Don't Be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson

Author:Randy Olson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press

“Reality Ends Here”

Now let's go back to the power of storytelling. The USC School of Cinematic Arts is made up of two main buildings with a walkway connecting them (or at least it was—USC just opened up a gargantuan new set of cinema buildings). Scratched into the cement of that walkway, from long ago, is the motto of the film school—“Reality Ends Here.”

I saw it the first day I arrived at the school, in January 1994, and had a light chuckle. It would take me a few months to begin to grasp how powerfully true the little slogan was.

I brought to film school what I thought was the creative equivalent of gold. I had fifteen years' worth of amazing stories from the world of marine biology: typhoons, shark attacks, sinking ships, modern-day pirates—a treasure trove of stories. I had spent a month in Antarctica, not just diving under twelve feet of ice into the clearest water on earth but also spending night after night in the dining hall listening to military helicopter pilots tell about crashing into icebergs, rescuing survivors of ice-crushed ships, and hovering over enormous pods of humpback whales. And I had spent a week in an undersea habitat, living at a sixty-foot depth and listening to the tales of the support divers, who had worked on oil rigs, battling sharks and watching drowned divers' skin turn to foam as they rapidly ascended from extreme depths. I had heard about divers dragged down by weights into black, watery graves.

My mind was overflowing with these stories, and I went to film school to turn them into amazing movies. But there was one catch I hadn't been warned about. It was scratched in that walkway—“Reality ends here,” or, in blunter terms, “We don't give a shit about what really happened.”

It didn't take long for me to end up in a writers' group, telling about the novel I had written that was set in Antarctica, cobbled out of all the real things I had seen and heard about there. And when I finished telling the story to the group, I looked up and saw expressions of disappointment.

“Could you have the scientists at the one research base have a bunch of automatic weapons that they smuggled down there, which they use to attack the scientists at the neighboring base?” someone asked.

I listened for a moment and thought about what a stupid suggestion it was. “Well, no,” I replied, “that would never happen.”

“Why not? Why couldn't they mutiny at their base and go on a rampage?” the one guy said. And then another guy said, “Yeah, and it could be like Lord of the Flies—they're all isolated and have lost their minds.”

Another guy chimed in, “And the genetic work they're doing has suddenly given them superpowers.” On and on, as I sat there thinking, “My stories aren't good enough. Reality loses to fantasy when it comes to telling stories.” And that's the bottom line. The harsh truth of it. Yes, the supposed reality of reality television shows is hugely entertaining, but those things are concocted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.