7 ms·

I haven't read "Save the Cat" so I can't speak to it specifically, but the article doesn't do a great job of selling me on the idea that the book is responsible

I haven't read "Save the Cat" so I can't speak to it specifically, but the article doesn't do a great job of selling me on the idea that the book is responsible for the sameness of movie plots considering that for all the examples of "beats" given in the article, I can think of dozens and dozens of movies that hit those beats well before 2005 (when the supposedly ruinous screenplay manual was published). If anything, it seems like the book was just clearly documenting what nearly every writer was already doing anyway, in some cases basically as far back as three act storytelling has existed (even prior to movies existing at all).

Semiapies 13y ago
I think the premise is that this book codified it, and thus a lot of movies have been based on its specific formula rather than various writers' intuitions/interpretations of these broad pattern. I'm skeptical, but I picked up the book to take a look.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  Yeah, that seems to be the premise, but I really don't get the sense that movies, overall, got significantly more formulaic post-2005 (there was already a pretty major amount of sameness back in the 90s). I do think that at the highest end of budgets there is less risk taking (because of the extremely high cost of a flop), and thus perhaps there is increasing adherence to the tried and true story formula, but I believe that has more to do with astronomical budgets than the publication of this manual and as I mentioned, I believe this trend started well before 2005. See also: Big budget videogames, which also suffer from a similar sort of sameness, but without a widely accepted "How to Make a Big Budget Game" formula book.
  - squidfood 13y ago
    I was taught something very similar in a screenwriting class in the late 1980s (it was in 10-15 minute increments rather than minute-by-minute, but still).
  - davidgerard 13y ago
    There's reasonable evidence they've gotten that formulaic in recent times: http://rocknerd.co.uk/2011/03/08/why-movies-right-now-suck-more-than-music/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2011/03/08/why-movies-right-now-suck-m... “The closer you get to (or the farther you get from) your thirtieth birthday, the more likely you are to develop things like taste and discernment, which render you such an exhausting proposition in terms of selling a movie that, well, you might as well have a vagina.”
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      Your comments on your own blog are not evidence, just your opinion. as for your one-sentence argument: Because the means of production are still locked down. Garbage. It has never been cheaper or easier to make a movie. It's what I do for a living, and I find your complaint laughably ignorant.
      - krakensden 13y ago
        Yup. And there is a great deal of interesting indie motion-picture making- YouTube and Vimeo have essentially torn down the barriers to distribution. Granted, very little of it is 90-120 minutes long, but so what?
      - gohrt 13y ago
        If you want to distribute online, sure. "Movie" is loosely defined: To get a showing in full-size theatre screens across America, for whatever that's worth, most indie/Youtube/Vimeo filmmakers don't have access, even for content that is vastly more popular than the bottm 25% of what does hit the cineplex.
Terretta 13y ago
"If anything, it seems like the book was just clearly documenting what nearly every writer was already doing anyway..." In the author's next book, Save the Cat Goes to the Movies, he documents "the key breakdowns of the 50 most instructional movies from the past 30 years". So yes, it would seem even the author considered it documenting rather than creating the approach. http://www.amazon.com/Save-Cat-Goes-Movies-Screenwriters/dp/1932907351 http://www.amazon.com/Save-Cat-Goes-Movies-Screenwriters/dp/...
tptacek 13y ago
Since the author of the article says the same thing directly, this is a somewhat superficial critique of that article.
- scott_s 13y ago
  Really? I missed it. Granted, I didn't read it too carefully because I felt he got repetitive, but I definitely got the impression that he was claiming that the book caused the scripts, and not the other way around. Near the beginning: Maybe that’s what Snyder intended. But that’s not how it turned out. In practice, Snyder’s beat sheet has taken over Hollywood screenwriting. Movies big and small stick closely to his beats and page counts. Intentionally or not, it’s become a formula — a formula that threatens the world of original screenwriting as we know it. I read that as "this book caused this kind of screenwriting," not "this book documents the kind of screenwriting that goes on."
  - tripzilch 13y ago
    I suppose the point is, analysis of storytelling elements isn't new, there's many more books written about it than just the Cat one. An interesting question (and one that the article IMO does not quite attempts to answer) would be: the Cat's description of storytelling-elements is quite formulaic, descriptive and precise. did the explicitness of this particular book cause (or play an important role in causing) the explosion of formula Hollywood plot-lines[0], or is it merely part of a general movement, flavour of the times? in short, is this "beat-sheet" literally used as a "cheat-sheet", or does it just continues the tradition of storytelling deconstruction? Maybe this is what you meant by the article not really selling you on it, though. (there's a couple more questions along this line that I would think are interesting as well, but you can probably guess them) [0] in particular, the part of phenomenon that is real and not based on selection bias.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  The article isn't that well written so there's some wiggle room in either direction, but by my reading while he does say the same thing directly, he attributes that view to the author of the book and then attempts to refute it, while mostly failing (IMO). Snyder, who died in 2009, would almost certainly dispute this characterization. In Save the Cat!, he stresses that his beat sheet is a structure, not a formula, one based in time-tested screen-story principles. It’s a way of making a product that’s likely to work—not a fill-in-the-blanks method of screenwriting. Maybe that’s what Snyder intended. But that’s not how it turned out. The way I read it, I'm agreeing with what the author of the article thinks the now-dead author of the book would have said, but the author of the article himself claims to have a view at odds with this view (but then goes on to fail in proving his view, IMO).
DocSavage 13y ago
