Ep. 211 - Jeff Gomez: Why Fans May Save Hollywood

0:01 storiesfromreallife is a production of media well done llc welcome back to stories from real life with melvin e. edwards today's guest is jeff gomez president and ceo of starlight runner entertainment now you may not know his name the way you know halo avatar pirates of the caribbean or spider-man but that is exactly what makes this conversation so fascinating For 25 years, Jeff has been one of the people studios call when a story becomes too big for one movie, one game, one comic or one platform. His work is about helping creators build with mythology structure history rules and emotional meaning this is stories from real life today's story is jeff gomez's why fans may save hollywood you are listening to stories from real life a podcast by engaging storytellers for engaged story listeners here's your host author and journalist melvin e edwards hello again and welcome to another episode of stories from real life i'm your host melvin e edwards thank you for joining us for the podcast where real stories are so much more interesting than fiction even if the real stories are about fiction today's guest is jeff gomez president and ceo

1:34 of starlight runner entertainment you may not know the name the way you know halo avatar pirates from caribbean or spider-man but if you know those titles you've been exposed to jeff's work we'll also talk about his new crime thriller deep down his forthcoming book the ten commandments of corporate narrative and his ongoing work exploring artificial intelligence as a new storytelling medium jeff gomez welcome to stories from real life so good to be here melvin awesome good to have you so what does it feel like to be one of the people behind the mythology of those huge franchises but not necessarily have people know your name or who you are in a way it reminds me of when i was a kid and used to do the homework for you know the jocks in high school did you really do that once in a while i needed protection i needed protection no look it's a privilege to be able to to work with stories that are going to be enjoyed by millions and millions of people especially the specific kind of work that i do which is to really go deep into these worlds these universes and find out what makes them distinct and and what kind of of wisdom how how exactly they are offering something that lifts the audience up and makes them excited and builds a zest for life.

3:08 To make sure that that information, that that code is in the property, especially as it spreads out across all these different media, which happens a lot these days, is something that I truly enjoy doing. Okay, that's awesome. So I'm curious what your parents and teachers thought about your creativity when you were a kid. well i always was a little bit of the odd one right i grew up in the uh in the 60s and 70s as a little kid and and back then you know to have highly specified interests that weren't you know things like sports or standard academics was a little bit unusual right so you know the best i got are kind of benign nods and oh you're a good writer do more once in a while i'd have a teacher that truly recognized something was going on and and and really encouraged me and and that made all the difference in the world so what do you think those teachers would say now or would think now i've stayed in touch with them melvin i uh i owe a debt a great debt to them uh i'm going to see one of them shelley uh this weekend and and uh because i do every year i go upstate to new york and and thank her because she truly was was deeply influential in in in getting me to write and understand literature and and writing move my interests beyond dinosaurs

4:40 and giant monsters so i know what they think they're proud you know and thrilled and happy that's great so about your work when you first look at a story universe what are you really looking for even the biggest universes star wars marvel harry potter they uh they were originated by one or a very few individuals so the first thing i think about melvin is what was this person thinking what what what what did they have to say that moved them to create something that would transcend time and earn a lot of money you know what um what happened to them as kids what did they have to surmount in order to have the the talent but also the wisdom to create such a fabulous work once i understand that i generally understand the story world and and i make sure to defend and protect that central artistic integrity to that world even as it becomes a comic book or a video game or a novel or things other than movies and tv shows so is every Every narrator or every creator who you work with, once you get to know their own origin story, is it always consistent that you can figure out their ideas

6:13 for their blooming world building? 100%. Never fails. never fails it that is if the if it's a truly transcendent work and by transcendent i mean that everyone in the world can look at it and get it understand it and even love it there's a power to storytelling that transcends cultures there's a power to storytelling that makes people want to hear the story over and over and over again or variations on that narrative and that is rooted in an artistic vision okay that's really powerful so when a studio or game company calls you what problem are they usually trying to solve well quite often these companies have tigers by the tail you know they don't quite understand why this property has become so powerful and so compelling to so many people and what they do quite often is that they rely on new artists new storytellers to come in and take the intellectual property and give us their version of the story sometimes that's successful a lot of times it's not why because their version is too far it's drifted too far away from the original vision

