Slashdot Mirror
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."
No wonder most movies seem like derivative things you can predict what will happen ... because they apparently are.
Still, keep making the superhero movies, and I'll keep going. =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Good luck getting funding for a unique motion picture when the studios not only know what makes a profitable film, they can prove it. And because the average moviegoer could not care less, this is not going to change until the sun burns out. What makes matters worse is that each successive generation grows up watching these movies and will never know that there used to be something better -- which makes this approach even more profitable.
Read a recent best-seller thriller or crime novel. It follows the same formula.
Sad, isn't it?
This was the book that inspired Micheal Bay's mother to conceive.
'Cause movies weren't formulaic before 2005.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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]
I'm part of an award-winning writer's group, and several of the members swear by this book. They follow it meticulously--and it isn't even the first to do this. The Warrior's Journey describes how Disney and Pixar created all their big masterpieces, and then takes that technique and applies it to novel writing. And then there's the Nora Roberts/James Patterson formulaic ghost-writers, plus the Harlequin series, any of Dan Brown's books; heck 90% of the entire fiction market follows a formula similar to Save The Cat. Formulaic writing is nothing new. Authors and screenwriters follow this like it's a religion--they cling to to the formula because they fervently believe it's the best chance they have of getting their work published. Fortunately, there are two mitigating factors that I've found: 1) a good idea is a good idea and even a plot-writing formula won't ruin it; and 2) good writing is good writing.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Formula for chic flicks:
1. Eye contact. They play coy for a while. He makes a buffoon of himself. She likes him, because he's a little shy.
2. Connection. She hides her innermost feelings from him, while he opens up.
3. Conflict. He either screws up somehow to make her unhappy, or she just can't get over some painful memory from her past.
4. Separation. The relationship falls apart, for whatever idiotic reason.
5. Resolution. Days, weeks or months later, they make contact. They either get together and everything's peachy, or they realize it was never meant to be and end up happy with someone else.
And, #3 always ALWAYS ends up being something so idiotic and petty that nobody with any kind of rational thought process can relate. This is called the estrogen phase.
Damn, I hate chic flicks.
sig: sauer
This is the method, but it's the sheer horror of marketing the stuff that makes it the bible.
“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.”
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Yes, there's also a formula for the perfect +5 Slashdot post too.
Always start by "I know this will get modded down into oblivion, but..."
Then bash Google, Apple, Facebook, or Microsoft, no matter what the subject is.
Make a car analogy.
Br a grmmer Nazi.
Insinuate all /. are virgins who live in their parents' basement.
Use Simpsons, TBBT, Star Wars/Trek references whenever possible.
Link to XKCD.
Label someone's facts as opinions simply because the guy didn't post a Wikipedia link, and say "oh, don't let facts get in the way of your biased argument."
Me, I tired of "hollywood formula" a long, long time ago.
Sounds to me like someone needs to check out the canon of work by hollywoods greatest story teller of all time, Michael Bay.
Unless you have a collection of older films
I thought one of the selling points of Netflix and foreign counterparts was older films.
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.
So what explans JJ Abrams latest products that seem to be random action scenes edited together, is this the next evolution? Who needs a complex plot or any kind of plot at all?
This is true and it's not unique to "Save The Cat!" (which I have read and enjoyed). However, as other screenwriters have pointed out, it's not the only way to tell or sell a story, but almost all of your favorite movies, if you bother to sit down and ruin your movie experience by going "meta"*, follow a structure that can be teased out of it. The reality is, no one really wants to watch 2.5 hour movies anymore (god forbid you ever read about film history and see how early film makers were trying to make 5 and 6+ hour movie epics... Fortunately for us, those are TV series these days) for the most part. And if you want to talk formulaic, watch TV shows, especially crime dramas. They've been doing this for decades and have it down to an art. And we love every minute of it.
I like Lennon & Garant's break-down of movie story structure: Put a guy in a tree, throw some rocks at him, throw some bigger rocks at him, get him down from the tree. That's basically it in a nutshell. Now, the nitty gritty of STC gets into how to make those 4 steps at least somewhat interesting (no one is gonna watch a movie where the protagonist just gets his way every step of the way for the most part.. Even Ferris Bueller (unless you ascribe to the notion that Cameron was the real protagonist and Ferris was the catalyst) had issues to overcome, etc. Or stuff like "Memento" or even "Pulp Fiction", they've all got discernable structures, they just move them around.