"Save the Cat" may be popular, but the idea of breaking down the three-act structure for screenplays has been around for a while. I took a screenwriting class that had a similar template that was taught to UCLA screenwriters who have then taught it to others. Wikipedia has a page on the three-act structure as it relates to screenplays: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure I like to think of it as a pattern -- something that has been proven as one way to tell a story. Screenplays are particularly conducive to this patterning because (1) movies are generally about 90-120 minutes so not a huge variation in length, (2) each page of the screenplay is about a minute on screen so you can easily project where critical points usually sit, e.g., the inciting incident, and (3) really big budget films seem to be made more on how not to lose money rather than how to try something original and potentially misfire. The third point is why Hollywood prefers making a movie with a proven market and audience (i.e., proven book sales) than using original spec screenplays.
- revelation 13y ago
  This structure goes all the way back to the ancient greeks.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    Arguably it existed before we had language.
    - DigitalJack 13y ago
      I'd like to hear that argument.
      - foobarbazqux 13y ago
        Well, the three-act structure basically just describes conflicts. There is a pre-conflict phase (Act 1), an event at the end of Act 1 that sparks a full-on confrontation for the duration of Act 2, and another event at the end of Act 2 that shifts the conflict into a climax in Act 3, wherein the conflict is resolved. You even see it in non-human animals, and not just in violent conflicts. For example, if you consider mammalian sex, there is foreplay (Act 1), penetration (first transition), intercourse (Act 2), first urethra contraction (second transition), and ejaculation (Act 3). You don't need language for that story to play out; you just need language to communicate it.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Somehow I think this is closer to the truth. Took the Cinema 150 class at USC (nice general ed credit) and the structure of screenplays was covered both from a classical "Hero's Journey" sort of way and the 3 act play sort of way. As others have mentioned studying story telling goes waaaaay back. In general I suspect that the marginal return in the movie due to the story is not high enough to justify investing there. If a movie made to a formula earns the same as a bespoke movie but costs less because it was made in 4 months instead of a year, guess what the formula movies get funded.
reeses 13y ago
To cast it to 'hacker' terms, it's much like design patterns. Prior to GoF and subsequent pattern library books (meta-patterns), engineers followed certain patterns when building systems. Once it was written down and the patterns were explicitly named, developers, especially less experienced developers, coded to the patterns as if they were software construction blueprints. I'd say from 2000(ish) to 2005(ish), many conversations with developers approaching a new project would inevitably involve "we need an abstract factory here and a chain of responsibility there..." type discussions. At the time, it drove me mad because I saw it as a failure in factorization of the development environment or the language. If a million people are writing "façades" and "singletons", then it's a bloody waste of humanity. Now, of course, there are frameworks to make building-to-patterns easier. Instead of being a vocabulary for describing conventions, it has become difficult to leverage these frameworks without coding to whichever pattern libraries it has adopted. Back to film, blockbusters have to follow the 'safe' path. Teal/orange, the hero of 1,000,000,000 faces, etc. have been shown to appeal to the human senses of visual attraction and folklore. There's still a lot of innovation if you hit the indie circuit, but if a director/producer/etc. want a $200m check from a studio, they have to come close to guaranteeing a "hit". If I cared about CMM and that sort of thing, I'd swing back into systems engineering and certification, but you've read enough of my drivel for now.
fusiongyro 13y ago
What makes the allegation interesting to me is that you get the same 15 beats, in the same order, occurring at roughly the same point in time. It's this specificity that makes it an interesting charge. The article's author points out that Jurassic Park hits almost all of these points, but doesn't have them in this specific order or on this same timeline. This kind of thing contributes greatly to that vague sense of sameness we get.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  If the author made that allegation with actual data to back it up, I'd have found the article much more interesting. If he showed, for example, 5 recent movies all hitting exactly the same beats at the same time (or at least at the same relative times adjusted for their total run times), that would give some meat to his argument that this is more than just the usual 3 act structure broken down a bit more. Alas, he did not do this.
  - fusiongyro 13y ago
    Can't it be an interesting article without being a peer reviewed research paper? Jeez. It certainly made an interesting point to my satisfaction, whether or not that constitutes "actual data." We're talking about plot and story here. It would be hard to come up with a more subjective domain. Can't you turn off the pedant for a few minutes and just enjoy a new thought?
    - apalmer 13y ago
      Well the point of the article was that movies are following this pattern down to the minute so its not unreasonable to expect a few examples
      - fusiongyro 13y ago
        From paragraph one: "the hero dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship); ... the moment of hopelessness and disarray a half-hour before the movie ends (Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6)." Paragraph 10: "Look at January’s Gangster Squad. After an opening image that sets up the conflict between Josh Brolin’s hard-charging cop, Sgt. John O’Mara, and the criminal forces of mob boss Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), O’Mara is called in to see his gruff police superior. “We got rules around here, smartass,” the chief growls. “Do yourself a favor. Learn ’em.” That’s Snyder’s second beat, theme stated. And it’s right at the seven-minute mark, almost exactly when it’s supposed to happen in a 110-minute movie....an all-is-lost moment—including a death—between the 75- and 80-minute mark..." Did you guys read the article, or just skim it looking for a table of data? The examples are there, with the minutes. You actually have to read numbers written as words (gasp!).
nobodysfool 13y ago
The writer of the article mentions "The Matrix" as one of the films that follows this structure, yet those films were made before 2005 when the book came out!
- comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
  That is fine, even if confusing. The point is the book allegedely has distilled the "good enough" formula -- whether the formula is new or mined from previous films is unimportant. That so many movies are echoes of The Matrix and similar is kind of the point.