7:46 the original intent the original meaning and and audiences can tolerate that a little bit but eventually it starts to float away so my job is to be a kind of architect to make sure that the structure is sound and to be able to give the core blueprints to the various um artists and storytellers and licensees um because licensing is a very big business right so they need to to understand the blueprints to to create things that are true to the essence of of that original story world okay and as i mentioned at the top you worked across massive worlds like halo avatar pirates of the caribbean and spider-man How important are the rules, timelines and the internal logic to make the fictional world feel real to those who are consuming the product?

8:43 well like i said before the most important thing is the the essence of of the the artistic vision the central messaging the themes the archetypes the the aspect of the world that fulfills deep inner wishes inner desires we call them aspirational drivers uh so we make sure to get that done first then yes there is an integrity to these worlds right you don't want people running around in the world of pirates of the caribbean with laser guns it's not going to work so so we decide based on everything that that we're able to absorb we we it's not even a decision we are discerning we're finding out what those fantastical structures are that hold the world together and those are rules you know a lot of uh us fanboys call it canon or canonicity you know what what is officially a part of this world how does it work in in the world of pirates of the caribbean there are gods but they tend to be nautical gods we're not going to see just any old god running around the god has to have some relationship to the sea and that's something that we help Disney to kind of hold to for Halo We want to make sure that Master Chief holds a certain integrity to himself

10:14 and conducts himself in very specific ways so that we, as an audience, maintain respect for him even though he has to do some pretty tough things and make some harsh decisions. Wow. All right. I'm going to make an assumption before I ask my question. Sure. Hopefully my assumption is correct. when your name is included in the credits is it at the front end of the movie or in ending credits quite often it's not included at all okay so my assumption was incorrect well at first there wasn't even a name for what it is that i did and the the thing that that i came to realize was that people who are able to interact with many divisions of a company which it was my responsibility and people who are maintaining the integrity of a brand whether that's coca-cola or you know um halo or teenage mutant ninja turtles that's a producer and and so i joined the producers guild of america and together we created a credit for what it is that i do transmedia producer and and and that's the credit that i earn sometimes i'm working directly with studio executives and so that means that i don't show in the credits because i'm not assigned by the producers and directors of

11:45 the movie i'm assigned by the studio heads and i'm working for them to make sure that there's this integrity and that sometimes leaves me off the credits in movies okay but more recently i've shown up here and there nice So pretty soon it'll be Pirates of the Caribbean featuring the works of Jeff Gomez. well pretty soon i actually teamed with ashley ekstein she's she plays ahsoka tano in in the star wars animated series she's wonderful and together we created a new intellectual property that we pitched to disney and disney accepted it so that's uh you know that's in production right now and that will have the names right up front nice very very exciting i think they'll announce it formally later this year Will that be the biggest day of your life?

12:39 One of them, absolutely very excited so something like this when you enter an existing franchise how do you respect what the owners want and expanding it while keeping in mind what the fans already love about it Melvin those are good questions maybe you're a little nerdier than uh then we thought you know that is not an easy job there are many cooks in that kitchen and and many people to please including me as a fan because because quite usually i am a fan of what it is that i'm working on right so uh so the trick is this number one be right so so there is a a kind of science a technique to being able to deconstruct story and understand the fundamental components the same way an auto mechanic can take apart an engine and and understand all the different pieces of it you know a lot of people think that's magic but really it's it's it's a methodology it's a technique and we have a good one at starlight runner so so we demonstrate that but at the same time we're interviewing everyone every major stakeholder is going to sit down with us and talk to us about their interpretation of of the material and their desires for the material and their job on the material when when you do that it's actually kind of not that different from talking the jock into making sure

14:14 that you're going to be safe on the playground you know it's understanding their needs and listening to them as a kind of friend and and then asking of them to help to maintain the integrity of this thing this intellectual property which melvin is greater than all of us these things that i've worked on will last well beyond our lifetimes you know we serve them and they hold wisdom they hold myth and and and they need to move on the way ancient myths have lasted all these centuries do you see so once once everyone understands that we work in tandem and usually it turns out pretty nice.

