THE JETS saunter across the court, and as the music swells, they pirouette. They cry “yeah!” and begin a series of ronds de jambe en l’air. They own this asphalt. They are poor and ignored by society, but right now, they own this space.
A TEENAGER, the leader of THE SHARKS, appears. THE JETS stop moving. Other SHARKS appear, and they start snapping, and then whirl in a series of pirouettes of their own. The SHARKS declare their own ownership of the stage.
The two gangs skirmish, contesting territory and dominance, pantomiming threats and apologies, competing but never outright fighting until dozens of SHARKS and JETS are flying across the stage, almost but never touching as they taunt and challenge each other. Then a SHARK trips a JET. The JET pushes his attacker. A cymbal starts chiming and everyone is suddenly atop each other, kicking and punching until a police whistle freezes them and the gangs unite, pretending to be friends in front of OFFICER KRUPKE.
For nine minutes, no dialogue is spoken. Everything is communicated through dance.
The first time West Side Story was performed in 1957, the audience wasn’t certain what to make of it. The actors were dressed in everyday clothes but moved as if in a classical ballet. The dances were as formalized as Swan Lake, but described street fights, an attempted rape, and skirmishes with cops. The music echoed the symphonic tritones of Wagner but also the rhythms of Latin jazz. Throughout the musical, the actors switched between song and dialogue interchangeably.
“The ground rules by which West Side Story is played are laid out in the opening number,” the theater historian Larry Stempel later wrote. “Before an intelligible sentence has had a chance to be uttered, or a single phrase of music sung, dance has conveyed the essential dramatic information.”
When the curtain went down on opening night, there was silence. The audience had just seen a musical about rumbles and murder, songs describing bigotry and prejudice and dances in which hoodlums moved like ballerinas and actors sung slang words with the power of opera stars.
As everyone prepared to take their positions for the curtain call, “we ran to our spaces and faced the audience holding hands. The curtain went up and we looked at the audience, and they looked at us, and we looked at them, and I thought, ‘Oh, dear Lord, it’s a bomb!’ ” said Carol Lawrence, who played the original Maria. “And then, as if Jerry had choreographed it, they jumped to their feet. I’d never heard people stamping and yelling, and by that time, Lenny had worked his way backstage, and he came at the final curtain and walked to me, put his arms around me and we wept.”
West Side Story went on to become one of the most popular and influential musicals in history. It succeeded by mixing originality and convention to create something new. It took old ideas and put them in novel settings so gracefully that many people never realized they were watching the familiar become unique. Robbins forced his colleagues to become brokers, to put their own experiences onto the stage. “That was a real achievement,” Robbins later said.
III.
The space assigned to the Frozen team for their daily meetings was large, airy, and comfortable. The walls were covered with sketches of castles and ice caves, friendly-looking reindeer, a snow monster named “Marshmallow,” and dozens of concepts for trolls. Each morning at nine A.M., the director, Chris Buck, and his core team of writers and artists would assemble with their coffee cups and to-do lists. The songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez would videoconference in from their home in Brooklyn. Then everyone would start panicking about how little time was left.
Anxiety was particularly high the morning after the disastrous screening and meeting with the story trust. From the beginning, the Frozen team had known they couldn’t simply retell an old fairy tale. They wanted to make a movie that said something new. “It couldn’t just be that, at the end, a prince gives someone a kiss and that’s the definition of true love,” Buck told me. They wanted the film to say something bigger, about how girls don’t need to be saved by Prince Charming, about how sisters can save themselves. The Frozen team wanted to turn the standard princess formula on its head. But that’s why they were in such trouble now.
“It was a really big ambition,” said Jennifer Lee, who joined the Frozen team as a writer after working on another Disney film, Wreck-It Ralph. “And it was particularly hard because every movie needs tension, but if the tension in Frozen is between the sisters, how do you make them both likable? We tried a jealousy plotline, but it felt petty. We tried a revenge story, but Bobby kept saying we needed an optimistic heroine instead of feuds. The story trust was right: The movie needed to connect emotionally. But we didn’t know how to get there without falling into clichés.”
Everyone in the room was well aware they had only eighteen months to finish the movie. Peter Del Vecho, the producer, asked them all to close their eyes.
“We’ve tried a lot of different things,” he said. “It’s okay that we haven’t found the answers yet. Every movie goes through this, and every wrong step gets us closer to what works.
“Now, instead of focusing on all the things that aren’t working, I want you to think about what could be right. I want you to envision your biggest hopes. If we could do anything, what would you want to see on the screen?”
The group sat quietly for a few minutes. Then people opened their eyes and started describing what had excited them about this project in the first place. Some had been drawn to Frozen because it offered a chance to upend the way girls are portrayed in films. Others said they were inspired by the idea of a movie where two sisters come together.
