Freakonomics & the Secret to Good Book Trailers

How do you adapt a nonfiction work like Freakonomics, which is essentially a book-length description of economic principles built around a series of illustrative set-pieces? Certainly, you’d want to interview Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, but the producers of the Freakonomics movie, which has been available on iTunes for a while now and is gradually making its way into theaters, also brought several directors into the mix to create four short films, each tackling a different section of the book. As I watched a preview screening a few weeks ago, I was reminded of a marketing principle I used to write about frequently at GalleyCat. “When is a book trailer not a book trailer?” I once asked. The answer: When it’s a human interest story.

(Note: I’m not using the film’s trailer as an example of this, but I wanted to have something for people who haven’t seen the film yet to look at, and you’ll catch glimpses of the things I discuss in the following paragraphs.)

The parts of the Freakonomics film that are most effective are the ones that ground Levitt and Dubner’s economic principles in compelling narratives: Alex Gibney (the director of Taxi to the Dark Side) probes the history of cheating in Japan’s top sumo wrestling leagues, while Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp) follows two Chicago-area ninth-graders at a school participating in a study which financially rewarded students for getting good grades—a study that was not in the original book. Each filmmaking team finds people intimately connected to the situation (or who at least can speak very powerfully about it), turns the camera on, and lets them tell their stories. The Ewing-Grady segment is particularly effective because the directors impose themselves on the unfolding narrative even more lightly than Gibney does; he’s rolling out a solid investigative journalism piece, but they’re more fly on the wall.

In the least effective segment, Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight) takes on the book’s controversial chapter about how the declining crime rate of the mid- and late 1990s might have been shaped by the national legalization of abortion through the Roe v. Wade decision. It’s pure abstraction, and Jarecki films it as such, using an all-animation format to present concepts rather than stories. As an intellectual puzzle, Jarecki’s segment is able to inspire some engagement, but it’s emotionally uncompelling—the lack of any identifiable human element even makes it difficult to recognize any genuine consequence to the theory he’s spinning out, which is pretty remarkable considering that it is a fairly consequential theory with serious real-world implications.

Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) also deals with a theory-heavy section of Freakonomics—the chapter on the professional fates of people with “black”-sounding names versus their “white”-sounding counterparts—but the efforts he makes to personalize the topic (including a lot of staged scenes with professional actors) increase his segment’s watchability. It’s still not as strong as the other two, but it’s miles ahead of the Jarecki segment, even though it’s probably the most facile of the four major segments intellectually.

And I shouldn’t leave out the interstitial segments directed by Seth Gordon, the ones which feature Dubner and Levitt in pure storytelling mode, illustrating big ideas through small anecdotes and parables. Those sections might be of particular interest to any nonfiction author looking to do a book trailer, in that they illustrate how, if you have the right story, you don’t need to do much more than sit in front of a camera and tell it. Granted, Gordon buttresses the stories with some effectively cute animation, but those cartoons still require the narrative backbone to succeed.

Fiction writers shouldn’t feel left out here: After all, “human interest stories” are (with rare exceptions which, other than Watership Down, aren’t especially coming to mind just now) pretty much what it’s all about, right? Or maybe the story you tell in your book trailer isn’t the story in the book, but the story of the book, if you catch my drift. The big point is: You can grab people’s attention more quickly, and more forcefully, by telling them a story than you can by simply telling them facts. The inconsistent application of that principle in the Freakonomics documentary is the film’s biggest flaw—but it’s a lot easier to be consistent when you’re the only storyteller, and you’re focused on just the one story.

4 October 2010 | theory |