“Don’t let the facts get in the way of the story”

Reflections on a Hollywood axiom and the power of emotional logic.

Friday was the final day of a five-lecture series I delivered to a community of people in Pilgrim, Michigan. The title: The Theology of Cinema. We explored numerous movies during our week together including Nomadland, Barbie, Up, Shakespeare in Love, Slumdog Millionaire, The Holdovers, The Silence of the Lambs, and the last film The Shawshank Redemption. I am pleased to say the series was received really well!

After I had finished the final lecture, a woman approached me, introducing herself as an engineer.

Woman: I have to ask … how serious is Hollywood about depicting the truth on screen? You know, scientific facts?
Me: As with …
Woman: Like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy crawls through the sewer pipe. That’s not realistic. He wouldn’t get more than a hundred feet let alone a half-mile. The methane gas would kill him.

Ah, methane gas from what Red describes in voice-over as “five hundreds yards of shit-smelling foulness I can’t even imagine.”

The engineer noted that in such concentrations methane gas would be highly poisonous, unless Andy “knocked holes in the pipe every few feet, he suffocate and die.”

I confessed, I’d never thought of that scientific issue.

Me: But to answer your question, there’s an old saying in Hollywood: “Don’t let the facts get in the way of the story.”

I explained there is scientific truth … then there is emotional truth. In a movie like Oppenheimer, I suspect Christopher Nolan hewed extremely close to the former. But for movies with subject matter that don’t feature science front and center, what Hollywood cares about is the latter: the emotional experience of the audience.

Me: You raise a great point. Your scientific reasoning is sound. But the reason why Andy’s escape works in the context of the story is because the audience is emotionally invested in living vicariously through him to experience that journey to freedom. In other words, we WANT him to escape. And that desire overrides every other consideration.

I was reminded of a debate about the movie Super 8 I addressed at Go Into The Story just after that film’s release in 2011. Here is an excerpt from my article: Super 8, emotional logic, and rational logic.

I have been emailed by a bunch of blog readers asking my reaction to the movie Super 8. I want to make sure folks have a chance to see it before providing any analysis so they can screen it with a clean slate. In the interim, I propose we have a go at some of the logic ‘problems’ in the movie, at least as lobbed my way via email. So if you’ve seen the movie and you had any problems with the story logic, please join me in comments where I have started a list.

I will collect all the logic issues, then go through them with my own response.

There were quite a few responses, so I have aggregated all of them and will post in comments so as not to spoil the movie for those who have yet to see it.

And now let me resolve all those logic issues for you.

But wait. How can I handle all the logic issues without actually referring to them one by one here in this post?

Simple. Because I don’t need to. There is a blanket rationale which overrides any logic problem in the movie. And that rationale is this:

Emotional logic trumps rational logic.

J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg are savvy enough to know when it comes to story, what a moviegoer wants to see, what they enjoy experiencing as they watch a movie, and the feelings they have during those two hours are absolutely, fundamentally, and utterly more important than any sort of rational consideration.

Two points:

(1) This doesn’t work with every movie. For example, a heist film like Ocean’s 11 or con movie like The Spanish Prisoner puts a higher premium of the internal logic of the story. There the filmmakers must craft a plot within the perimeters of how that rational logic shapes the contours of the story universe. That is not the case with a movie like Super 8 which is a cross between science fiction, fantasy, and wish fulfillment. For this movie, emotional logic rules over rational logic because moviegoers go into the film experience desiring to experience the sci-fi, the fantasy, and the wish fulfillment.

(2) Once the story establishes the threshold of emotional logic, basically sinking that hook in the moviegoer, they are free to play that trump card as often as they like as long as they don’t overuse it. How does Super 8 do this? Since anybody who is interested in the movie has likely seen the trailer or commercials, I’m not giving away anything here to note that a major Plotline point is a train wreck.

But it’s not just a train wreck, it is the train wreck to end all train wrecks. Dozens of train cars exploding, careening, flying, hurtling, crashing, smashing, tumbling, rumbling, banging, booming, creating a hailstorm of metal parts and flaming shards, taking several minutes of screen time resulting in massive destruction.

