Interview – UCLA Film School professor Howard Suber explains how you can be a better storyteller

Interview – UCLA Film School professor Howard Suber explains how you can be a better storyteller

by eric barker

Howard Suber is one of my mentors. He founded the graduate program I was in at UCLA and has taught literally thousands of students about the power of film and narrative structure.

From his bio at UCLA:

During his 40 years on the UCLA faculty, Howard Suber helped establish and also chaired the UCLA Film Archive, the Critical Studies and Ph.D. Programs, and the UCLA Producers Program. He is a former Associate Dean, recipient of UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and has been a consultant and expert witness to all the major film studios on copyright and creative control issues. He continues to teach Film Structure and Strategic Thinking.

He is the author of The Power of Film and Letters to Young Filmmakers: Creativity and Getting Your Films Made.

I spoke to him about how to be a better storyteller and how we can use narrative to improve our lives.

The full interview was over two hours long, so for brevity’s sake I’m only going to post heavily edited highlights here.

What Do All Great Stories Have In Common?

Howard:

The word “but.” Which is to say inexperienced or poor storytellers structure their material with the words “and” or “then.” So “They did this, and then they did that, and then they did this, and then they did that,” which produces an episodic structure that doesn’t build on anything, and there’s no relationship between what came before and what came after. Read more of this post

Hangzhou eatery chain Grandma’s thrives on making customers wait at its chain of 60 outlets across China; One customer claimed online he had queued for three days before finally securing a seat in his local Grandma’s

Hangzhou eatery chain Grandma’s thrives on making customers wait

• Staff Reporter
• 2013-03-04

Grandma’s, a chain of eateries founded in Hangzhou in 1998 as a single noodle house, now has 60 outlets across China often crammed with diners or those waiting in long queues for a table.

One customer claimed online he had queued for three days before finally securing a seat in his local Grandma’s, reported the Beijing magazine, China Entrepreneur.

However, for most the wait is well worth it as the restaurant chain’s fare is usually priced at about a third of what it costs for similar food at other restaurants, the magazine said.

Whether in Hangzhou, Shanghai or Beijing, the average bill per customer at a Grandma’s restaurant comes to about 60 yuan (US$9.50), compared with around 80 yuan (US$12.70) at similar restaurants.

Although eateries across the country have been hurt by increasing costs and sliding profits since 2010, Grandma’s has remained strong. It opened a dozen new outlets in 2012 alone, and is expected to open more in 2013.

Founder Wu Guoping told the China Entrepreneur the key to his success lay in his unending drive to look for ways to improve the management of his business. Read more of this post

We Are What We Quote

MARCH 2, 2013, 12:59 PM

We Are What We Quote

By GEOFFREY O’BRIEN

Quotes are the mental furniture of my life. From certain angles my inner landscape resembles a gallery hung with half-recalled citations, the rags and tag-ends of a lifetime of reading and listening. They can be anything at all, the exquisitely chiseled perceptions of poets and philosophers or the blurts of unscheduled truth-telling by public figures caught in the spotlight (the former Jersey City mayor Frank Hague’s “I am the law” or Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook”); the punch lines of 1930s comedians or the curtain lines of Jacobean dramatists; or words of wisdom or anguish or ridiculous humor, or simply, for instance, M.F.K. Fisher’s recollection of “the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936, in the bar of the Lausanne Palace.” They are the dangling threads that memory can latch onto when everything else goes blank.

What is the use of quotations? They have of, course, their practical applications for after-dinner speakers or for editorialists looking to buttress their arguments. They also make marvelous filler for otherwise uninspired conversations. But the gathering of such fragments responds to a much deeper compulsion. It resonates with the timeless desire to seize on the minimal remnant — the tiniest identifiable gesture — out of which the world could, in a pinch, be reconstructed. Libraries may go under, cultures may go under, but single memorizable bits of rhyme and discourse persist over centuries. Shattered wholes reach us in small disconnected pieces, like the lines of the poet Sappho preserved in ancient treatises. To collect those pieces, to extrapolate lost worlds from them, to create a larger map of the human universe by laying many such pieces side by side: this can become a fever, and one that has afflicted writers of all eras.

Anyone, of course, might develop a passion for quotes, but for a writer it’s a particularly intimate connection. A good quotation can serve as a model for one’s own work, a perpetual challenge with the neatness and self-sufficiency of its structure laid bare in the mind. How does it work? How might a quotation be done differently, with the materials and urgencies of a different moment? Perhaps writers should begin, in fact, by inwardly uttering again what has already been uttered, to get the feel of it and to savor its full power.

