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Organic Intelligence, Toy Story and "What did you do in school today?

Mark Bell

This article was originally published in the Sudbury Valley School Journal, Volume40, Number 1, Fall 2010, and is reprinted with the permission of the Sudbury Valley School Press.

‘The organic intelligence in that room is automatically higher than even the
smartest person in the room.’

Michael Arndt, screenwriter of Toy Story 3

As a new student at Sudbury Valley School I found myself spending a lot of
time listening, laughing and sparring with an unlikely bunch of friends. We
chose to hand around in what was then called the Smoking Room. Some of
us were older, some younger. Occasionally we’d be joined by staff and
visitors from all walks of life. Not all of us smoked, but every one of us joined
in the ongoing joking, discussion, dramas and arguments. When my pals and
I emerged a few years later we all had plans. Most of us felt confident that we
were ready to take on the world.

I’ve been on the staff for fifteen years now and I watch this pattern continue.
A new student will latch onto another student or group of kids. That group
will already have or will soon claim a room, lounge, stall, lab or tree as their
headquarters. In each of these forts the bonding, the feuding, the support, the
giggles, the tears, the storytelling and the soul-searching will begin and carry
on. The gush of crazy and no-so-crazy ideas that first took shape here in the
sixties continues to flow and multiply in all those spaces.

A film I saw and an article I read recently helped me to refocus on what I
think continues to be a vastly underrated and difficult to define aspect of the
Sudbury Valley educational experience.

The movie Toy Story 3 impressed me. As an aspiring screenwriter I was
especially struck by the complexity and emotional depth of the script and
how many supercharged ideas, references, in-jokes, truths and fears the
writer managed to cram into 90 minutes of screen time. I wanted to see the
name of the person who could pull together a tale with such wide appeal. As
the movie ended the Pixar Toy characters continued to entertain as the credits
scrolled. The Toys had me hypnotised. I missed the screenwriter’s name. I left
the movie theatre with my niece and we walked over to a bookstore to
browse. I was looking through the music publications when I happened to see
a magazine with a cover photo that showed Woody, Buzz and the rest of the
Tory Story gang all tumbling out of a cardboard box. The headline was, ‘Out
of the box writing in Toy Story 3.’ I bought the magazine and discovered that a
New York writer named Michael Arndt was given the assignment to script
Toy Story 3. At the time he was an unknown writer. Arndt was hired based on
a screenplay he’d sold called Little Miss Sunshine. That film had not yet found
a distributor. So starting in 2005 Arndt began to hammer together an outline
for Toy Story 3. He had a pretty good beginning and a ‘golden’ ending for the
movie, but figuring out what was going to happen in between had him
stalled. Now the article got really interesting. Arndt revealed the secret of
how his story was completed and ‘what separates Pixar from almost everyone
else.’

But first let me tell you about a thing I used to dread when I was a kid. It was
when my relatives and parents would ask me, ‘What Did You do in School
Today?’ It was bad enough when I was slaving in the required classes at
Holliston Public Schools. ‘Umm, I did homework in a Study Hall, then
English and then we all had to go to a mandatory Pep Rally and uh, we had to
do a quiz in Health class.’ Answering the awful question got much, much
harder once I gained my freedom at Sudbury Valley.

What had I done, anyway? I was embarrassed to tell anyone that a bunch of
us squandered a beautiful day just wandering the sunny campus making up
incredibly dumb stories and songs and reading our journals to each other and
laughing our heads off. Worse yet would be to tell my folks that after baking

1 Inside Pixar’s Toy Chest by Danny Munso, in the May/June 2010 edition of
Creative Screenwriting, Vol. 17, number 3.

an apple pie with Mrs. Parra `I had blown the afternoon engaged in an
annoying showdown with a stubborn older kid who refused to agree with
anything I said or did. Even lower was to admit that I had got myself
embroiled in another standoff with our judicial system or wormiest of all, that
I had found myself in deep poo with the entire School Meeting. Again.