Semiapies 13y ago

I think the premise is that this book codified it, and thus a lot of movies have been based on its specific formula rather than various writers' intuitions/interpretations of these broad pattern. I'm skeptical, but I picked up the book to take a look.

georgemcbay 13y ago
Yeah, that seems to be the premise, but I really don't get the sense that movies, overall, got significantly more formulaic post-2005 (there was already a pretty major amount of sameness back in the 90s). I do think that at the highest end of budgets there is less risk taking (because of the extremely high cost of a flop), and thus perhaps there is increasing adherence to the tried and true story formula, but I believe that has more to do with astronomical budgets than the publication of this manual and as I mentioned, I believe this trend started well before 2005. See also: Big budget videogames, which also suffer from a similar sort of sameness, but without a widely accepted "How to Make a Big Budget Game" formula book.
- squidfood 13y ago
  I was taught something very similar in a screenwriting class in the late 1980s (it was in 10-15 minute increments rather than minute-by-minute, but still).
- davidgerard 13y ago
  There's reasonable evidence they've gotten that formulaic in recent times: http://rocknerd.co.uk/2011/03/08/why-movies-right-now-suck-more-than-music/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2011/03/08/why-movies-right-now-suck-m... “The closer you get to (or the farther you get from) your thirtieth birthday, the more likely you are to develop things like taste and discernment, which render you such an exhausting proposition in terms of selling a movie that, well, you might as well have a vagina.”
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Your comments on your own blog are not evidence, just your opinion. as for your one-sentence argument: Because the means of production are still locked down. Garbage. It has never been cheaper or easier to make a movie. It's what I do for a living, and I find your complaint laughably ignorant.
    - krakensden 13y ago
      Yup. And there is a great deal of interesting indie motion-picture making- YouTube and Vimeo have essentially torn down the barriers to distribution. Granted, very little of it is 90-120 minutes long, but so what?
    - gohrt 13y ago
      If you want to distribute online, sure. "Movie" is loosely defined: To get a showing in full-size theatre screens across America, for whatever that's worth, most indie/Youtube/Vimeo filmmakers don't have access, even for content that is vastly more popular than the bottm 25% of what does hit the cineplex.

