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The Book That Is Making All Movies the Same
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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure Essentially, the book described here strikes me as nothing more than a derivative of the accepted formula of ancient Greek drama. From Wikipedia: In his Poetics the Greek philosopher Aristotle put forth the idea that "A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end" (1450b27).[1] This three-part view of a plot structure (with a beginning, middle, and end – technically, the protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe) prevailed until the Roman drama critic Horace advocated a 5-act structure in his Ars Poetica: "Neue minor neu sit quinto productior actu fabula" (lines 189-190) ("A play should not be shorter or longer than five acts").[2] Renaissance dramatists revived the use of the 5-act structure. In 1863, around the time that playwrights like Henrik Ibsen were abandoning the 5-act structure and experimenting with 3 and 4-act plays, the German playwright and novelist Gustav Freytag wrote Die Technik des Dramas, a definitive study of the 5-act dramatic structure, in which he laid out what has come to be known as Freytag's pyramid.[3] Under Freytag's pyramid, the plot of a story consists of five parts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and revelation/catastrophe.[4]
Mate, I can feel your pain. You girlfriend must love you very much for taking her to each and every one of them, but you really have my deepest sympathy. One day when you are in the vicinity, do drop in for a beer.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
TFA's claim is pretty bullshit. Syd Field 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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
This has been covered extremely well by everything is a remix ( http://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.
No, I'm pretty sure that Joseph Campbell published The Hero With A Thousand Faces in 1959, and Christopher Vogler wrote the seven page summary that was the closest thing to a book that anyone in Hollywood had ever read in 1985.
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.
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.
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.
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".
It is modded down for being a "subtle brag".
"(not so) subtle EURO brag"
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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!".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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 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).