Quotes are the actual fabric with which the mind weaves: internalizing them, but also turning them inside out, quarreling with them, adding to them, wandering through their architecture as if a single sentence were an expansible labyrinthine space. Read more of this post

Spoiled brats spring from pampering parents

Spoiled brats spring from pampering parents

Created: 2013-3-4

Author:Ni Tao

FOR renowned army singer Li Shuangjiang, the music is over, the curtain brought down by his ne’er-do-well son Li Tianyi. The junior Li has been placed under detention in Beijing for allegedly taking part in the gang-rape of an underage girl in a hotel room, together with four friends. It’s not the first time Li fils has dishonored his father, now 74 and arguably one of China’s best altos.  In 2011, the younger Li was given a one-year term in a juvenile rehabilitation facility for violently beating a man with whom he nearly had a car crash. He was released in September. After only six months, the bad boy struck again, this time bringing greater shame to his father and raising deeper questions about his parenting. The younger Li’s aggression can only be bred by his parents’ indulgence, many assert. This assertion appears plausible.  After the gang-rape case went public, Meng Ge, the boy’s mother and also a singer, appealed to the public to show some tolerance for his son, who is still a minor aged 17. Read more of this post

Are High-Priced Managers Worth It? Some stock pickers get paid a lot more than others. Here’s how to decide if they are right for you

March 1, 2013, 10:47 a.m. ET

FUNDAMENTALS OF INVESTING

Are High-Priced Managers Worth It?

Some stock pickers get paid a lot more than others. Here’s how to decide if they are right for you.

By CORRIE DRIEBUSCH

Investors know they have to pay higher fees for actively managed mutual funds than for index funds.

But those portfolio-management fees vary greatly from fund to fund, and investors often wonder if they will get enough bang from a costlier fund to justify the bigger buck.

Consider, for instance, the 100 largest actively run U.S.-stock mutual funds. The average portfolio-management fee—which is typically the largest component of a fund’s overall expense ratio—is 0.58% of assets a year, according to Morningstar Inc. MORN +0.28% But five of the funds charge an even 1%: Yacktman Focused, Fairholme, Sequoia, Baron Growth andJPMorgan U.S. Large Cap Core Plus .

Is a higher-paid manager worth it? Financial advisers and fund analysts consider things such as a fund’s track record, management style and total costs when making the decision. Read more of this post

In teachers they trust: Every Finnish school is a good school, because every teacher is highly-trained and qualified. In a two-part special report, we look at the secrets of Finland’s education model.

In teachers they trust

Every Finnish school is a good school, because every teacher is highly-trained and qualified. In a two-part special report, we look at the secrets of Finland’s education model.

Asked how he assesses his teachers, Mr Matti Koivusalo shrugs matter-of-factly that he has “no means” to do so. “There is no evaluation whatsoever for teachers. Everything is based on trust,” says the Principal of Haaga Comprehensive School in Helsinki.

Asked how he assesses his teachers, Mr Matti Koivusalo shrugs matter-of-factly that he has “no means” to do so. “There is no evaluation whatsoever for teachers. Everything is based on trust,” says the Principal of Haaga Comprehensive School in Helsinki.

Indeed, the “open” school culture means any feedback quickly reaches his ears, says Mr Koivusalo, who looks after 50 teachers and 600 pupils in grades one through nine (the equivalent of Primary 1 to Secondary 3 in Singapore).

It is easy to see how: Along the school’s hallway, pupils look up from their mobile phones and greet him as he walks past; some engage him in friendly banter. At the school cafeteria where free lunches are served daily — an established practice at all Finnish schools — teachers join him for lunch and chat about how their day has gone.

Said Mr Koivusalo: “If something bad happens, I’ll hear about it in five minutes … The atmosphere is such that (students and teachers) can come and talk about it freely without being afraid.”

Even so, sackings are rare in Finnish schools, say educators. Mr Vesa Valkila, one of the principals at Turku University teacher training school, tried to explain: “Finnish teachers have a lot of freedom and are trusted … that really motivates a lot of them to do their best.” Read more of this post

Frogs Leap from Indonesian Swamps to Tabletops in France; “God will protect us and be fair to us, and make sure there are always frogs”

Frogs Leap from Indonesian Swamps to Tabletops in France
March 03, 2013

Bogor, West Java. The Indonesian frog vendor closes her eyes, asks Allah for his blessing, and with one swift strike of a cleaver, beheads the trembling creature.

Though diners in white table-clothed French brasseries may not know it, their frogs legs most likely come from the murky swamps of tropical Indonesia, caught by hunters in the dead of the night to be slaughtered and sold at local markets.

As mechanically as a factory worker, Sri Mulyani rips off the frog’s skin, pulls out its innards with her bare hands and flings the amphibian onto a mountain of others that have suffered the same fate.

“If I feel disgusted and sick of frogs, I just think about the money,” the smiling 41-year-old told AFP at an early-morning market in Bogor, on the outskirts of the capital Jakarta.

Mulyani and her frog-hunter husband, Suwanto, 48, make up to Rp 500,000 ($52) a day – well above the local minimum wage of around $200 a month – chasing and selling frogs to restaurants or middlemen for export. Read more of this post