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Life Arts    H4'ed 3/10/13

"Oz The Great and Powerful" A movie with a bottom up, Occupy Hero Message

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There's a  great message in the new, number one box office OZ prequel movie, "Oz: The Great and Powerful,"  out this weekend, with over $150 million in ticket sales worldwide.

Oz the Great and Powerful
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Oz the Great and Powerful by YouTube


Even without the great message, this is a movie that you'll probably really like if you liked the original Wizard of Oz movie. 
What's really fun for me is this movie demonstrates the answer to a question I raised after viewing the Avengers movie in this article: An Occupy Wall Street Eyed Review of the Avengers
I wrote in that review,
"... having been through the past year's Occupy Wall Street experience gave me new eyes.

And what those eyes viewed brought me to an epiphany.  Superheroes serve the 1%. They serve the top down powers that are waging a massive war with the 99%-- we on the bottom."

A bit further into the Avengers review, I wrote,

" the Avengers movie and superheroes They also engage the fantasy that one person, or a small few, can save the world. That can have the same kind of top-down fantasy theme to it. The Avengers movie did. I''ve come to believe that top down thinking is part of the problem that the Occupy Wall Street movement faces. To change the system it is necessary to change the way we think about saving the system and fighting our enemies. How many  scores of millions of kids have grown up having read Marvel and DC comics, about Spiderman, the Avengers, the Hulk, Superman, Green Lantern, the Justice League of America-- where people with super powers save the world? 

This way of thinking takes the responsibility out of the hands of the people, takes the perception of possibility out of the reach of the masses."

That led me to a conclusion and some observations:

" But today, we need big stories that show how "the people"-- how vast groups of millions rise up to face the challenges to humanity. Occupy and the Arab Spring have shown that this is not fiction. it is reality.

... We need big, epic, blockbuster movies that portray bottom up leaders who, rather than defeating the bad guys by being super-heroes, do it by inspiring the crowd to rise and join together.

... If movie makers produce movies like this, they will be hugely profitable. And they just might help get enough people thinking that THEY can be bottom up, horizontal, or Occupy superheroes of a different kind and save the world.

Writing that article inspired me to contact the man who actually wrote the book on how writers and screenwriters can weave the hero's journey into books and movies-- Chris Vogler, author of The Writer's Journey-- a brilliant, best-selling book for writers. I did an interview with him about this topic. Here's the podcast: 

Chris Vogler; Can There Be Blockbuster Movies and Stories Using an Occupy/Bottom Up/Horizontal "Collective" Hero?


by chris Vogler and Michael Weise publishing


Here's an excerpt from my radio interview with Chris Vogler,   Chris Vogler; Can There Be Blockbuster Movies and Stories Using an Occupy/Bottom Up/Horizontal "Collective" Hero?

Rob: Well, let's try. You know, what I kind of proposed as an idea, was that it would be nice to see movies where the hero was a whole group of people, where one person who was kind of bottom up hero, who basically did the job of waking everybody up or bringing them alive. Does that--is that--are there examples of that even--are there movies that have had--where that's happened? Are there myths like that? Or is this breaking new ground?

Chris:  Well, it's in a way its revolutionary, because as I say, so much of our assumption about movies--the American movie model, usually is about one person who can make a difference, but this is not universal as a cultural constant everywhere.  The idea, the very idea of what a hero is, will shift from culture to culture and I've found in some places around the world, they don't think in those terms of one person making a difference. It's a community working together or a family working together. And the community or some sub-group within that becomes the focus and the individual people have their roles to play.  They do each have specific talents or tendencies or problems they're trying to work out. But the interest in the story is from this more collective point of view and I guess we have some stories like that.

   I mean, you think about the Three Musketeers, it's really four Musketeers and I think this was the author's concept, is that if you put all four of those guys together with their very different qualities you get a complete human being. All the possibilities are expressed. So, we have some stories like that, but it's a little more common maybe in some other parts of the world. 

I don't want to turn this review into a spoiler, which I don't think I've done so far. The movie is delicious and the fact that the story illustrates a bottom-up theme for the hero is simply wonderful, if you have cared about Occupy or if you're an activist. 
To me, the success of this movie offers a way for writers to create more bottom-up heroic stories that empower the Occupy Wall Street vision. Build upon classic stories, archetypal stories and themes, like this one built on the L. Frank Baum Oz series. It's that simple. Using that approach will make the stories attractive to publishers and movie studios. Even better, taking classic, potentially top-down old stories and re-writing them, or their sequels or prequels as bottom up will change the way people think. 
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Rob Kall Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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