The Book That Is Making All Movies the Same 384
Bruce66423 writes "This Slate story explains how a 2005 book has led to all Hollywood movies following the same structure — to a depressing extent. From the article: '...Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster. The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking since the late 1970s.' I've always known we could be manipulated — but this provides a segment by segment, almost minute by minute, guide how to do it."
This news is about 3600 years late (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just like all chic flicks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yeah. (Score:3, Informative)
TFA's claim is pretty bullshit. Syd Field [wikipedia.org] basically wrote the same book on screenplay structure and "how to sell your spec" in the 1970s, there's nothing particularly new about the claim here. I work in LA and have many produced screenwriter friends (yes even ones who've worked for Jerry Bruckheimer) and they haven't read this silly book.
Movies presently suck for a lot of reasons, but structure isn't one of them. The biggest problem nowadays is that a movie must have a simple enough story to be marketable in the international market, and specifically the Chinese market. 2/3s of all of Hollywood's revenue now comes from international distribution.
Re:No wonder ... (Score:5, Informative)
This has been covered extremely well by everything is a remix ( http://everythingisaremix.info/ [everythingisaremix.info] ). I highly suggest people watching that if they want to realize how long ago creativity left everything that was original from Hollywood and simply became remixes of everything from Hollywood.
Which begs the question and/or makes it seem ridiculous when anyone tries to assert ownership of these ideas, when they don't even come up with it themselves.
Re:This news is about 3600 years late (Score:5, Informative)
Did you read the article?
There's no doubt that the structure of effective stories has been studied for millenia, but what's different about this is the degree of detail with which its laid out, including not only the key elements (15, not three or five), their exact sequence and even their timing to a fairly high degree of precision.
Aside: Something that has occurred to me of late (while watching discussion about the Zimmerman trial, actually), is that I think humans have a tendency to fit real-world events into neat, narrative structures that have the same three-act form as good stories. I'm wondering if any news story that achieves really broad penetration of a large population's collective psyche doesn't end up getting "adjusted" until it fits a smooth, memorable narrative arc. This became apparent to me in the case of the Zimmerman trial when I realized that those who argued for guilty and not-guilty verdicts were discussing two rather different versions of the narrative, each of which followed a traditional storytelling arc, and neither of which was overly concerned about including facts that didn't fit the arc. The whole sequence of events, especially when the focus is on the actual evidence, makes a rather lumpy, disjointed tale with false starts and inconvenient edges, but the pro- and anti-Zimmerman stories are both much smoother.
I'm going to start watching to see if that phenomenon arises frequently.
Summary seems to have missed something. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yeah. (Score:5, Informative)
Field and McKee offered the screenwriter’s equivalent of cooking tips from your grandmother—general tips and tricks to guide your process. Snyder, on the other hand, offers a detailed recipe with step-by-step instructions.
So either you didn't read TFA, or you wanted to deliberately miss its message to post your own rant.
Re:Slashdot posts too. (Score:4, Informative)
Someone posted a perfect formula for getting mod points years ago, but I can't find it. I'm stealing some of the following from that post:
1 - The earlier you post, the more people will read it - thus, the higher the moderation may go. /. with your posts, you'd better have a solid argument or it's more likely to get ignored/blasted.
2 - If you reply to a +5 post (vs. starting your own thread), you're more likely to get read and get modded up.
3 - Repeat something obvious someone else has said (getting modded Redundant doesn't seem to happen often anymore).
4 - Keep your posts shorter, and more people will read them - possibly modding them higher.
5 - Use subtle flamebaiting that comes off as Insightful in a groupthink-like environment.
6 - Have a left-leaning, Democrat-focused, progressive viewpoint. If you lean more conservative on
I'd list more, but I need to post this now or I may miss out of a mod point or two.
Re:As you like it (Score:4, Informative)
Don't the Art Houses have a Porn formula?
That was established long before this... all straight porn follows this pattern (no exceptions!):
BJ, sex, anal sex, facial.
Re:No wonder ... (Score:2, Informative)
Which begs the question
No, it doesn't. "Begging the question" is a fallacy in which a proposition that requires proof is assumed tobe true without any proof. It is a form of circular reasoning. You meant to say "raises the question".
Re:As you like it (Score:4, Informative)
It is modded down for being a "subtle brag".
"(not so) subtle EURO brag"
Re:No wonder ... (Score:5, Informative)
When a movie studio announces a new project, another movie studio will almost immediately come out with a movie based on almost exactly the same premise -- so when "A Bugs Life" was announced, a few months later we got "Antz".
Oddly, they seem to have been produced in parallel, with neither inspiring the other. Bugs's Life was released just 2 months after Antz, with both in production for quite some time beforehand (the final render pass for each likely took more than 2 months).
Not coincidence, but synchronicity: computer animation had just reached the point where you could take a leap forward in realism, as long as you didn't try for hair or muscles-under-skin. Toy Story was the breakthrough, but "what else doesn't have hair or muscles?" led both Pixar and DreamWorks to "ooh, insects!".
Re:No wonder ... (Score:4, Informative)
Tool Time was written by women you idiot. That's why Tim was such a duffus. You appear so programmed to accept this you don't even recognize it when it bitchslaps you in the face.
Re:No wonder ... (Score:5, Informative)
Oddly, they seem to have been produced in parallel, with neither inspiring the other. Bugs's Life was released just 2 months after Antz, with both in production for quite some time beforehand (the final render pass for each likely took more than 2 months).
A friend of mine worked on Antz (and is still at PDI/Dreamworks). The movie itself was in development for more like 3 years, not 2 months. And WAAY more than 2 months to render the final frames. Remember, this was 1998. Each frame took hours to render, depending on the complexity. A Bug's Life reportedly took up to 100 hours to render some frames (though Pixar's tools were notably not as efficient as PDI's).
Not coincidence, but synchronicity: computer animation had just reached the point where you could take a leap forward in realism, as long as you didn't try for hair or muscles-under-skin. Toy Story was the breakthrough, but "what else doesn't have hair or muscles?"
Well... not quite. The real story of the two movies [businessweek.com] is fairly interesting, and revolves around Jeffrey Katzenberg (who left Disney to start Dreamworks). Turns out the Antz concept came first (almost 10 years earlier) but Katzenberg decided to make it largely in response to Pixar's project and feeling slighted by its competition with another Dreamworks release (The Prince of Egypt).