I learnt this when I first started making education films, films that needed to have a purpose, films that were not merely to be entertaining. I was making a film on collaboration technologies with John Seely Brown. We had a great big long shoot for the film. There was a lot of excitement and wonderful stories. I thought it had been a great shoot. The interviews had gone well. 

   I felt we had a big success. And at the time, we hired a consultant, Michael Schrage, who was helping us with the content. I had sent him stacks of transcripts, and I thought, “With all this wonderful stuff, we’re on our way!”

   When he said that, I started to laugh, because I knew he was going to say something awful. (Laughter) He doesn’t hold any thing back. He was great. And he said, “Yeah, I don’t really need 15 minutes. I don’t even need 1 minute.” And I was just laughing, because this was not upsetting me. This was good. I wanted him to help put us back on track. 

   Then he said: “It just doesn’t add up. I’ve read all of the stuff, all of these stories from all of these people. It’s got all kinds of happy endings. But it doesn’t answer the most important question of all: ‘So what?’” There was a pause and then he said, “O.k.? Got to go.” 

   I said, “Bye!.” (Laughter)

   And I sat there, and I didn’t get upset. I knew immediately that he was right. It didn’t matter how great I thought these stories were. We weren’t making a story for PBS, or for PBS only. We had a very tough audience. We were going to have people who would be asking, “Why am I buying this to show it to my organization? What are they going to get out of it? There needed to be an answer to the “So what?”. So that was a very important discovery for us. 

THE STORY SHOULD BE ENTERTAINING: THE EMOTIONAL PUNCH-LINE

    People ask me: how do create narratives? We’re still always trying to make it entertaining. And I don’t mean entertaining just in the sense of laughing or enjoying something. There are a lot of entertaining parts to these songs, but rather entertaining by having what Larry called earlier the emotional punch-line. 

   This is the most important element in a good story, whether it’s a film, or it’s told orally, or written in a book. Whether it’s a happy emotion, or a violent emotion like the stories of blood and murder that Larry had mentioned, or whether it’s sad or funny, it has to have an emotional punch-line. And hopefully it has many of those emotional punch-lines. Because this is what keeps the audience engaged. So this is what we are always trying to do, creating emotional transitions.