*Take some film courses at your local community college, if offered. Pay attention to the cinematography methods classes,etc. Pretty soon you'll see you can't just "watch" a movie; instead you'll be focusing on shots, or framing, or sound design, or story beats, etc. It really sucks if you just want to turn off and watch a movie and be entertained.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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.
Cop Show: follow the wrong lead - commercial - follow the wrong lead - commercial - follow the wrong lead - commercial - arrest the bad guy.
Doctor Show: wrong diagnosis - commercial - wrong diagnosis - commercial - wrong diagnosis - commercial - save the patient.
Home Improvement Show: find problem that changes the project - commercial - find problem that changes the project - commercial - find problem that changes the project - commercial - finish the project.
Home Buying Show: show perfect home that's over budget - commercial - show crappy home that's in budget - commercial - show good-enough home that's in budget - commercial - completely random decision by homebuyer.
.
.
.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Chick: a baby chicken, or a young woman
Chic: Pronounced like "sheek". French for "fashionable."
And that's why you don't get laid, you pansy-ass metrosexual sitzpinkler PUSSY.
"Mon dernier souffle" - 'My last breath' in English. ;-)
He explains what he 'learned' while being on a sponsorship in Hollywood. He wrote this story around 1980. He had but acquired one item on top of what he had already known and done before he arrived: Setting up a geneology of all American movies. One night someone dropped in and told him of a new movie with a totally unexpected, novel and revolutionary line. He wanted to hear of the first minutes, and then he said, he'd be able to construct the rest. And that actually worked!
Actually, Bunuel was a trainee of Charly Chaplin in the thirties. I always consider it the wrong way round in who should have been the person to be the supervisor.
I mean, you can complain all you want about formulaic content but the reality is society has regressed into an idiotic stupor that allows this type of movie making to succeed.
Look at CSI and all its derivatives. Its the SAME EXACT SHOW week after week. Then look at ALL the crime investigation shows and realize, its the SAME PLOT over and over again. Yet these shows consistently rank in the top 10 because viewers do not want to be challenged with new plot devices. Its why any even remotely unique show is usually cancelled because the idiot masses don't like watching it because its not like CSI or some other derivative tripe.
All movies are coming out the same? Realize that the major demographic for movies are teenagers and early 20 somethings and you understand that this demographic has not yet developed the maturity or patience for investing any thinking power into changing their derivative lifestyles. Eat, sleep, party, fuck, get a tattoo, is about all they can handle so taking 90 minutes out of their "busy" schedule can't be over-complicated by something that challenges or inspires an actual original thought.
So you can blame Hollywood all you want but the reality is that Hollywood makes a product, and the product only sells if consumers want the product, and consumers want this derivative bullshit, period.
We are firmly in the era of the Stupocalypse. Mankind has entered a zombie state where originality, rational thought and common sense are thrown out the window and replaced with a need for immediate entitled gratification with a minimum investment of effort.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It is modded down for being a "subtle brag".
"(not so) subtle EURO brag"
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Michael Bay has more of a "cannon" of work. He needs the extra n to pack in more EXPLOSIONS!
And really, how many movies are there that you can't guess the ending by 30% of the way through? It isn't usually because of the surprise story that we like movies, it's the skill of the telling.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You don't KNOW what's going to happen in them. Seriously- there is no "chekov's" gun in Bollywood films. You may see 3 guns on the wall and only 1 of them will be used. You may have an entire subplot which is just interesting but doesn't mean go anywhere.
It's fantastic. When I go to a hollywood film- I can often guess the ending within the first 30 minutes. And it LOWERS the value I place on hollywood films by a couple bucks. I might pay 9-10 bucks to see a genuinely interesting surprising film. But only about 6 to 7 bucks for a mildly entertaining predictable film with a manipulative soundtrack (they tell you how to feel about the actions taken basically-- making the same action "good" or "bad" based on the accompanying soundtrack.)
I noticed several years ago that R rated films which are not "sex" films (like betty blue) have their first nude scene at 40 minutes into the movie (sometimes 39, sometimes 41 but you get the idea). Probably sets unrealistic expectations for dating people.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.