“My sister and I fought a lot as kids,” Lee told the room. Her parents had divorced when Lee was young. She had eventually moved to Manhattan while her sister became a high school teacher in upstate New York. Then, when Lee was in her early twenties, her boyfriend drowned in a boating accident. Her sister had understood what she was going through at that moment, had been there at a time of need. “There’s this moment when you start to see your sibling as a person, instead of a reflection of yourself,” Lee told the room. “I think that’s what’s been bothering me the most about this script. If you have two sisters and one of them is the villain and one is a hero, it doesn’t feel real. That doesn’t happen in real life. Siblings don’t grow apart because one is good and one is bad. They grow apart because they’re both messes and then they come together when they realize they need each other. That’s what I want to show.”
Over the next month, the Frozen team focused on the relationship between Anna and Elsa, the movie’s sisters. In particular, the filmmakers drew on their own experiences to figure out how the siblings related. “We can always find the right story when we start asking ourselves what feels true,” Del Vecho told me. “The thing that holds us back is when we forget to use our lives, what’s inside our heads, as raw material. That’s why the Disney method is so powerful, because it pushes us to dig deeper and deeper until we put ourselves on the screen.”
Jerry Robbins pushed his collaborators in West Side Story to draw on their own experiences to become creative brokers. The Toyota Production System unlocked employees’ capacity to suggest innovations by giving them more control. The Disney system does something different. It forces people to use their own emotions to write dialogue for cartoon characters, to infuse real feelings into situations that, by definition, are unreal and fantastical. This method is worth studying because it suggests a way that anyone can become an idea broker: by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder. We all have a natural instinct to overlook our emotions as creative material. But a key part of learning how to broker insights from one setting to another, to separate the real from the clichéd, is paying more attention to how things make us feel. “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect exp
eriences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.” People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel.
“Most people are too narrow in how they think about creativity,” Ed Catmull, the president of Disney Animation, told me. “So we spend a huge amount of time pushing people to go deeper, to look further inside themselves, to find something that’s real and can be magical when it’s put into the mouth of a character on a screen. We all carry the creative process inside us; we just need to be pushed to use it sometimes.”
This lesson isn’t limited to movies or Broadway. The Post-it note, for instance, was invented by a chemical engineer who, frustrated by bookmarks falling out of his church hymnal, decided to use a new adhesive to make them stay put. Cellophane was developed by an exasperated chemist looking for a way to protect tablecloths from wine spills. Infant formula was created, in part, by an exhausted father who suspended vegetable nutrients in powder so he could feed his crying child in the middle of the night. Those inventors looked to their own lives as the raw materials for innovation. What’s notable is that, in each case, they were often in an emotional state. We’re more likely to recognize discoveries hidden in our own experiences when necessity pushes us, when panic or frustrations cause us to throw old ideas into new settings. Psychologists call this “creative desperation.” Not all creativity relies on panic, of course. But research by the cognitive psychologist Gary Klein indicates that roughly 20 percent of creative breakthroughs are preceded by an anxiety akin to the stress that accompanied Frozen’s development, or the pressures Robbins forced onto his West Side Story collaborators. Effective brokers aren’t cool and collected. They’re often worried and afraid.
A few months after the story trust meeting, the songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, anxious about all the songs they needed to write, when Kristen asked, “What would it feel like if you were Elsa?” As they walked past swingsets and joggers, Kristen and Bobby began discussing what they would do if they were cursed and despised for something they couldn’t control. “What if you tried to be good your entire life and it didn’t matter because people constantly judged you?” she asked.
Kristen knew this feeling. She had felt other parents’ looks when she let their daughters eat ice cream instead of healthy snacks. She’d felt glances when she and Bobby let their girls watch an iPad inside a restaurant because they wanted a moment of peace. Perhaps Kristen wasn’t cursed with some deadly power—but she knew what it felt like to be judged. It didn’t feel fair. It wasn’t her fault that she wanted a career. It wasn’t her fault that she wanted to be a good mom and be a good wife and a successful songwriter, and so, inevitably, that meant things like home-packed snacks and sparkling dinner conversation—not to mention thank-you notes and exercise and replying to emails—sometimes fell by the wayside. She didn’t want to apologize for not being perfect. She didn’t think she needed to. And she didn’t think Elsa should have to apologize for being flawed, either.
“Elsa has tried to do everything right, all her life,” Kristen said to Bobby. “Now she’s being punished for being herself and the only way out is for her to stop caring, to let it all go.”
As they walked, they began riffing, singing snippets of lyrics. What if they wrote a song that started with a fairy-tale opening, Bobby suggested, like the stories they read to their girls at night? Then Elsa could talk about the pressures of being a good girl, said Kristen. She jumped up on a picnic bench. “She could change into a woman,” she said. “That’s what growing up is, letting go of the things you shouldn’t have to care about.”
She began singing to an audience of trees and trash cans, trying out lyrics for Elsa to convey that she’s done being the good girl, that she doesn’t care what anyone thinks anymore. Bobby was recording her impromptu song on his iPhone.
Kristen spread her arms.
Let it go, let it go.
That perfect girl is gone.
“I think you just figured out the chorus,” said Bobby.
