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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."
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
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
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.
Depends on the motivation of the movie-goer.
Movies are just an entertainment medium - a way to escape life for a couple of hours. Depending on how you do it, you can see a standard summer blockbuster that'll give you visuals and effects that you won't see elsewhere outside of movies, or an artsy thought-provoking movie.
Fact is, most people go for shiny and don't want to think - the movie becomes a basic 2 hour vacation from the ills of life they don't want to think about (which is one reason we have entertainment).
That, and I'm sure a ton of people just hated English class when they read literature and had all the fun sucked out of books through critical thought and analysis, leaving people less willing to see "better" because it brings back days when they had to look for deeper meanings and such.
There will always be the classics - and then, like now, a bunch of crap was made. We're seeing the survivor effect - the ones we call classics today people remember. They just forgot that at the time, there was a ton of crap as well. The proportions of crap vs. good haven't changed, it's just the crap got forgotten and the good lasted. Movie theatres played more than Gone With the Wind in the past, after all.
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
It would hardly be Star Trek movies if every other one wasn't horrible.
On the other hand it's good for TV.
So true. Much of the best adventure and drama of the past decade has been made for cable.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age