According to a New York Times story the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory is planning to study the future of storytelling.  The initiative is funded by David Kirkpatrick, who used to be president of the Paramount Pictures motion picture group and more recently started Plymouth Rock Studios, a future film production center in Massachusetts.  Plymouth Rock will house the new MIT lab and finance it to the tune $25 million over seven years.

Cool.  Scientific study of story… Or maybe not.  To quote my brother Jody “I’m not entirely comfortable with their initial assumptions.”  The starting point is the belief…

…that Hollywood’s ability to tell a meaningful story has been nibbled at by text messages, interrupted by cellphone calls and supplanted by everything from Twitter to Guitar Hero.

“I even saw a plasma screen above a urinal,” said Peter Guber, the longtime film producer and former chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment who contends that traditional narrative — the kind with unexpected twists and satisfying conclusions — has been drowned out by noise and visual clutter.

A common gripe is that gamelike, open-ended series like “Pirates of the Caribbean” or “Spider-Man” have eroded filmmakers’ ability to wrap up their movies in the third act. Another is that a preference for proven, outside stories like the Harry Potter books is killing Hollywood’s appetite for original storytelling.

They should talk to David Milch about endings!

Gruber, who teaches a course at UCLA called Navigating in a Narrative World actually blames the audience:

Ultimately, he blames the audience for the perceived breakdown in narrative quality: in the end, he argued, consumers get what they want. Bobby Farrelly, a prolific writer, and director with his brother Peter of comedies like “There’s Something About Mary” and “Shallow Hal,” concurred.

“If you go off the beaten path, say, give them something bittersweet, they’re going to tell you they’re disappointed,” Mr. Farrelly said. He spoke from his home in Massachusetts, where he is working on the script for a Three Stooges picture, and said he missed complex stories like that of “The Graduate.”

At the risk of further endangering the quality of narrative, let me say: LOL.

Luckily, there are those with another point of view on this:

At the Sundance Institute, as it happens, other deep thinkers tend to think that film storytelling is doing okay.

“Storytelling is flourishing in the world at a level I can’t even begin to understand,” said Ken Brecher, the institute’s executive director. Mr. Brecher spoke last week, as his colleagues continued sorting through 9,000 films — again, a record — that have been submitted for the coming Sundance Film Festival.

The idea of studying story is a good one.  Story is indeed changed by any new medium we use to tell our tales and is thus in constant flux.  And every step along the way someone screams bloody murder that we’ll all going to be permanently perverted by it.

Dime store novels, comics, television, video games have all been reviled somewhere along the line…  but usually by parents or preachers.  It’s odd to hear the cry raised by Hollywood.  But then again, maybe the worry isn’t so much about the health of story as it is about the well-being of a revenue model.

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