As a newbie at SVS it was hard to assess the value of the weekly roller coaster
ride of triumph, defeat and adventure constantly unfolding on a campus
where young men and women are allowed to trust their own hearts and
minds. I occasionally wondered if perhaps we were misusing time arguing
about whether Khalil Gibran would have made a good parent while playing
barefoot soccer before returning to the Smoking Room to evaluate Bob
Dylan’s comeback record. While engaged in these roving debates and
respectfully combative sporting activities we were trail-blazing a
revolutionary new kind of mental/physical schooling. The small kids were
watching and joining in too. Our little guys were always on the go but
occasionally they would stop to share their energy and unfiltered thoughts
with us. They reintroduced my group to facets of the universe that our
previous masters had swept aside and ignored. So we would listen and write
and read to one another. Others might draw together, run together or create
melodies or maps or games.

Okay, now back to Toy Story for a minute. In what they call ‘the process’ the
whole Pixar community, creatives and executives alike, meet on occasion in a
large room. Everybody can come. Songwriters, special effects people, editors,
vice presidents, animators and even the bean counters. These people are all
attached to different studio projects in different ways. Pixar calls this
powwow their ‘Brain Trust.’ These folks all have one goal in common. They
all want to be sure that every movie that is released by Pixar stays up to par
with its predecessors. On this occasion and on several more days the
Process/Brains Trust would meet with Michael Arndt, the writer who was
still stuck looking for a middle part for his Toy Story 3.

‘As soon as people started talking it was like the Harlem Globetrotters in your
living-room,’ enthuses Arndt. One member of the Brain Trust would throw
out an idea while others would follow up, add or put a twist on the original
thought. ‘Jokes were topped sometimes three times over. The organic

intelligence in that room is automatically higher than even the smartest
person in the room.’ The articles describes an atmosphere of thought-
exchange that might sound familiar to anyone who has spend an afternoon in
the Sewing Room, the Music Study, the VGC stalls, the Internet Room, the
Kitchen, the Creek or just about any other classroom here at SVS.

The old Smoking Room gang never called our hangout a classroom nor did
we consider ourselves to be a brain trust. Reflecting back on it we were all
that and probably a lot more.

Arndt’s term ‘organic intelligence’ fits our room well. Once in the door it was
impossible to avoid sinking ankle-deep into the enriched, unbridled muck
where the topic of the minute could bounce along from ethics and biology to
politics and metaphysics and then back to logic, poetry and the Beatles.

Of course we never limited our verbal explorations using those dumb
department headings. We would swiftly improvise on each others’ riffs.
Someone might introduce a new theme and others would embellish that
melody or even modulate right up to a whole new key. The mind flow would
continue to evolve as interesting new licks and hooks g until finally returning
to a roaring refrain that we could all join in on.

Over time and with a potent mix of little kids, staff, other Room Groups, the
Judicial System, the School Meeting and lots of fresh air we were casually
assembling customised mind-structures that would become the vehicles of
each of our own life stories.

A beginning for mine came to me when I saw myself reflected in some of my
younger friends in the school. It was the first time I saw a glimmer of my own
worth. This started a train of thought leading me eventually to imagine what
my ‘golden’ ending could be. The in-between part was hazy and it was going
to be up to me to figure it out. When I need some help along the way I could
still consult my revolving/evolving brain trust.

This was all way heavier than we could comprehend back then. I still can’t
totally recall or fully grasp the cosmic forces that pulled our group together. I
was fifteen and most of us were still bobbling around in those soon-to-end,
mega-important formative days of youth. Many of the topics we found

ourselves discussing and grappling with in the Smoking Room will never be
found in any classroom or even Googled. Primal bonds were forged, we made
up our own codes and rituals. We traded secrets, nightmares, crushes and
goals. From the git-go the School had given us total respect and trust and over
time we found ourselves giving that same respect and trust back to the
School.

Back at Pixar the studio boss maintains that it takes 10 man-years of labour to
create a good script. This could mean two gals writing for 5 years, or 10 guys
working for a year.

