While most animated projects are given four or five years to mature, Frozen was on an accelerated schedule. The movie had been in full production for less than a year, but because another Disney movie had recently collapsed, executives had moved Frozen’s release date to November 2013, just a year and a half away. “We had to find answers fast,” said Peter Del Vecho, the film’s producer. “But they couldn’t feel clichéd or like a bunch of stories jammed together. The movie had to work emotionally. It was a pretty stressful time.”
This conundrum of how to spur innovation on a deadline—or, put another way, how to make the creative process more productive—isn’t unique to filmmaking, of course. Every day, students, executives, artists, policy makers, and millions of other people confront problems that require inventive answers delivered as quickly as possible. As the economy changes, and our capacity to achieve creative insights becomes more important than ever, the need for fast originality is even more urgent.
For many people, in fact, figuring out how to accelerate innovation is among their most important jobs. “We’re obsessed with the productivity of the creative process,” said Ed Catmull, president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and cofounder of Pixar. “We think it’s something that can be managed poorly or well, and if we get the creative process right, we find innovations faster. But if we don’t manage it right, good ideas are suffocated.”
Inside the story trust, the conversation about Frozen was winding down. “It seems to me like there’s a few different ideas competing inside this movie,” Lasseter told Buck, the director. “We’ve got Elsa’s story, we’ve got Anna’s story, and we’ve got Prince Hans and Olaf the snowman. Each of those stories has great elements. There’s a lot of really good material here, but you need to make it into one narrative that connects with the audience. You need to find the movie’s core.”
Lasseter rose from his seat. “You should take as long as you need to find the answers,” he said. “But it would be great if it happened soon.”
II.
In 1949, a choreographer named Jerome Robbins contacted his friends Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents with an audacious idea. They should collaborate on a new kind of musical, he told them, modeled on Romeo and Juliet but set in modern-day New York City. They could integrate classical ballet with opera and experimental theater, and maybe bring in contemporary jazz and modernist drama, as well. Their goal, Robbins said, should be to establish the avant-garde on Broadway.
Robbins was already famous for creating theater—as well as a life—that pushed boundaries. He was bisexual at a time when homosexuality was illegal. He had changed his name from Jerome Rabinowitz to Jerome Robbins to dodge the anti-Semitism he worried would doom his career. He had named friends as Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee, terrified that if he didn’t cooperate, his sexuality would be publicly revealed and he would be shunned. He was a bully and a perfectionist and so despised by dancers that they sometimes refused to speak to him off the stage. But few refused his invitations to perform. He was widely acknowledged—revered, actually—as one of the most creative artists of his time.
Robbins’s Romeo and Juliet idea was particularly bold because big Broadway musicals, in those days, tended to adhere to fairly predictable blueprints. Stories were built around a male and a female lead who pushed the plot along with dialogue that was spoken, not sung. There were choruses and dancers, as well as elaborate sets and a few duets about midway through each show. The elements of plot, song, and dance, however, weren’t intertwined as they were in, say, ballet, where the story and dancing are one, or opera, where dialogue is sung and music shapes the drama as much as any actor on the stage.
For this new show, Robbins wanted to try something different. “Why couldn’t we, in aspiration, try to bring our deepest talents together?” Robbins later said. “Why did Lenny have to write an opera, Arthur a play, me a ballet?” The three men wanted to create something that felt modern yet timeless. When Bernstein and Laurents saw a newspaper article about race riots, they proposed making their musical about two lovers—one Puerto Rican, the other white—whose families were affiliated with warring gangs. The name of the show, they decided, would be West Side Story.
Over the next few years the men traded scripts, scores, and choreography ideas. They mailed one another drafts during their long months apart. After half a decade of work, though, Robbins was impatient. This musical was important, he wrote to Bernstein and Laurents. It would break new ground. They needed to finish the script. To speed things up, he suggested, they should stop trying to do something new at every turn. Instead, they should stick with conventions they knew, from trial and error, had worked in other shows. But they should combine those conventions in novel ways.
For instance, they had been wrestling with the first meeting between Tony and Maria, the musical’s main characters. They should take a page from Shakespeare, Robbins suggested, and have the lovers see each other across a dance floor. But it should be made contemporary, a place where “a wild mambo is in progress with the kids doing all the violent improvisation of jitterbugging.”
For the battle in which Tony kills his enemy, Robbins said that the choreography ought to imitate the way battles are staged in motion pictures. “The fight scene must be provoked immediately,” Robbins wrote, “or else we’re boring the audience.” During a dramatic encounter between Tony and Maria, they needed something that echoed the classical marriage scene of Romeo and Juliet, but also incorporated the theatricality of opera and a bit of the sentimental romanticism that Broadway audiences loved.
The biggest challenge, however, was figuring out which theatrical conventions were truly powerful and which had become clichés. Laurents, for example, had written a script that was divided into the traditional three acts, but it’s “a serious mistake to let the audience out of our grip for two intermissions,” Robbins wrote. Motion pictures had proven that you can keep audiences in their seats if the action is always progressing. What’s more, Robbins wrote to Laurents, “I like best the sections in which you have gone on your own path, writing in your own style with your own characters and imagination. Least successful are those in which I sense the intimidation of Shakespeare standing behind you.” Similarly, roles that were too predictable had to be avoided at all costs. “You are way off the track with the whole character of Anita,” Robbins wrote to his colleagues. “She is the typical downbeat blues torch-bearing 2nd character,” he remarked. “Forget Anita.”
By 1957—eight years after they had first embarked on the project—the men were finally done. They had combined different kinds of theater to create something new: a musical where dance, song, and dialogue were integrated into a story of racism and injustice that was as contemporary as the newspapers sold outside the theater doors. All that was left was to find financial backers. Nearly every producer they approached turned them down. The show was too different from what audiences expected, the moneymen said. Finally, Robbins found financiers willing to support a staging in Washington, D.C.—far enough from Broadway, everyone hoped, that if the show bombed, the news might not spread to New York.