Interesting 7-part interview between a young entrepreneur Sramrana Mitra and screenwriting guru Robert McKee. The questions have a business slant to them and yet McKee always pulls through them the commerce side of things and back to his central focus: Story.

Here is an excerpt from Part 1:

SM: Box offices have seen a surge in movie tickets sales as it looks as though people are going to the movies more during the recession. At the same time, there is a story crisis in Hollywood films. We see a lot of the same stories repeatedly. Why is storytelling facing a crisis?

RM: I agree with you. From the Hollywood point of view there is no story problem. It is not in crisis. They are making a lot of money and they are happy to do that. As a business, Hollywood is very pleased with their storytelling, and it is successful for them.

We think that storytelling is in crisis because we do not like the movies Hollywood is producing. To be clear, Hollywood by and large knows how to tell stories. The problem is not a crisis in storytelling. I have been teaching for 25 years, and they have a 100-year tradition behind them. Hollywood knows how to tell a story. The problem is not a crisis of form. It is a crisis of content.

We do not approve of the content of Hollywood films. Hollywood films are not intended for us. They are intended for young people. They are by and large action films, low-brow comedies, or the occasional romantic comedy. We are not their audience. People of a certain age and of a certain educational background are not Hollywood’s audience.

I have argued for years that the problem in Hollywood is a problem of content. These films are made by people who have nothing to say. They are made to be experienced by people who do not want to discover or learn anything in human nature or human relationships of any substantive kind. Hollywood is happy. We may not approve of their content, but they are doing fine as a business.

“The problem is not a crisis of form. It is a crisis of content.” And even that is a relative point. 2009 is on target to set a record for B.O. revenues (albeit affected by increased ticket prices). The studios wouldn’t admit to there being any problem with the content of their movies. Look at Transformers II — or perhaps don’t — which has generated $832M in box revenues worldwide, an astonishing number for a movie with astonishingly little in the way of story, a point that McKee makes in the interview. Mature audiences wouldn’t find Transformers entertaining, but young audiences?

On the other hand, you can take films that are meant for young people who do not have the same standards. They will enjoy a film simply for its special effects. You can market to young audiences with more success by showing amazing CGIs despite the banality of the storytelling. One of the most successful films of the summer was “Transformers”, which could not be more banal in terms of storytelling. On the other hand, an equally successful film was “Up” from Pixar, which was very rich in storytelling. The same audience, more or less, goes to both of those films. They are just as likely to watch “Transformers” as they are “Up” because the storytelling is not the great factor, the effects are.

McKee’s point is Hwood can make a movie like Up, which has a story, and Transformers which has one in the most “banal” sense of the word, and audiences will go see both for different reasons: Mature audiences driven by story, young audiences driven by special effects.

So where do Hollywood’s storytellers go? In Part 2 of the interview series tomorrow, McKee discusses the new golden age of television.