Peter Guber hopes the story never ends

Studio Professor Peter Guber was quoted extensively as an expert witness in a New York Times article about one of the School's core concerns: the future of storytelling.

The article describes an initiative of the famous MIT Media Lab, the brand new Center for Future Storytelling, "which will examine whether the old way of telling stories — particularly those delivered to the millions on screen, with a beginning, a middle and an end — is in serious trouble. ... "The idea, as we move forward with 21st-century storytelling, is to try to keep meaning alive," said David Kirkpatrick, a founder of the new venture."

Many Center participants seem convinced 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.
...
Mr. Guber, who [co-]teaches [with Dean Robert Rosen] a course at the University of California, Los Angeles, called "Navigating in a Narrative World," is singularly devoted to story. Almost 20 years ago Mr. Guber made a colossal hit of Warner Bros' "Batman" after joining others in laboring over the story for the better part of a decade.

But in the last few years, Mr. Guber said, big films with relatively small stories have been hurried into production to meet release dates. Meanwhile, hundreds of pictures with classic narratives have been eclipsed by other media ... or suppressed by louder, less story-driven brethren.

"How do you compete with 'Transformers'?" asked Mr. Guber.

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