14:59 Okay. So you've argued that fan communities may be the key to saving legacy media. What do you mean by that? sure well legacy media you know is is is media to me that that basically was born from the year 2000 and earlier so legacy media is is everything from photo photography to television radio feature films and and novels things like that and and things are moving so quickly now melvin that that that some of those media are challenged right not too many people reading newspapers and and and good old am fm radio not too much of that left either so so what is going to last what's going to transcend well uh it is the thing that's going to be able to continue delivering what it is that we love and delivering it well so we need to listen to fans and and not just algorithmically which you know some of these streamers that's what they're they're doing we need to listen to what it is that they desire what it is that they are experiencing right now which is kind of rough melvin in my lifetime i haven't seen what's going on today too often you know there's a lot of stress and anxiety what's going to resonate with these young people what's going to give them what they need

16:35 to to calm themselves and gain strength so that they can affect some change you know and improve our situation those stories are if they are distributed through legacy media are going to be what maintains legacy media okay so let's shift over to your crime thriller deep down so tell us about the world that that story takes place in melvin as a kid i often didn't feel like i belonged where i was and and so i was i was on the move a lot and and back then you know in the 1970s there weren't there wasn't that much parental supervision so where am i going to go now that i've moved to flushing queens from the lower east side where where am i going to go where a couple of dollars can get me a hot dog and four monster movies in a row well i'm gonna have to get on that seven train and go to times square right and and traveling throughout the new york city subway system the mta the metropolitan transit authority was always just so fascinating to me admittedly i have a little of that ocd thing going on and and and the information that was zooming past me actually was kind of soothing in a strange way and also of course peering into

18:05 the darkness what's down there who's down there you know what's happening it seems to me and it turns out i was right there are people down there people who live there you know and i'm not talking about subway workers how do they live how do they support one another how do they maintain themselves what do they do when they're persecuted that's the essence of what's going on in this deep down comic book series i invented that world with some partners, Dana Kay and Mark, and we hired some wonderful writers who are very experienced in comic book and graphic novel writing, Steele Philippeck and Fabian Mesieza.

18:52 Fabian has written many, many comic books and sold tens of millions of them, and that's Deep Down. That's a series that's i'm going to preview at san diego comic-con in july and and then run as a a series starting in the fall okay so earlier you talked about a creator's origin story being the foundation of whatever worlds they're able to create later in life so having a gritty crime thriller even though you were soothed by the passage passing scenes and sounds of the subway was there any kind of a fear of crime under there that might impact you melvin in my life you know crime was a fact of life you know violence in the streets the tremendous economic disparity that was experienced by myself and and the people around me i grew up in the projects you know we we were in poverty as a as a puerto rican in in new york that that wasn't a particularly positive thing to be you know um and i ran into racism i ran into fists i ran into anger and resentment and on top of all that i was a little bit weird to begin with i looked funny and and talked about things that people don't usually talk about and and so you know i got the occasional elbow to the head and

20:22 a knee to the groin and so forth and and so crime is is a concern you know but although the genre is crime thriller you know it's a police investigation and so forth what it is really about is that there are people who are above and there are people who are below and and and some of those people are neurodivergent that's a running theme through the comic book series that i haven't gotten to write about too much and i'm i'm deeply obviously sympathetic to neurodivergent people i think they have points of view that are astounding really and that we need to listen to more you know maybe there's a reason they're around right so those themes are are what i cared to infuse into deep down okay so after working on so many major prod properties what felt different about building something that was entirely yours yeah yeah in recent years i've gotten to do that melvin and it's it's astounding a pleasure you know some have asked me what took you so long you know you you you got to work on all these you know amazing projects couldn't you have thrown one out yourself you know and and the fact of the matter is i i have but but under the guise of of of other people's brands you know i i contributed a whole lot to something called magic the gathering a trading card game that really alluded

