8 Things Movies Can Teach You About Human Nature
I don’t often get quoted in the business world, so I thought I’d share this piece by former student Eric Barker: http://www.businessinsider.com/8-things-movies-can-teach-you-about-human-nature-2013-10
Eric is a produced screenwriter, graduate of the Producers Program, and now works for a major video game company. He has a 25,000-subscriber blog that often has fascinating pieces at http://www.bakadesuyo.com. The piece in Business Insider was drawn from a longer interview he posted at http://www.bakadesuyo.com/howard-extended/.
How to Predict Creative Success
I’ve received many emails from former students on the New York Times front page article dealing with the claims of The Worldwide Motion Picture Group that they can use statistics to predict the success of a film while it’s still in the development process. Read more 
The Most Important word in storytelling
Lifehacker picked up this interview with me in which I identify the most important word in storytelling:
http://m.lifehacker.com/5988636/improve-your-storytelling-with-the-word-but
Creativity and Selling Your Ideas
One of the few online blogs I subscribe to is “Brain Pickings Weekly” by Maria Popova. (Full disclosure: she listed The Power of Film in her piece, “(Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Culture in 10 Books” in 2011, so I was first attracted to her site by self-interest, but I’ve stayed a subscriber because she is always interesting.)
Today, her free newsletter discusses a new book by Daniel Pink in the article, “Ambiverts, Problem-Finders, and the Surprising Secrets of Selling Your Ideas.” There are several good ideas there for creative people.
The piece is at http://www.brainpickings.org/. It’s the third article on today’s page.
Great Characters
Character is most deeply revealed in moments of decision that produce change.
I think this is a principle of life, too.
Change can occur when the character makes a decision to do something different than what they’ve been doing before (like seizing control of their destiny, for example). Or the change can take place in the audience, when they recognize something they hadn’t known about the character, so that they change their attitude towards the character or their conception of them. Aristotle called this “Anagnorisis,” Notice that the change in the character can take place simultaneously with the audience. There are significant examples of this in Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and, Apocalypse Now, to name just a few. Read more