Terretta 13y ago

"If anything, it seems like the book was just clearly documenting what nearly every writer was already doing anyway..." In the author's next book, Save the Cat Goes to the Movies, he documents "the key breakdowns of the 50 most instructional movies from the past 30 years". So yes, it would seem even the author considered it documenting rather than creating the approach. http://www.amazon.com/Save-Cat-Goes-Movies-Screenwriters/dp/1932907351 http://www.amazon.com/Save-Cat-Goes-Movies-Screenwriters/dp/...

tptacek 13y ago

Since the author of the article says the same thing directly, this is a somewhat superficial critique of that article.

scott_s 13y ago
Really? I missed it. Granted, I didn't read it too carefully because I felt he got repetitive, but I definitely got the impression that he was claiming that the book caused the scripts, and not the other way around. Near the beginning: Maybe that’s what Snyder intended. But that’s not how it turned out. In practice, Snyder’s beat sheet has taken over Hollywood screenwriting. Movies big and small stick closely to his beats and page counts. Intentionally or not, it’s become a formula — a formula that threatens the world of original screenwriting as we know it. I read that as "this book caused this kind of screenwriting," not "this book documents the kind of screenwriting that goes on."
- tripzilch 13y ago
  I suppose the point is, analysis of storytelling elements isn't new, there's many more books written about it than just the Cat one. An interesting question (and one that the article IMO does not quite attempts to answer) would be: the Cat's description of storytelling-elements is quite formulaic, descriptive and precise. did the explicitness of this particular book cause (or play an important role in causing) the explosion of formula Hollywood plot-lines[0], or is it merely part of a general movement, flavour of the times? in short, is this "beat-sheet" literally used as a "cheat-sheet", or does it just continues the tradition of storytelling deconstruction? Maybe this is what you meant by the article not really selling you on it, though. (there's a couple more questions along this line that I would think are interesting as well, but you can probably guess them) [0] in particular, the part of phenomenon that is real and not based on selection bias.
georgemcbay 13y ago
The article isn't that well written so there's some wiggle room in either direction, but by my reading while he does say the same thing directly, he attributes that view to the author of the book and then attempts to refute it, while mostly failing (IMO). Snyder, who died in 2009, would almost certainly dispute this characterization. In Save the Cat!, he stresses that his beat sheet is a structure, not a formula, one based in time-tested screen-story principles. It’s a way of making a product that’s likely to work—not a fill-in-the-blanks method of screenwriting. Maybe that’s what Snyder intended. But that’s not how it turned out. The way I read it, I'm agreeing with what the author of the article thinks the now-dead author of the book would have said, but the author of the article himself claims to have a view at odds with this view (but then goes on to fail in proving his view, IMO).

DocSavage 13y ago

"Save the Cat" may be popular, but the idea of breaking down the three-act structure for screenplays has been around for a while. I took a screenwriting class that had a similar template that was taught to UCLA screenwriters who have then taught it to others. Wikipedia has a page on the three-act structure as it relates to screenplays: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure I like to think of it as a pattern -- something that has been proven as one way to tell a story. Screenplays are particularly conducive to this patterning because (1) movies are generally about 90-120 minutes so not a huge variation in length, (2) each page of the screenplay is about a minute on screen so you can easily project where critical points usually sit, e.g., the inciting incident, and (3) really big budget films seem to be made more on how not to lose money rather than how to try something original and potentially misfire. The third point is why Hollywood prefers making a movie with a proven market and audience (i.e., proven book sales) than using original spec screenplays.