Now several people noted logic issues re this plot point:

• How could one pick-up truck driving onto the tracks and crashing into the engine cause such a massive chain reaction of destruction?
• How could the driver of the truck possibly survive the collision and ensuing apocalypse?
• If the alien is able to break out of the train after the accident, why doesn’t it escape before?
• Why were the soldiers transporting the alien in the first place?
• Why was the train apparently unmanned?
• How is it none of the kids filming at the time of the destruction gets hurt?
• How is it Alice’s father’s car survives the rampage?
• And then the remarkable coincidence that the kids just happen to be filming their scene at the precise time the train happens to rumble by as well as the precise time the teacher in the pick-up truck just happens to cause the accident.

That’s a lot of issues, right? And while they may exist as concerns in our rational mind, there’s one simple fact that sets them aside:

We just got done watching the greatest single train accident sequence in the history of movies!!!

That experience — the emotional logic of that — trumps the rational logic. And now having created this enormous latitude of emotional logic, the filmmakers can go to that well again and again and again.

Now sure, there will be a segment of moviegoers who will diss the movie because they can’t get past the issues of rational logic.

But that’s not the movie’s target audience. And as filmmakers, Abrams and Spielberg would be downright dumb if they allowed the intellectual instincts of a small minority of the movie’s potential audience squash the primacy of emotional logic which they figured would be there in the target demo group.

In other words, the filmmakers made a calculated choice that a helluva a lot more moviegoers would enjoy giving themselves over to the emotional logic of the story universe in Super 8 than would not.

And they were right. Per Box Office Mojo, Super 8 has racked up $155M in worldwide box office receipts as of today, probably on its way to $200M. With a production budget reported to be $50M, the movie will have a very healthy ROI.

Caveat: If your name isn’t Abrams, Spielberg, or the like, and you are an aspiring or novice screenwriter, your scripts will be held to a higher degree of scrutiny per its story logic. So you have to be careful. While your script’s target audience may be tween girls, ten year-old boys, horror enthusiasts, or whatever type of fans, the readers of your scripts will all be adults. If you need them to buy into your story’s emotional logic, you must get them in touch with their inner tween, ten year-old, horror fan, and so on in order to buy into your vision for the story.

— —

From a recent event at the DGA, J.J. Abrams and James Cameron talked with the night’s honoree Steven Spielberg in a wide-ranging conversation about filmmaking. This excerpt:

Applauding Spielberg’s passion and childlike enthusiasm for the open wonder of possibility, Cameron and Abrams listened intently as Spielberg explained how he balanced the “magic of the moment with the necessary architecture of each scene.” Spielberg was vividly forthright in discussing everything from dealing with a disastrous first day of shooting on Jaws, thanks to an inebriated Robert Shaw, to the creative genesis of Close Encounters which led to the discovery that the key to accessibility in science fiction is personal, human relationships: “Create characters you really want to be with.” [emphasis added]

Seems applicable to this discussion as I think it supports my basic contention at least how Spielberg and Abrams approached Super 8. The more deeply a moviegoer is immersed in the story’s characters, the more latitude you have as a filmmaker to do just about anything, including bending the ‘rules’ of rational logic.

Hollywood cares less about science and rational logic … and more about emotional truth. Hence, “Don’t let the facts get in the way of the story.”

A final note about Shawshank. In the scene where Andy and Red have their final conversation — before Andy’s escape that night — Andy talks about his fantasy of living on the beach in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. After he waxes on about his dream, Red says this:

“I don’t think you oughta be doing this to yourself, Andy. It’s just shitty pipe-dreams.”

Shitty pipe-dreams.

How does Andy escape?

Through a shitty pipe.

That’s setup and payoff is yet another reason why we want Andy to crawl through a half-mile pipe … methane gas notwithstanding.

How about you? Andy’s escape bother you due to its flawed science? Any other movie scenes bother you due to their lack of scientific or rational logic?

SCREENWRITING TAKEAWAY: Unless you’re making a documentary or the subject matter of your movie focuses on science, you’ve got some latitude to stretch the truth … but be sure to create characters the audience identifies with emotionally … because it’s that emotion which will carry the viewer — or script reader — through the action.