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Stories
A Hollywood Backstory
Every Sunday night when I was a kid, I'd sneak out of bed to watch the late movie on TV, film classics like Patton or A Man for All Seasons. I may very well have been the only fourth grader to have a profound, life-altering experience watching The Graduate. What can I say—even at nine years old, it spoke to me about assuming control over one's life. Twenty-five years later, after HBS, strategy consulting, and brand management, I chucked it all and decided I was a writer. Thank you, Benjamin Braddock.
Of course I'm not the only person to have fallen prey to Hollywood's ability to influence how we think, speak, and dress—or to awaken our greatest, superheroic aspirations, or legitimize our darker inclinations. Particularly with regard to the portrayal of violence, the question arises again and again: How and why have we let ourselves become desensitized—brainwashed—by Hollywood?
I spent a lot of time thinking about this for a script I worked on for a movie called Beautiful Boy. It tells the story of two ordinary parents trying to understand—and escape—the fact that their son took a gun to school and killed dozens of his college classmates. We decided to convey the violence obliquely through snippets of news, and to focus on the devastation the piecemeal revelations brought about on the shooter's parents and their relationship. We wanted to gut the short-term adrenaline out of the violence and instead show its long-term emotional toll.
The discomfort our film may have brought about was an attempt to promote awareness, vigilance, and understanding of our children, rather than to oversimplify and assign blame to parents, drugs, bullies, schools, gun laws—or violence in media. There simply is no easy answer.
But do movies/TV/music/games influence our identity and behavior? For me, the answer is definitely yes. And with this comes a personal responsibility for everyone—content creators, producers, exhibitors, audience members, and parents. We should not create things thoughtlessly and without purpose, nor should moviegoers sidestep responsibility for their own viewing choices and actions.
Recently, I met with Ellen DeGeneres's company about some possible new TV shows, one of which revolved around a scientist who, through experiments with monkeys, made some breakthrough anthropological discoveries. The conversation came to an abrupt halt: Ellen will not be involved in anything that even remotely suggests cruelty to animals. Similarly, a friend of mine who's an Oscar-nominated cinematographer will not even consider working on films that show children getting hurt.
From them and from experience, I've learned to be much more cognizant of what I'm writing and how I'm writing it. What we choose to create is an extension of our selves, our ideals, our musings. Writing a script is not unlike living life: It's a series of choices. And what we choose to view is an expression of our taste, curiosity, and values.
While Hollywood is more than capable of glorifying the cardinal sins, it's also adroit at depicting our shortcomings as human beings. Good protagonists in stories (and in life) think, reason, and are transformed by their experiences to overcome their flaws (e.g., the war profiteer Oskar Schindler in the 1993 movie Schindler's List). Which begs another question that rarely gets asked: in the aggregate, is it possible that we're actually better off with the influence of Hollywood?
A basic tenet of storytelling is that protagonists are active. They identify goals, overcome obstacles, and persist until their goals are realized. That determined individuals can bring about changes big and small is reinforced in almost every movie ever made. That's an invaluable contribution that helps drive away inertia and self-doubt and nudges us toward doing something meaningful, toward making our lives, as Benjamin Braddock said in The Graduate, different.
—A former Nestlé executive, Michael Armbruster (MBA 1994) coauthored the script for Beautiful Boy (2010) and has worked on numerous other projects for film and television. His next feature, End of Sentence, is scheduled to be shot in Iceland this fall.
My Two Cents represents the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of HBS or Harvard University.
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