Hollywood taps into science of tears to release flood of weepies

Hollywood studios have known there is money in tears since Walt Disney killed Bambi’s mother in 1942. Now they are using science to make people who love to cry at the movies very happy.

By manipulating an array of tricks known as “psychocinematics” — or what scriptwriters call “telling a good story” — they aim to get multiplexes ringing to the sound of teenage sobs.

After the summer success of The Fault in Our Stars, about two teenage cancer victims finding romance, which earned 30 times its budget in just four weeks, studios are unleashing a flood of “weepies”.

A decade ago audiences flocked to romantic comedies. But the misadventures of Cameron Diaz and Katherine Heigl became too predictable, so studios are turning to a younger generation of actresses who are willing to fade away from mystery illnesses — both beautifully and cheaply.

As female film-goers eclipse teenage boys, who prefer to stay at home playing video games, it has never been so rewarding to make girls cry.

One weepie will be released every month over the next year, starting this weekend with the $11m (£6.6m) If I Stay, a story about a cello prodigy marooned in a coma after a car accident.

The winsome teenager with the impossibly supportive boyfriend is played by Chloë Grace Moretz, 17, last seen as a foul-mouthed action hero in the two Kick-Ass films.

Ansel Elgort, the male lead of The Fault in Our Stars, said he was shocked when people came up to him and started crying — but he is back in another weepie: Men, Women and Children.

He turned down roles in two other “Kleenex jobs”, This Is Where I Leave You and The Skeleton Twins — both about families torn apart by death — but may provoke tears again in Flowers for Algernon, in which a simple man is given IQ-boosting drugs . . . but at terrible cost.

Based on a science-fiction short story, it has been filmed twice before — and banned in Texas for its obscenity. But the new version of the book that sold 5m copies has been made using the science of emotional cues developed over six years at Stanford and Princeton universities, which both have strong links with Hollywood.

They wired-up people watching a variety of past weepies, from The Champ to The Notebook, and noted which parts of their brains “lit up” at key moments.

They also filmed men sobbing more discreetly when in the company of other men than they did with women.

Cues include music that swells, locked gazes and that perfect moment for women when men expose their vulnerability — as in the film Jerry Maguire, when an apologetic Tom Cruise is told “You had me at ‘hello’.”

However, a 2008 report by Stanford determines that such scenes cannot last longer than 30 seconds, because if they do they are at risk of toppling into parody.

Life-reflecting moments, such as a final dance between a father and his daughter, the bride, can also be relied upon to make an audience weep.

Men, too, can be reduced to tears in the dark, according to research published by Uri Hasson, a psychologist at Princeton.

He said men grow misty-eyed about father-and-son scenes — one has been written into This Is Where I Leave You, dying athletes and heroic deaths, as in the film Saving Private Ryan.

Hasson’s research suggests that Tom Hanks makes more men cry than anyone else. Hanks inserted his own line into Sleepless in Seattle, where he admits crying at the end of The Dirty Dozen, a classic war movie.

Researchers also noticed that more men than women dabbed their eyes when Hanks broke down at the end of his ordeal in last year’s Oscar-nominated movie Captain Phillips.

“It’s about pacing the cues for the genders,” said a consultant on that movie.

“We noticed that women will cry most freely halfway through the film, while men let go at the end. Except on the Pixar movie Up, whose first 12 minutes relate the story of a happy marriage, at which everyone bawls their eyes out right away.”

Author: John Harlow Article, originally published in The Times, 31 August 2014