What happened to great storytelling?

In the film Major League (1989), a beautifully simple premise underlies a magnificently structured plot. The unlikely heiress to the long beleaguered Cleveland Indians baseball club plots to assemble a team so pathetic that it’s inevitably horrible performance will justify moving the franchise to Miami, where she would rather live. The resulting collection of rag-tag, washed-up ball players first collides but then bonds. Then they uncover their boss’s ploy. Damned if they don’t rise above their mediocrity to win the pennant in an epic showdown with their long time nemesis, the New York Yankees. (It’s a bit late for a spoiler alert, I suppose, but the film is more than twenty years old.)

Watching the film or reading its script, you will find not a shred of unnecessary dialogue. Everything either sets up or executes a gag while advancing character and driving action. It’s a story about second chances, redemption and the prevalence of love. It’s a classically written screenplay that contains themes of which audiences never tire, dating back to Shakespeare and then before.

If you’ve seen the film you likely share my affection for it. Critics could claim that some of the humor in Major League is juvenile, certain outcomes predictable. Perhaps they could criticize the amount of baseball knowledge the movie assumes of its audience. But few would accuse Major League of coming up short on the entertainment front. The film is, simply put, a clever story well told.

David S. Ward, the film’s writer and director, the chap who had won an Oscar for writing The Sting (1974), had trouble selling Major League to studios. He finally convinced Morgan Creek Productions and Mirage Productions to bankroll the film. The result was its production in 1988 with a budget of $11 million.

Now twenty years since the release of Major League (to commercial and critical success, by the way), what is the state of storytelling on the silver screen? As budgets have ballooned and special effects grown more sophisticated, have, too, the tales that filmmakers today spin?

Erectile dysfunction or ED or impotence steals the happiness from free tadalafil the life of its victim. People who fall short to getting all such kind of super cheap cialis bliss are addressed as disappointed one. Psychological causes like performance anxiety, stress, mental disorders, psychological problems, and negative feelings are another major cause of this condition as experts are unaware of its exact cialis 10 mg http://www.learningworksca.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/015-USC-Rossier-A-Different-View-of-How-We-Understand-Progression.pdf cause. The symptoms could be very serious thus emergency medical get free viagra attention. Regretfully, I think not. Despite massive technological gains and stratospheric budgets, today’s films are often successful products, but rarely great stories. This era of film-making is plagued by the ever sharpening commercial imperative and marred by a lack of originality. What sophisticated audiences cry out for today is not bigger budgets or more mind-bending special effects. Movie goers aren’t calling for the casting of bigger, more reliable Hollywood stars. What we crave is story.

A call for story is not a call for increasingly fantastical characters who live out their fates in ever more fanciful worlds. I’m not against the science fiction and fantasy genres, but a creative setting and bizarre character does not a great story make. I’m calling for a return to what matters most to audiences: characters with whom we empathize, seemingly inescapable conflicts and an outcome that tells us something about ourselves.

When Charlie Rose recently asked him about the most important thing in storytelling, James Cameron replied, “Find a key into the heart of the audience; find universals in human experience and then express them in exotic new ways.” Avatar (2009) is choc full of mind-bending special effects, fantastical characters and fanciful worlds. But Cameron himself calls the story simple; it’s a classic tale whose structure stands on the shoulders of stories going back centuries.

2009 saw the greatest ever worldwide box office revenues. As storytellers in an era when the cinematic medium is high and on the rise, let us follow Cameron’s lead. Let us start with fascinating characters and excruciating obstacles. Let us start with colliding values and fulfilling triumphs. Like Cameron, we can package our story however we wish, set it in whatever world we can dream up. But beware of the allure of novelty and technology. Today, we must not stray from fundamentals, we must not deviate from the imperative to spin a great tale.