Back in their apartment, they recorded a rough draft of the song in their makeshift studio. In the background were the clinks of plates from the Greek restaurant downstairs. The next day, they emailed it to Buck, Lee, and the rest of the Frozen team. It was part power ballad and part classical aria, but infused with Kristen’s and Bobby’s frustrations and the emancipation they felt when they let go of people’s expectations.
When the Frozen team gathered at the Disney headquarters the next morning, they put “Let It Go” on the sound system. Chris Montan, Disney’s head of music, slammed his hand on the table.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s our song. That’s what this whole movie is about!”
“I have to go rewrite the beginning of the movie,” said Lee.
“I was so happy,” Lee told me later. “So relieved. We had struggled for so long, and then we heard ‘Let It Go’ and, finally, it felt like we had broken through. We could see the movie. We had been carrying the pieces in our heads, but we needed someone to show us ourselves in the characters, to make them familiar. ‘Let It Go’ made Elsa feel like one of us.”
IV.
Seven months later, the Frozen team had the first two-thirds of the film figured out. They knew how to make Anna and Elsa likable while driving them apart to create the tension the film needed. They knew how to portray the sisters as hopeful yet troubled. They had even transformed Olaf—the f’ing snowman—into a lovable sidekick. Everything was falling into place.
Except they had no idea how to end the film.
“It was this huge puzzle,” said Andrew Millstein, president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. “We tried everything. We knew we wanted Anna to sacrifice herself to save Elsa. We knew we wanted the movie’s true love to exist between the sisters. But we had to earn that ending. It had to feel real.”
When filmmakers get stuck at Disney, it’s referred to as spinning. “Spinning occurs because you’re in a rut and can’t see your project from different perspectives anymore,” said Ed Catmull. So much of the creative process relies on achieving distance, on not becoming overly attached to your creation. But the Frozen team had become so comfortable with their vision of the sisters, so relieved to have figured out the movie’s basics, so grateful that the creative desperation had lifted a bit, that they had lost their ability to see other paths.
This problem is familiar to anyone who has worked on a long-term creative project. As innovation brokers bring together different perspectives, a creative energy is often released that is heightened by a small amount of tension—such as the pressure that comes from deadlines, or clashes that result when people from different backgrounds meld ideas, or the stresses of collaborators’ pushing us to do more. And these “tensions can lead to greater creativity, because all those differences trigger divergent thinking, the ability to see something new when you are forced to look at an idea from someone else’s point of view,” said Francesca Gino, who studies the psychology of creativity at Harvard Business School. “But when that tension disappears, when you solve the big problem and everyone starts seeing things the same way, people also sometimes start thinking alike and forgetting all the options they have.”
The Frozen team had solved almost all their problems. No one wanted to lose all the progress they had already made. But they couldn’t figure out how to end the film. “You start spinning when your flexibility drops,” said Catmull. “You get so devoted to what you’ve already created. But you have to be willing to kill your darlings to go forward. If you can’t let go of what you’ve worked so hard to achieve, it ends up trapping you.”
So Disney’s executives made a change.
“We had to shake things up,” said Catmull. “We had to jolt everyone. So we made Jenn Lee a second director.”
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In one sense, this change should not have made a huge difference. Lee was already the film’s writer. Naming her as a second director, with equal authority to Chris Buck, didn’t alter who was participating in the daily conversations. It didn’t add any new voices to meetings. And Lee herself was the first to admit that she was as stuck as everyone else.
But, Disney executives hoped, disrupting the team’s dynamics just slightly might be enough to stop everyone from spinning in place.
In the 1950s, a biologist named Joseph Connell began traveling between his home in California and the rain forests and coral reefs of Australia in an effort to understand why some parts of the world housed such incredible biological diversity while other regions were so ecologically bland.
Connell had picked Australia for two reasons. First, he hated learning new languages. Second, Australia’s forests and seascapes offered perfect examples of biological diversity and homogeneity in close proximity. There were long stretches of the Australian coast where hundreds of different kinds of corals, fish, and sea vegetation lived in very close quarters. Less than a quarter mile away, in another portion of the sea that seemed essentially the same, that diversity would plummet and you might find only one or two kinds of coral and plants. Similarly, some pockets of Australia’s rain forests contained dozens of different types of trees, lichen, mushrooms, and vines flourishing side by side. But just a hundred yards away, that would dwindle to just one species of each. Connell wanted to understand why nature’s diversity—its capacity for creative origination—was distributed so unevenly.
His quest began in the Queensland rain forests: 12,600 square miles that contain everything from forest canopies to eucalyptus groves, as well as the Daintree tropical forest, where conifers and ferns grow right at the edge of the sea, and the Eungella National Park, where trees are so dense that, at ground level, it can be nearly lightless in the middle of the day. As Connell spent his days walking under green canopies and hacking through thick foliage, he found pockets of biodiversity that seemed to erupt out of nowhere. Then, just a few minutes away, that medley would dwindle until just one or two species remained. What explained this diversity and homogeneity?
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