Didactic Message Films Always Fail

I have spent a good deal of time trying to persuade storytellers that message films, with a didactic base will always failed at the box office. The subject matter doesn't matter. Failure is inevitable unless you've managed to target your project (and budget it) to the niche audience that agrees with the film

There are examples every year.

Today I read this story about the Broadway Musical "The Great Immensity," which was clearly a government indoctrination effort produced by climate change supporters.

What must be considered if you're going to connect with a wide audience is to use a conflict of values that is UNIVERSALLY accepted by the wide audience. This is so simple to understand. Follow natural law, not man-made ideology. The audience isn't dumb. And in the case of "global warming" relabeled "climate change" (when it was discovered that the globe is not warming...)  somewhere around 30% of the public believe it's at some level true, and far less than that think it's a priority. That's not a universal value.  [I next expect a musical promoting Kale Cakes in school cafeteria's programs instead of Brownies, to fight obesity.]

The law within the moral premise framework is to match motivational values with NATURAL LAW consequences of actioning out those values. You cannot manipulate Natural Law and win. I don't care if you're a fundamentalist Christian who wants to wave the Bible in your audience's face, or a liberal environmentalist. There may be truth in both messages, but unless the audience agrees with you,  you're going to lose big, folks.

Anyhow, to prove my point, once again, here are some selected quotes form the reviews:

The curtain has come down on Climate Change 

The Musical and reviews of the taxpayer-funded play about global warming are downright icy.

By Perry Chiaramonte - 9/20/14 - Fox News 

The play, which is actually entitled "The Great Immensity," and was produced by Brooklyn-based theater company The Civilians, Inc. with a $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, ended its run early amid a storm of criticism from reviewers and lawmakers alike. It opened a year late, reached just five percent of its anticipated audience and likely fell short of its ambitious goal of informing a new generation about the perceived dangers of man-caused climate change. 

Plus, it apparently wasn't very good. 

“Despite fine performances, the musical mystery tour is an uneasy mix of fact and credulity-stretching fiction. It’s neither flora nor fauna,” New York Daily News reviewer Joe Dziemianowicz wrote in a review at the time. “[The] songs — whether about a doomed passenger pigeon or storm-wrecked towns — feel shoehorned in and not, pardon the pun, organic.” 

The play, which featured songs and video exploring Americans’ relationships to the environment, opened in New York in April with a three-week run before going on a national tour that was supposed to attract 75,000 patrons. But it stalled after a single production in Kansas City, falling short of the lofty goals outlined in a grant proposal. 

It was envisioned as a chance to create "an experience that would be part investigative journalism and part inventive theater,” help the public "better appreciate how science studies the Earth’s biosphere” and increase “public awareness, knowledge and engagement with science-related societal issues.” 

According to a plot description on the theater company’s website, "The Great Immensity" focuses on a woman named Phyllis as she tries to track down a friend who disappeared while filming an assignment for a nature show on a tropical island. During her search, she also uncovers a devious plot surrounding an international climate summit in Auckland, New Zealand. 

The description touts the play as “a thrilling and timely production” with “a highly theatrical look into one of the most vital questions of our time: How can we change ourselves and our society in time to solve the enormous environmental challenges that confront us?” 

..... 

"Even the best adventurers can wander off course, and the Civilians do so on a global scale in The Great Immensity,” read a review from Time Out New York. “The inventive troupe’s latest effort is all over the map… It’s not easy preaching green.”

First Entertain

There's an adage in Hollywood, and similar industries, that says: "FIRST ENTERTAIN."

Successful entertainment, to me, is defined as emotionally engaging audiences so that they're willing to buy a ticket, or dispose of some of their free time. 

For me, the term "entertain" has an emotional element and a training element. (I'm sure this is NOT the word's etymology, but humor me.) Successful entertainment always emotionally engages your audience, AND it passes onto them some true moral message usually hidden in the subtext.  (For the girl on the right that truth is "Never, ever believe your mom when she says, 'Trust me, you'll love it.'")

So, we have something that is emotional (E) and we have a training element (TRAIN). That gives us E-TRAIN. Also there is the idea that both the emotional and the training enter into the person's consciousness and become INGRAINED (which rhymes with ENTER-TAIN-ED -- like I said, humor me). The key word there is ENTER.

Successful entertainment, therefore, ENTERS into a person EMOTIONALLY and TRAINS them about something true. First ENTERTAIN as you EMOTIONALLY TRAIN.

Okay, Okay, so TRAIN and TAIN are not the same. Let me  s t r e t c h  it for ya. TAIN rhymes with STAIN, and good entertainment leaves behind a stain.... no, no, you potty head... a stain in your brain—a memory. (Geez! I can't take you anywhere.) Another way to understand this is that ENTER-TAIN is a lot like INNER-TRAIN. That is, something is "entertaining" because it has the ability to train our memories. The reverse is also true: if we want to train our memories there must be some emotional involvement, some entertainment. Memories do not "stick" without adrenalin burning some synapses together in our brain.  

The long of this short post is that successful communication has three components. It must ENTERTAIN, and for it to do that it must be MORALLY TRUE (at a psychological, spiritual, or subliminal level), and it must EMOTIONALLY ENGAGE (it must be be a visceral simulation of life).

That is what stories do better than a thrill ride at an amusement park, and what stories do almost as good as real life experiences (life's best teacher), but with out the physical danger.

(And you can believe the little girl above would feel a lot safer at the movies. Real life does have its drawbacks, especially when your mother is C R A Z Y!)