21:55 to this greater universe and i helped to invent a lot of the characters and and and lands and and storylines history in that uh in that game it was incredibly um satisfying and and it earned me some money um and and but now i i i've just become bold enough to be honest with you melvin you know i was shy i i allowed my my differences to marginalize me a little bit and now i've had it so i'm stepping up and stepping forward take it anymore well you know it's time to tell my stories and that's what's happening right now uh with the project with disney with ashley and and with deep down okay and maybe more okay and you've got a forthcoming book called the ten commandments of corporate narrative what is what is corporate narrative and why does it matter when i um when i work on these story worlds for the disney company or sony pictures or 20th century fox years ago i would tell them you you have to understand that you are the owner and custodian of this brand of this world and you have to maintain its integrity and so you cannot completely turn it over to a third party what other company would do that you know would would coca-cola go

23:26 to some third party and say invent a new soda for us no you they'd buy you and then make sure that what you're doing is in line with the coca-cola brand right so it's the same with those story worlds and and once i realized that what i actually realized melvin was that i was asking a huge corporation to show some integrity you know and to be able to stand up to scrutiny by its customers and to and to you behave accordingly and if you make mistakes you have to talk about the mistake and how you're going to fix it and uh and so uh a long time advisor and friend alan burksen came to me and said you know you should do this for companies for for corporations because they need to learn these lessons especially in an age where anybody can say anything now and and and that can spread very rapidly and impact brands and impact you know how much money your your company's making super super fast right so so i worked with alan uh to create a kind of corporate version as if your corporation is a story world right and gave them a kind of instruction book to maintain the integrity of their company and their brands, their products and brands.

24:56 And that's called the Ten Commandments of Successful Corporate Narratives. And that just came out. It's just out now on Amazon. Okay. I'll make sure I'd include a link in the show notes for people who are interested in getting copy of that. So through the mythic field, you've been writing about AI as a new storytelling medium. What do you mean by storytelling medium for AI purposes? Melvin, this might be a touch controversial, but i've been around a long time so so i can afford to to toss these things off you know when when when computers arrived especially ones that were connected to one another in some strange network i looked at that and said to myself the world is going to change there's there's going to be a very significant difference between yesterday and tomorrow this happened again with mobile phones you know uh these are are so significant that the way our minds work is going to shift is going to change to integrate this technology this tool into our everyday lives it's happening again with generative AI and various LLMs and anything related to artificial intelligence.

26:20 So what is it? I believe in many ways that artificial intelligence is a medium unto itself. right just like mobile technology just like television you know radio mobile it's it's a it's a medium that will be able to generate content and and the way that we interact with that content is going to be different from anything that we've ever experienced before and here's the one reason why it can kind of listen to you all right think about that melvin this device this tool could kind of hear you understand what you're saying and say something back that you can interpret as meaningful okay ain't nothing like that before nothing okay so so think of of the storytelling that you can do with a medium like that i can go into that that world and start talking to characters me myself not not an avatar that i'm controlling but me what's that like that's kind of like role play that's kind of like live action immersive worlds

27:50 not just filled with things that i can kill but filled with things that i can talk to work things out with hang out with talk about with my troubles relate to that's something that is very striking to me it also i think requires a great deal of responsibility in terms of us as storytellers who are utilizing that medium you know already we've heard of of relationships that are going on between human beings and ai kind of characters and that could be very you know very positive but also very destructive and and you know isolating if this thing is never going to give you any trouble why wouldn't you hang out with it instead of a human being you know so we we have to be wary of that but also my gosh the the potential is remarkable all right so for creators is ai more of a threat or a shortcut for me neither listen what what you're looking at in terms of ai's capabilities right now think back when we first saw these little jpegs on the internet you know those first few years of the internet and you can get look like at a fuzzy image you know and it's all filled with dots and and so forth that's where we are with ai

