Slay the Dragon. Robert Denton Bryant

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СКАЧАТЬ Porter’s twelve-minute The Great Train Robbery (1903). Audiences (groups of people watching together, rather than the lonely experience of the kinetoscope) sat on benches or chairs in tents, or in theaters. Barely a dozen years later D. W. Griffith’s incredibly successful (and incredibly racist) The Birth of a Nation (1915) proved that longer, “feature-length” movies were a viable means of telling longer, more complex, and multi-threaded stories. Even silent movies needed writers (or “scenarists”). Someone had to conceive the plot and write the intertitles.

      Movies came of age in 1939. This was the beginning of Hollywood’s golden age. Why 1939? The years 1939 to 1942 saw the release of a trove of classic films that continue to captivate viewers to this day:

       Casablanca

       Citizen Kane

       Destry Rides Again

       Gone with the Wind

       Goodbye, Mr. Chips

       The Maltese Falcon

       Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

       Ninotchka

       Rebecca

      The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu)

       The Wizard of Oz

       Young Mr. Lincoln

      Citizen Kane changed the medium. It set new expectations for cinematic storytelling. Its director? Orson Welles, the same boy wonder who created a national panic with his radio play.

      Americans went to the movies in record numbers each week. But things change. Television landed in living rooms, so many moviegoers landed on the couch. Today, not as many Americans go to the movies as they did back then, but more of the world goes. Hence, Hollywood’s appetite for computer generated imagery (CGI) and animation spectacles. KA-BOOM! and SPLAT! are understood worldwide.

      Pick up any issue of any magazine that covers entertainment, eavesdrop at a table where writers hang out, look at the original programming offered by not only the broadcast and cable networks, but also Netflix, Amazon and other streaming providers, and you will hear this consensus: we are in a golden age of television. It has never been better. Broadband and binge watching have changed the way stories are told. Audiences love long-form serialized storytelling. Kind of like what Dickens used to do. (Then again, many big game franchises have been providing longform episodic storytelling for, well, a lot longer than Netflix has.)

      Television as a storytelling medium did not begin with a golden age. Mom and Dad America did not unwrap their TV dinners and enjoy Breaking Bad or The Sopranos. For decades, many TV shows were essentially radio programs with pictures. (Many very early TV shows, like Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, started out as radio programs.) TV’s current golden age—with its nuanced, cinematic storytelling—took close to seventy-five years to get here. For decades, television was the most underappreciated and most often disparaged medium (besides comic books). Theater critic John Mason Brown famously called TV “chewing gum for the eyes.”⁵ It was unfashionable in smart circles to declare that you might actually enjoy watching television. Does that attitude seem familiar to those of us who love video games?

THE GOLDEN AGE OF GAMES?

      We’ve come a long way from the bouncing ball that was Pong. We are now in a golden age of video game storytelling. Thankfully, the technology has plateaued in recent years. In the last generation of high-def game consoles, you could see the nose hair growing out of the nostrils of the zombies that were about to kill you. In the current “next generation,” you can see individually animated legs on the mites on the nose hairs of the zombies that are about to kill you. For most game players, the most meaningful technological advancements of the last decade have been innovative controllers (via touch screens, cameras, plastic guitars, and wiggle sticks), better networking and, by far, the portability and ease of use provided by both smartphones and their app stores.

      What’s been so exciting about this is that so many creators have been able to focus on making more immersive and emotionally compelling stories with better gameplay, rather than having to spend so much time learning how to render graphics on totally new platforms. Half-Life, Halo, Assassin’s Creed, Fallout 3, BioShock, Uncharted, Mass Effect, The Last of Us—all these landmark story-driven franchises have players returning again and again to experience the next chapter in the story; to explore more deeply these compelling worlds.

      Although they’re not “playable movies,” their graphics and sound are cinematic. Advances in motion capture and a thousand other bits of technology allow more realism and beauty. The worlds and story lines have attracted A-list Hollywood talent. Music tracks are no longer the ping-ping-ping of an 8-bit chip but sweeping symphonic scores. World building and mythology are unparalleled. What was the norm for the video game industry now has become a key point in every story conference for movies and television. The creators and narrative designers of these games—Ken Levine (BioShock), Susan O’Connor (Tomb Raider), David Cage (Heavy Rain) and many others—are treated like rock stars at game conferences.

      Agents, managers, and writers talk about how a writer in today’s world should know how to write it all: movies, novels, plays, articles, and “webisodes.” Even video games.

HOLLYWOOD CALLING!

      Film and television industry executives have long been fascinated by video games. But, like many grown-ups, they’ve had a very hard time understanding them. But if there’s one thing blockbuster movies and games have in common, it’s that their creators and distributors are always pursuing The Big Idea.

      Hollywood loves The Big Idea. The high-concept one-liner. The story that gets butts in movie seats. The tantalizing “What If?” question that people pay you to answer. The IP that can feed the fans’ insatiable appetite for sequels and spin-offs (and book tie-ins and toys and T-shirts). Every big media company wants nothing more than a franchise like Star Wars, in which the slightest announcement of new information or release of a new trailer can fill the halls at comic conventions and might even crash Twitter.

      The appeal is twofold: for creators and fans, it’s about the fun of exploring an exciting world and getting to know fascinating characters; for the suits, it’s about the money! As Gus Grissom (actor Fred Ward) says in The Right Stuff, “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

      The first modern American transmedia franchise was, arguably, The Wizard of Oz (and we don’t mean the beloved 1939 MGM film—that came almost four decades later). L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. The book was a best-seller for years, and Baum wrote thirteen more novels based in the “merry old land of Oz.” He then brought the franchise to the stage as a musical play, which had a successful run on Broadway and toured the United States. In 1914 he expanded into movies with a series of silent films produced by his own Oz Film Manufacturing Company.⁶ There were spin-offs and merchandise (both licensed and unlicensed) for nearly forty years before audiences ever got to see Judy Garland wear her sequined ruby slippers.

      All these journeys to Oz across multiple media made Baum a fortune. (He later lost a fortune, but that’s a different story.) Audiences bought his books and tickets to his shows because they already knew of Oz and its characters, but wanted to know more. It was much easier for Baum to sell a new Oz-based book—for which there was an existing audience—than it was for him to sell a new book СКАЧАТЬ