They say that the path to wealth is through writing and I believe them.

It makes sense. If you can write put your thoughts on paper then the value of your ownership goes from something ethereal to something tangible.
They also say that being left-handed is an economic advantage. That makes less sense, but then I met Steve de Souza and I was convinced.

Steve is a left-handed screenwriter whose credits include Die Hard, Die Harder, 48 Hrs, Another 48 Hrs, Commando and The Running Man. He’s an eccentric character who takes notes with a pen that lights up when he writes. He goes a mile a minute and knows exactly what he wants to say. He scribed many of the classics that helped shape my lifelong emergency plans for How to Deal with Bad Guys. Did I mention that his movies have done a combined box office gross of over two billion dollars?

It turns out that Steve, who has an unbelievable passion to tell stories and has done so prolifically at the highest studio levels of film and TV, is focused on distribution on digital platforms because of the creative ownership that it allows. Like many writers, he’s seen great scripts dilute into unremarkable commercial snoozefests after an interminable process of focus-groups and rewrites, rinse and repeat.

No one sets out to make a bad movie. The truth is that nobody green lights a bad script, they green light bad projects. Making movies is a combustible process and there’s an endless permutation to what can go wrong in film production, marketing and distribution. Movies have been around in one form or another for 100 years and it’s still a tough business.

Which leads me to my point. The platform or the medium (I use the two terms interchangeably) of digital is a relatively new one for artists and part of the equation of the economics of entertainment convergence is how to express creativity efectlively on that platform.

The challenge for Steve, and anyone else looking to create for digital platforms, is to understand and execute compelling storytelling that touches an audience on multiple levels while conforming to the specific constraints of the medium.

That isn’t easy to do, especially for artists who have a legacy of success on traditional screens.

At SDG we often refer to the of the six word story an analogy for the challenge that digital creators face in dealing with general limitations of screen size and content duration.
Hemingway once bragged that he could write the greatest novel in only six words. He was right:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

In only six words the reader is taken on an emotional journey.
This is the challenge for digital content creators. Write the web equivalent of the six word novel. Take the Hemingway challenge.

Watch Steve de Souza in Dreams on Spec speak about how he wrote a scene from Die Hard