That concept throws a spotlight on my 9 years of traditional schooling where
each subject was explained by a lone master. The snailish pace was doing
amazingly little to inspire me. The single-minded grind fed my self-doubts.
The system made me fell small and cynical. I dreaded each new day. I was
shutting down.

At SVS my dried-out pea of a brain was plopped into this swirling pool of
wild imagination, physical challenges and countless possibilities. Overnight I
found myself becoming optimistic again. During those first months of mind
and body freedom I began to effortlessly scoop up lost years of meaningful
interaction and experience. All of a sudden everything I chose to turn my
attention upon was absolutely fascinating and relevant to me. I gained a lion’s
share of my education at SVS in a natural, integrated, organic way. Mine was
a practical, invigorating course of study infused with the costs and rewards of
taking responsibility for myself. The way we do it at SVS is incredibly more
complex but simultaneously way simpler than the other ways. Ours is a
highly personalised process – so personal that it is nearly impossible to
comprehend or weigh or appreciate the value of what our School allows us to
accomplish on our own on any given day. I guess this is why I had such a
hard time finding a satisfying answer to ‘What Did You Do in School Today?’

Conveying exactly how an SVS education will occur continues to be an
elusive task for a lot of us. It leaves some folks unable to fathom how a school
environment so open, fast-paced and seemingly random will ever compare to
the rigorous compulsory education available at other schools.

A nice thing about all those standardised schools where every student follows
the approved path and no student is left behind is that they make it a whole
lot easier for bored kids and teachers to answer the What Did You Do in
School Today? question. It is a no-brainer for Junior to shoot back, ‘I did
English Literature, Precalc and Nutrition. Can I go now?’ Hard to argue with
that impressive answer. Grandparents, politicians and union leaders in turn
can boast to their constituents that Junior and his future taxpaying school
chums ‘did English Literature, Precalc and Nutrition!’

Standardised students are tested constantly and many will figure out the trick
to performing well on these monkey drills. Bored pupils trudge home
clutching their impressive high test scores. The grown-ups dance in the street
when the local school system produces a high scoring class. I dance a little jig
too. Those controlled children, sitting inside all day and marching quietly in
single file are going to raise the value of my home and all the other real estate
in my school district each time they test well. You can see the head and
shoulders of every Public School student droop whenever the elders start
crowing about their town’s wonderful schools.

Back in Hollywood Michael Arndt did very well with his first script, the one
he penned all by himself. Little Miss Sunshine went on to win the Oscar of Best
Original Screenplay. Still, Arndt admits that his screenplay for Toy Story 3
puts Little Miss Sunshine in the shade. ‘Pixar was very, very generous in
giving me sole screenplay credit. But what’s up on screen is the product of a
huge team effort.’

My team of daydreaming Smoking Room regulars grew up to become a
registered nurse, an environmentalist, an Air Force officer, a medical
technician, a fashion designer, an orchestral musician, an audio lab engineer,
a business-woman and a mortician. Some of them were listeners, some were
talkers, some conservative, some liberal, some were extremely shy and others
were bold. They were mixed race, religion, age and gender. After SVS a few
went to the military, some dove straight into apprenticeships, internships and
their chosen trades. Others packed knapsacks and headed for the hills and a
lot of them journeyed back to the classrooms of universities and colleges.

Throughout my life in and out of SVS I have fortunately chosen some
excellent mentors, gurus and role models but no single one could ever match
the team of freewheeling young minds that deliberated daily in that smelly
old Smoking Room. At SVS everyone still gets the opportunity to be
bombarded from every angle with observations and emotions. We are
allowed to hear a rainbow of beliefs and ideas spouted from every viewpoint.
At Sudbury Valley School we are free to pluck whatever we choose to harvest
along our way through a lush garden or organic intelligence. This is where we
learn how to make up our own minds. We don’t just learn from the smartest
person in the room any more.

 

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