Every journalist in America is struggling right now over how to tell this story. It doesn't matter which form we choose, text, audio or visual, with data or only anecdote, everyone is trying to make sense of all this.
All stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, of course, and according to classic structure the second act -- the middle -- is twice as long as acts one and three.
So here we all are stuck in the middle of the second act of this story, with few clues as to the outcome.
Complicating this process is the reality that over the past quarter-century, most media companies have become multi-media operations. The New York Times, for example, used to be a newspaper. But today, a story will appear there and elsewhere in several forms, with an increasing emphasis on digital video. This development had to wait until bandwidth increased to be able to support video, and the miniature cameras built into mobile devices improved in quality.
During the protests of the 1960s, it was mainly only television crews or the occasional documentary team that filmed events. The 8 mm "Zapruder Film" that captured the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 was highly unusual. When Oliver Stone released his film, "JFK" including Zapruder footage in 1991, it so thoroughly confused the public that by the time I was teaching journalism at Stanford in 2002, a majority of my students believed that Kennedy's murder had been broadcast live on TV (it was not).
In 1982, "camcorders" started reaching the public.
In 1991, a man named George Holliday videotaped a group of LAPD officers beating Rodney King from his balcony, over a decade before the first cameras in cellphones became publicly available in 2002.
Now, virtually anybody can shoot a video anywhere, so the likelihood that an incident like the George Floyd killing will be recorded has increased exponentially since the King riots or the Kennedy shooting. It has almost reached the point that today if there is no video, there is no story.
***
Yesterday, out front, I saw a hummingbird visit a clump of wisteria in the heat of the day. I didn't shoot a photograph or a movie; the subject would have been too small to capture the magic.
But it did happen, you have me to testify to that. Of course, I may have been day-dreaming, we have to take that into account.
Before I published my first story in Rolling Stone in the '70s, I published photos in the magazine. That certainly amounts to a footnote in my career -- nobody will ever remember anything I did with a camera.
But sometime it is a writer's fate that he is rewarded for words when his passion is actually for images.
At CIR, my colleagues and I obtained declassified footage the Navy had shot of early nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific in the '50s a quarter-century after the fact.
Several of us collaborated on an investigation, which resulted in a segment on ABC's "20-20"; it then fell to me to write the magazine version. In order to do so, I watched that old footage over and over until I could accurately capture the visual narrative in words.
When Hollywood came calling in the '80s, I happily migrated from journalism and its vigorous fact-checking dictates to the relative freedom of fiction and feature films. This is where creative license to play with the facts comes into play. when the ordinary rules no longer necessarily apply.
One of the main things I love about film is the role actors play. Many may consider acting the art of faking something -- pretending you are somebody you aren't, for example.
I have a different view. When actors achieve their best work they may succeed in pretending they are someone else but they are not pretending the emotional state they are evoking in the process. My favorite moments are those that unleash feelings inside of me, the viewer.
"Do you feel that? That's emotion." -- Tiffany Maxwell (Silver Linings Playbook).
There is nothing fake about the emotion.
***
Academics assure us there are only seven types of stories:
- Overcoming the Monster.
- Rags to Riches.
- The Quest.
- Voyage and Return.
- Comedy.
- Tragedy.
- Rebirth.
Despite any personal preference to merge fact and fiction, we as a people have a deep stake in our ability to separate the two.
Some of us will fixate on the facts. What do the videos of our city streets document? Who did what when and how?
But that approach leaves out the why.
To grapple with that, maybe we need to venture beyond the facts to a less tangible place. Like how all of this makes us feel.
What do we see when we watch a white policeman suffocate a black man? What do we see when we see a protestor taunt the police to hit him?
What emotions come to the surface for us?
Do you feel that? That's emotion.
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