How We Decide Read Online Free PDF Page B

function is precisely the opposite. From the perspective of the human brain,
Homo sapiens
is the most emotional animal of all.
4
    It's not easy making a daytime soap opera. The demands of the form are grueling: a new episode has to be filmed nearly every single day. No other type of popular entertainment churns out so much material in so short a time. New plot twists have to be dreamed up, new scripts have to be written, actors need to rehearse, and every scene must be meticulously mapped out. Only then, once all that preparation is complete, are the cameras turned on. For most daytime soaps, it takes about twelve hours to film twenty-two minutes of television. This cycle is repeated five days a week.
    Herb Stein has been directing
Days of Our Lives,
a soap opera on NBC, for twenty-five years. He's shot more than fifty thousand scenes and has cast hundreds of different actors. He's been nominated for eight daytime Emmys. Over the course of his long career, Stein has witnessed more scenes of melodrama—rapes, weddings, births, murders, confessions—than just about any other human being alive. He is, one might say, an
expert
on melodrama: how to write it, block it, film it, edit it, and produce it.
    For Stein, the long road to daytime television began when he was a student at UCLA and read
The Oresteia,
the trilogy of classic Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus. It was the utter timelessness of the plays—their ability to speak to enduring human themes—that made him want to study theater. When Stein talks about drama—and it doesn't matter if he's talking about Aeschylus or
General Hospital
—he tends to sound like a literature professor. (He also looks like one, with his rumpled shirts and a few days' worth of salt-and-pepper stubble.) Stein talks in long, digressive monologues and finds grand ideas in the most unlikely plot lines. "Many of these classic plays have elements of the ridiculous," he says. "The plots are often completely implausible. That whole Oedipus thing? Totally absurd. And yet, when these stories are told well, you don't notice the absurdity. You're too busy paying attention to what's happening."
    Soap operas work the same way. The key to being a successful soap opera director—and Stein is one of the most successful in the business—is telling the story so that people don't notice you're telling them a story. Everything has to feel sincere, even when what's happening onscreen is completely outlandish. This is much harder than it might seem. Let's say you're shooting a scene in which a woman is giving birth to fraternal twins fathered by two different men, both of whom are at the bedside with her. One of the fathers is the villain of the show: he impregnated the woman by raping her. The other father is the good guy, and the woman is deeply in love with him. However, if she doesn't marry her rapist, then members of her family will be killed. (This is an actual plot line from a recent
Days of Our Lives
episode.) The scene has several pages of intense dialogue, a few tears, and plenty of subtext. Stein has about an hour to shoot it, which forces him to make some crucial decisions on the fly. He has to figure out where each character should stand, how they all should move, what emotions they should convey, and how each of the four cameras should capture the action. Should they zoom in close, or get a reaction shot over the shoulder? How should the villain deliver his lines? These directorial decisions will determine whether or not the scene works. "You've really got to know how to milk the drama," Stein says. "Otherwise, it's just a bunch of people standing in a room, saying stupid stuff."
    Although the scene has been mapped out in advance, Stein still needs to make many of these decisions in the midst of filming, while the actors are delivering their lines. Most of the fake rooms on the Burbank sound stage have only two flimsy walls, with one camera positioned on each side. An