29:24 that's where we are so it won't be long and i do have a little inside knowledge melvin it won't be long before we will be given the tools to essentially fabricate our own creations through artificial intelligence, which means that it isn't us typing in a prompt and suddenly a pop song comes out that it invents based on a sentence or two that that we're writing, it will be able to work with us to create each piece of music that goes into the compilation of that song, just as we'll be able to build sets for our movies special effects and things like that piece by piece so it won't be something that is lifted from somewhere or copied from somewhere it can emerge from our specific artistic vision that's what i call the mythic field and and that's what i'm helping to build this this notion that that the quintessence of you and your aesthetics and your storytelling and your desires and your childhood trauma all get poured into this thing that then if you're building a world that that field inhabits that world and maintains your artistic integrity

31:00 as it spreads out and becomes accessible to a participant or many participants or millions of participants Based on your insider knowledge, if you're able to talk about anything like this, will AI be able to, let's say, create a hologram of a deceased person for you to maybe have a conversation with? The answer is yes, and it's already happened. Yep. these are in operation these are occurring around the world you know the united states isn't the only one moving fast this is occurring there's a company called deep fusion that is doing stunning work with regard to actualizing characters that you can look at and have a conversation with really really amazing all right so what do you want people to understand about the invisible work behind the stories that they love what i what i would love for people to understand is that is that that invisible work harkens back to the earliest stories that have ever been told and those early stories were roadmaps to survival roadmaps to survival so that's the purpose of story to lift our lives to allow for us to persist and the only thing that's changed Melvin is that we are now intrinsically interconnected millions and millions of us billions

32:34 of us even are interconnected so the shift that we have to think about is a shift away from the central conceit of direct conflict we must shift away from that why because direct conflict is the assertion of right on wrong generally right and and that's a binary and we are seeing that binaries are getting us into trouble because everyone has a voice everyone has a perspective and and if all of us assert our right on one another's wrong we are going to get into a tremendous mess we might have already started right so so the stories of today need to provide us with a road map to reconciling our language with the language of others our perspectives with the perspectives of others right those are the kinds of stories that we need narratives that are systemic not good and evil i live here you live there maybe there's someone who is taking advantage of a flaw in the system that's harming us we need to fix the flaw if you knock off the villain right if you destroy the bad guy who's taking advantage of us tomorrow there's going to be another one

34:09 right just like that so forget about it believe me there's plenty to try and stop you from actually affecting systemic repair but our narratives need to at least make us aware of the possibility that we can fix the system as opposed to destroying the antagonist and and that map is a map of reconciliation the ability for us to join forces to repair things because we are the human race. We're capable. We can do it. We can do it. So let's provide our audience with patterns and maps to be able to do just that.

34:56 Okay. I just have a couple of regular questions before we start to wind down the conversation and then I have a quick lightning round. I'd like to have to finish it off. So what gives you hope about the future of storytelling? I'm seeing more systemic narratives. I'm seeing stories about people who are grappling with complex issues and who are surmounting their differences with others to try and solve the problem. That gives me a lot of hope. The fact that I'm able to tell my stories with companies like Disney, it's just awesome you know they chose me you know fantasy science fiction boy when they had Star Wars and Marvel you know that means that they're looking for something different and new that has maybe a slightly different kind of message to it a more complex message for a more complex world that really gives me encouragement okay so what worries you the most about storytelling the future of storytelling we are right now we are uh imprisoned by language and and there are people out there who understand that language can be used as a weapon and and they can weaponize they can leverage our anxiety our dissatisfaction our anger and and turn us

36:32 against one another and and that's a a genuine cause for concern because it it has reached a level of intensity that i haven't seen in a long long time melvin and and the people who think that they're not going to be touched by it very soon will be touched by it and so I'm hoping that some of our younger friends are building strength within themselves to be able to take effective action and to alter our navigational course if you get my drift okay that all makes sense all right so for this final lightning round i'm going to ask you some short questions you just throw back some short answers at me all right one fictional world you wish you had helped build I've gotten to work on many of the ones that I could have only fantasized about.

