying power—reveals some fascinating patterns. The first, obviously, is the dominance of sequels and established franchises, which doesn’t come as a surprise: if you throw out The Passion of the Christ as a marginal case, the largest opening weekend for a movie with an original story belongs to Avatar, all the way down at number 39. And although The Hunger Games is based on an existing property, the fact that a series of books that most readers hadn’t even heard of two years ago has generated such excitement is nothing less than remarkable.

Yet this list reveals another, more important trend: the gradual but inexorable replacement of science fiction and comic book properties with those based on young adult novels. A few years ago, the list of top opening weekends—which, again, is less a measure of staying power than a sort of index for cultural excitement over particular franchises—would have been dominated by Spider-Man, Batman, and the Star Wars movies. Today, it’s Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games, which will undoubtedly fill three more slots on the list before long. And while this may seem like a case of Tweedle-Dum giving way to Tweedle-Dee, it’s actually a generational shift that has implications not just for the movies, but for all forms of popular storytelling. A list like this is the closest thing we have to a snapshot of the narrative forces shaping the inner lives of children and teenagers, and by extension the rest of the world. And the transition from comics to young adult novels is arguably the most significant cultural change of the last twenty years.

It’s no surprise that Hollywood has always looked to young people to construct their tentpole franchises. Not only are kids more likely to see a movie on opening weekend, but their tastes, in general, tend toward the monolithic: as we grow older, we break off into Mad Men-watching splinter factions, but until high school, kids usually like more or less the same stuff. (The difference in magnitude can be roughly understood as the disparity between the opening weekends of The Hunger Games and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.) From a marketing perspective, this is very helpful: it allows expensive films to be pitched to the widest possible audience. Around the time of Tim Burton’s Batman, the studios realized that comic books were the most valuable properties for exciting the youngest quadrants, although it took the massive success of Spider-Man and the latest revolution in computer-generated effects for this trend to reach its culmination. In the end, Marvel went from being a niche provider of superhero fantasies to a central part of mass culture, to the point where the comics themselves became incidental to the multimedia studio to which they provided raw material.

And yet that moment appears to be passing. The explosion of young adult fiction in the past decade has allowed kids to get their pop culture satisfactions in other ways. As a result, comic book sales have been suffering for a long time, as existing companies struggle to interest younger readers in characters who were around before their parents were born. (To the extent that kids today care about these characters, it’s because of their movie incarnations, not the comics that inspired them.) And new heroes aren’t being created to take their place. Hence the efforts to repeatedly renew the few viable properties (The Amazing Spider-Man) or to launch franchises that palpably lack the fan enthusiasm to justify a movie (Green Lantern). It may not be long before a movie based on a big comic franchise will feel like John Carter: an attempt to drum up excitement for a hero who looks like a relic, while The Hunger Games is fresh and new. Which also means that a publisher like Scholastic, which can generate new properties in a way that Marvel cannot, will soon find itself in a similar position: a formerly tiny company that can move our entire culture. Farfetched? Maybe. But it’s happening before our eyes.