it so hard to get pandas at the zoo to breed? Why don’t customers like our new product? What’s the best way to teach kids about fractions?
Notice what is happening here: We have now moved to a higher level of unexpectedness. In the Nordstrom example, the Nordie stories had a punchy immediacy:
Nordies warm up customers’ cars!
When you hear this, your past schema of customer service is called up, contradicted, and refined, all in a short period of time. Mysteries act differently. Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected
journey
. We know where we’re headed—we want to solve the mystery—but we’re not sure how we’ll get there.
A schema violation is a onetime transaction. Boom, something has changed. If we were told that the rings of Saturn were made of dryer lint, a schema would be violated. We could call it “first-level” unexpectedness. But the actual “rings of Saturn mystery” is more extended and subtle. We are told that scientists do not know what Saturn’s rings are made of, and we’re asked to follow on a journey whose ending is unpredictable. That’s second-level unexpectedness. In this way, we jump from fleeting surprise to enduring interest.
Curiosity in Hollywood Screenplays
Early in the movie
Trading Places
, Billy Ray Valentine (played by Eddie Murphy), an apparently legless beggar, is using his arms topush himself around on a skateboardish contraption in a public park. He begs for money from passersby and harasses an attractive woman for a date. A couple of cops approach. As they jerk him up, his legs—perfectly normal legs—are exposed. Valentine is a con artist.
Later in the movie, the Duke brothers—two elderly businessmen—intervene to get Valentine out of jail, persuading the cops to release him into their custody. A couple of scenes later, Valentine appears, dressed in a three-piece suit, in a wood-paneled office. The Duke brothers have turned him into a commodities trader.
Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, uses this example to illustrate the concept of a “Turning Point.” McKee knows something about how to hold an audience’s attention. His screenwriting seminars play to packed auditoriums of aspiring screenwriters, who pay five hundred dollars a head to listen to his thoughts.
The Village Voice
described his course as “damned near indispensable not only for writers, but also for actors, directors, reviewers, and garden-variety cinephiles.” His students have written, directed, or produced television shows such as
E.R., Hill Street Blues
, and
The X-Files
, and movies ranging from
The Color Purple
to
Forrest Gump
and
Friday the 13th
.
McKee says,
“Curiosity
is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns.
Story
plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.” In
Trading Places
, the Turning Point with Billy Ray and the Duke brothers makes the audience curious. How will Valentine, the street-smart con man, fare as a trader?
In McKee’s view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point. “Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. The audience wonders,
What will happen next?
and
How will it turn out?
The answer to this will not arrive until the Climax of the last act, and so the audience, held by curiosity, stays put.” McKee notes that the
How will it turn out?
question is powerful enough to keep us watching even when we know better. “Think of all the bad films you’ve sat through just to get the answer to that nagging question.”
What will happen next? How will it turn out?
We want to answer these questions, and that desire keeps us interested. It keeps us watching bad movies—but it might also keep us reading long scientific articles. McKee and Cialdini have come up with similar solutions to very different problems.
Yet there are other domains where people can be rabidly interested in something that lacks this sense of mystery. Kids who
Notice what is happening here: We have now moved to a higher level of unexpectedness. In the Nordstrom example, the Nordie stories had a punchy immediacy:
Nordies warm up customers’ cars!
When you hear this, your past schema of customer service is called up, contradicted, and refined, all in a short period of time. Mysteries act differently. Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected
journey
. We know where we’re headed—we want to solve the mystery—but we’re not sure how we’ll get there.
A schema violation is a onetime transaction. Boom, something has changed. If we were told that the rings of Saturn were made of dryer lint, a schema would be violated. We could call it “first-level” unexpectedness. But the actual “rings of Saturn mystery” is more extended and subtle. We are told that scientists do not know what Saturn’s rings are made of, and we’re asked to follow on a journey whose ending is unpredictable. That’s second-level unexpectedness. In this way, we jump from fleeting surprise to enduring interest.
Curiosity in Hollywood Screenplays
Early in the movie
Trading Places
, Billy Ray Valentine (played by Eddie Murphy), an apparently legless beggar, is using his arms topush himself around on a skateboardish contraption in a public park. He begs for money from passersby and harasses an attractive woman for a date. A couple of cops approach. As they jerk him up, his legs—perfectly normal legs—are exposed. Valentine is a con artist.
Later in the movie, the Duke brothers—two elderly businessmen—intervene to get Valentine out of jail, persuading the cops to release him into their custody. A couple of scenes later, Valentine appears, dressed in a three-piece suit, in a wood-paneled office. The Duke brothers have turned him into a commodities trader.
Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, uses this example to illustrate the concept of a “Turning Point.” McKee knows something about how to hold an audience’s attention. His screenwriting seminars play to packed auditoriums of aspiring screenwriters, who pay five hundred dollars a head to listen to his thoughts.
The Village Voice
described his course as “damned near indispensable not only for writers, but also for actors, directors, reviewers, and garden-variety cinephiles.” His students have written, directed, or produced television shows such as
E.R., Hill Street Blues
, and
The X-Files
, and movies ranging from
The Color Purple
to
Forrest Gump
and
Friday the 13th
.
McKee says,
“Curiosity
is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns.
Story
plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.” In
Trading Places
, the Turning Point with Billy Ray and the Duke brothers makes the audience curious. How will Valentine, the street-smart con man, fare as a trader?
In McKee’s view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point. “Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. The audience wonders,
What will happen next?
and
How will it turn out?
The answer to this will not arrive until the Climax of the last act, and so the audience, held by curiosity, stays put.” McKee notes that the
How will it turn out?
question is powerful enough to keep us watching even when we know better. “Think of all the bad films you’ve sat through just to get the answer to that nagging question.”
What will happen next? How will it turn out?
We want to answer these questions, and that desire keeps us interested. It keeps us watching bad movies—but it might also keep us reading long scientific articles. McKee and Cialdini have come up with similar solutions to very different problems.
Yet there are other domains where people can be rabidly interested in something that lacks this sense of mystery. Kids who
Similar Books