revelation 13y ago
This structure goes all the way back to the ancient greeks.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Arguably it existed before we had language.
  - DigitalJack 13y ago
    I'd like to hear that argument.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      Well, the three-act structure basically just describes conflicts. There is a pre-conflict phase (Act 1), an event at the end of Act 1 that sparks a full-on confrontation for the duration of Act 2, and another event at the end of Act 2 that shifts the conflict into a climax in Act 3, wherein the conflict is resolved. You even see it in non-human animals, and not just in violent conflicts. For example, if you consider mammalian sex, there is foreplay (Act 1), penetration (first transition), intercourse (Act 2), first urethra contraction (second transition), and ejaculation (Act 3). You don't need language for that story to play out; you just need language to communicate it.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Somehow I think this is closer to the truth. Took the Cinema 150 class at USC (nice general ed credit) and the structure of screenplays was covered both from a classical "Hero's Journey" sort of way and the 3 act play sort of way. As others have mentioned studying story telling goes waaaaay back. In general I suspect that the marginal return in the movie due to the story is not high enough to justify investing there. If a movie made to a formula earns the same as a bespoke movie but costs less because it was made in 4 months instead of a year, guess what the formula movies get funded.

reeses 13y ago

To cast it to 'hacker' terms, it's much like design patterns. Prior to GoF and subsequent pattern library books (meta-patterns), engineers followed certain patterns when building systems. Once it was written down and the patterns were explicitly named, developers, especially less experienced developers, coded to the patterns as if they were software construction blueprints. I'd say from 2000(ish) to 2005(ish), many conversations with developers approaching a new project would inevitably involve "we need an abstract factory here and a chain of responsibility there..." type discussions. At the time, it drove me mad because I saw it as a failure in factorization of the development environment or the language. If a million people are writing "façades" and "singletons", then it's a bloody waste of humanity. Now, of course, there are frameworks to make building-to-patterns easier. Instead of being a vocabulary for describing conventions, it has become difficult to leverage these frameworks without coding to whichever pattern libraries it has adopted. Back to film, blockbusters have to follow the 'safe' path. Teal/orange, the hero of 1,000,000,000 faces, etc. have been shown to appeal to the human senses of visual attraction and folklore. There's still a lot of innovation if you hit the indie circuit, but if a director/producer/etc. want a $200m check from a studio, they have to come close to guaranteeing a "hit". If I cared about CMM and that sort of thing, I'd swing back into systems engineering and certification, but you've read enough of my drivel for now.

fusiongyro 13y ago

What makes the allegation interesting to me is that you get the same 15 beats, in the same order, occurring at roughly the same point in time. It's this specificity that makes it an interesting charge. The article's author points out that Jurassic Park hits almost all of these points, but doesn't have them in this specific order or on this same timeline. This kind of thing contributes greatly to that vague sense of sameness we get.

georgemcbay 13y ago
If the author made that allegation with actual data to back it up, I'd have found the article much more interesting. If he showed, for example, 5 recent movies all hitting exactly the same beats at the same time (or at least at the same relative times adjusted for their total run times), that would give some meat to his argument that this is more than just the usual 3 act structure broken down a bit more. Alas, he did not do this.
- fusiongyro 13y ago
  Can't it be an interesting article without being a peer reviewed research paper? Jeez. It certainly made an interesting point to my satisfaction, whether or not that constitutes "actual data." We're talking about plot and story here. It would be hard to come up with a more subjective domain. Can't you turn off the pedant for a few minutes and just enjoy a new thought?
  - apalmer 13y ago
    Well the point of the article was that movies are following this pattern down to the minute so its not unreasonable to expect a few examples
    - fusiongyro 13y ago
      From paragraph one: "the hero dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship); ... the moment of hopelessness and disarray a half-hour before the movie ends (Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6)." Paragraph 10: "Look at January’s Gangster Squad. After an opening image that sets up the conflict between Josh Brolin’s hard-charging cop, Sgt. John O’Mara, and the criminal forces of mob boss Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), O’Mara is called in to see his gruff police superior. “We got rules around here, smartass,” the chief growls. “Do yourself a favor. Learn ’em.” That’s Snyder’s second beat, theme stated. And it’s right at the seven-minute mark, almost exactly when it’s supposed to happen in a 110-minute movie....an all-is-lost moment—including a death—between the 75- and 80-minute mark..." Did you guys read the article, or just skim it looking for a table of data? The examples are there, with the minutes. You actually have to read numbers written as words (gasp!).

nobodysfool 13y ago

The writer of the article mentions "The Matrix" as one of the films that follows this structure, yet those films were made before 2005 when the book came out!

comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
That is fine, even if confusing. The point is the book allegedely has distilled the "good enough" formula -- whether the formula is new or mined from previous films is unimportant. That so many movies are echoes of The Matrix and similar is kind of the point.