37:32 I love Godzilla, and so I wish I could have been involved in all that. It'd be a little different than what it is with my taste. And of course, James Bond is awesome. And I'd love for that character to live in a more complex and intricate world and still be able to do his thing. Okay. Best example of a world building? Wow. I'm watching a series right now on MGM called Rum, F-R-O-M, that is a highly intricate mythology and story world.

38:13 And it really seems to be carefully thought out. and it's scary and and brilliant uh so so i love that widow's bay also by the way is a much more simpler uh story world that also is is rather elegant and intriguing okay most overrated storytelling buzzword hero's journey storytelling is far too commonly used today to refer to a very simple cycle of adventure. The hero leaves the home, is mentored, fights a bunch of things, grabs the treasure, confronts the bad guy, becomes enlightened somehow, and returns home with the treasure.

39:02 i'm not too fond of of that simply the cambellion the joseph campbell hero's journey is actually highly sophisticated and beautiful but it's simplification we it's it's not helpful to us as much anymore all right one franchise that understands its fans especially well wow what's been uh what's been awesome with regard to uh to dealing with the fans i not to brag but but i i just spent six or seven years on ultraman right um that was a a japanese superhero who had been absent from american popular culture for like 25 years i used to watch ultraman when i was a kid isn't that awesome see so you were what i had to work with coming on to the project a bunch of guys with a little gray in their beard or a lot of gray were the only fans left and the beauty of Tsuburaya Productions in Tokyo was they said do whatever you think is best to cultivate new Ultraman fans in America as we bring the character back into the popular culture.

40:19 And I went straight to those old men and I said, guys, let's bring them back you know one more one more mission uh for us ultra man and they got together man it was wonderful they they reached out to their their kids and their grandkids and and and and helped echo anything that that we uh talked about with them i got to be their friend and and we worked together and and as a kind of demi semi celebrity for me to drop into chat rooms and and discord servers and things like that made everyone all excited and and so it was like a mission that spread and spread and spread and now there are millions of ultraman fans in the united states so that was really really satisfying to directly go and and recruit apostles for ultraman i could have been one of those i that would have been fun that would have been a lot of fun all right so what's one thing you wish studios would stop doing immediately please stop making war on your customers stop making war on your customers okay so if if someone doesn't like your movie don't tell them that they're idiots or morons or even racists or or they're being sexist because yeah there are always some of those

41:54 but there are also people who just don't like it right there is a a a filmic shortcut that's that happens a lot these days where the character um a suddenly becomes you know is like nobody to start with and within half an hour they're an expert marksman they they use swords they're chopping up the bad guys and and and so forth that annoys audience members you know particularly i gotta tell you young adult men who who in their minds understand that there needs to be a process a rite of passage that enables the hero to to earn their way into expertise you know that that a lot of a lot of the time that doesn't happen so they complain this this girl character is beating up men and that's ridiculous and so forth and and then the actress will come and say you're you know we're worse right they'll say something nasty uh to them and then there's there's fighting you know um i tell the studios that the actors who are portraying powerful iconic characters ought to at least in the immediate run up and wake of the release behave like

43:26 that character you know lift yourself above the din you don't have to go in into x and start fighting with with people what what good is that going to do either you the people you're fighting with or the movie it's not going to do any good stop fighting with the customer you know let the customer understand the aspirational values of the character and also make better stories you know and you won't get that many complaints so you know that's something that I've advised again and again various movie studios video game companies and even regular corporations in our 10 commandments we talk about that in the book okay and that seemed like a good a good way to wind down today's episode so thank you to jeff gomez who's been our guest thank you for joining us today jeff on stories from real life i really enjoyed the stories you had to share thank you melvin i hope you you got a little bit out of it i absolutely did and just for the audience hopefully you were paying attention just in case you need a little reminder or a little prompt don't forget to check out his works that we talked about today deep down his new crime thriller set in new york city subway system his forthcoming book the ten commandments of corporate narrative and his work exploring ai called the mythic field so that's it for today's episode of stories from real life until next time don't forget to shine your light wherever you go

45:02 That was Stories from Real Life. Join us again next week for another great storytelling journey. See you next time. Stories from Real Life is a production of Media Well Done, LLC.