Anyone else read this?

I'm dipping in and out of it at the moment and whilst some of his ideas are interesting, I can't help but feel that there is a rigidity to his notion of creative writing in relation to screenplays that somehow seems to take the fun out of it.

He lays down so many rules, laws, regulations and guidelines that it feels like to undertake writing a screenplay is to undertake some kind of exam.

Anyway I'm taking from it what I want and we'll see what happens I suppose.

Just listened to an old Radio 4 Film Programme podcast which had three (British) screenwriters lamenting the rules set out by the likes of Robert McKee and US screen writing magazines.

They confirmed what I thought about the whole 3 act approach to screenwriting ie. it's fairly sterile and dull.

Probably just get on with writing from the heart and see what happens.

I read books by his predecessor Syd Field. I think they are useful to get a basic sense of storytelling when you start writing but over time you realize its also rather obvious advice --anything can be presented as having 3 acts if you search for it. If you write a story you want it to have certain things- plot, character, drama, interesting turn of events, etc.


I have only heard McKee talk in bits-but he is probably right that the best writers in the US are doing cable tv shows, not feature films (how many original screenplay-based movies are made these days?)--and many of the current movies I see don't seem to follow basic screenwriting (or storytelling) structure either.

I wouldnt want all films to follow a US storytelling model though, but I think it is good when used with some motivation. A movie like Clash of the Titans 2010 might use a 3 story arc but if so its by accident.
lol

I've got a Syd Field book too, but haven't looked it at yet (maybe I should give it a peek).

At the moment it just feels like I'm doing a lot of research. I think it's best if I just get writing and see what happens (also I need to get to grip[s with Final Draft).

It's kind of funny though since since reading excerpts of McKee's book I scrutinise nearly all films for their structure, which is useful to some extent, but I really don't want to analyse films like a student - it can take the fun out of the viewing experience.

I read the Field books in the mid 80s so maybe he revised them since then. i think it was a good time for it because Hollywood movies still have normal structures then.

Another interesting area is script doctoring. Apparently Carrie Fisher does script doctoring--she worked on Hook and a few other things-she appears in some documentary on writing and they dont even refer to her acting background.

Sometimes I'll watch a movie and get a strong feeling of how I would have expected the story to go differently.
Usually little things--like I expected the terminator at the end of Terminator 2 to be a complete endoskeleton when it fights the liquid metal one, or I expected Jurassic Park to take place on the opening day of the park with lots of tourists around-though probably because i heard it described as Westworld with dinosaurs-so you expect lots of people.

Its interesting how little things can be missed that seem so obvious in retrospect. In Raiders of the Lost Ark-originally it ended with Indiana Jones talking to the government, and then going to the warehouse scene. When Lucas and Spielberg were screening the movie for staff everyone was cheering, and the former Mrs Lucas apparently said: what about Marion ravenwood? She was left at the island. There should be some closure for that story thread.

So they added that scene.


When watching Christine I thought-what the hell happened to the blonde girl who liked the protagonist?
You just get a feeling that something is missing. The story doesnt feel complete in some way.

When i watched Ghost Rider-not a good movie obviously-but when the two ghost riders are riding out in the desert-the older one suddenly stops and says: that's all the flames I had in me-good luck..and he disappears.

Well, I think they sure the hell should have had that other ghost rider in the town for the finale. It would have been like a homage to spaghetti westerns--Eastwood and Van Cleef...

Maybe they had planned to but ran out of money.
From a story angle-its pretty obvious they needed some oomph there.

But a lot of this subjective and based upon one's own experiences.

I also heard someone say the best thing to do is watch a lot of bad movies-so you can see what's wrong with them, and learn from the mistakes.

Seems like a good place to add this. often these books say you need one character to focus on-for the audience to identify with. But I can think of movies that changed the rules.
One is Vertigo. We follow James Stewart through most of it, but about 2/3rds through the doppleganger character(dont want to spoil it) has a vision or memory that shows what is really going on-and then the Stewart character seems kind of nuts-the audience identifies with the doppleganger. I have wondered how the movie would have played had it not shown that memory vision scene---I guess the audience would have felt a little lost because they wouldnt have identified with the doppleganger and felt unsure about Stewart.
Maybe it was necessary to keep the audience from being disoriented.
Hitchcock also does that in Psycho--who is the main character?