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TLDR from the article: “I’m not here to teach you how to write a Hollywood movie,” McKee said, the scorn in his voice sending a wave of reassurance through his
by __jf__ 6y ago
TLDR from the article:
“I’m not here to teach you how to write a Hollywood movie,” McKee said, the scorn in his voice sending a wave of reassurance through his well-educated audience. But then he drew a triangle on an overhead projector slide: at the top was “Classical Design” (stories with causality, closed endings, linear time, an external conflict, a single, active protagonist); in the other corners he wrote “Minimalism” (open endings, passive protagonists) and “Anti-Structure” (coincidence, nonlinear time). “This course is about the top, about classical design,” he said, pointing at the triangle. “Why? For your careers. As you move down the triangle, your audience shrinks.
The top of the pyramid describes his magnum opus “Story”. For anyone interested in the lower corners I can recommend “Me and You and Memento and Fargo” [1]. This gives an interesting counterpoint to McKee’s shrinking audience hypothesis.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/You-Memento-Fargo-J-J-Murphy/dp/0826428053 https://www.amazon.com/You-Memento-Fargo-J-J-Murphy/dp/08264...
- securingsincity 6y agoSave The Cat[1] is another book for the top of the pyramid he describes. This is taken to the extreme where each of the beats should happen on this page number of your script. If anything it helped me recognize why blockbuster movies even though they might have completely different situations feel so samey [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00340ESIS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00340ESIS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
- teachrdan 6y agoIn particular, the trope of "Villain lets himself get captured, only to escape" was in Batman, Star Trek, James Bond and the Avengers before I stopped keeping track.