Right now I'm about halfway through Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting That You'll Ever Need. It's a guide on how to write a screenplay, written by the guy behind such flicks as Blank Check and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. I read a reference to it as being one of the better writing guides out there and thought I'd try it. It is in fact decent. Basically his advice is that if you cannot come up with a logline - a one sentence synopsis - your story is inherently flawed. He also reduces most every movie to a handful of archetypes - the buddy film, dude with a problem, the fool triumphant, the whydunit. It's interesting - and perhaps a little sad - to realize that everything can be distilled down to these few simple themes.And you? What are you reading, FTGers?
I buy in to the whole Joseph Campbell camp of literary/storytelling theory that we all (humans across every culture)tell the same stories over and over again. Over the years I have bored the hell out of friends and classmates by harping on this. Beowulf is a story in The Bible is the Egyptian legend of Osiris is a Greek myth about Theseus is a Celtic fairytale is Finnegan's Wake is Harry Potter. I find this simplifies reading. To some degree that's depressing, sure, but it also frees me up to look for the things a particular author does differently than her peers. Also - Campbell believed that we tell stories the way we do (with similar structure, plot and themes) because we are all attempting to relate to an unknowable "force" which is present in the universe and which we sense but cannot describe without metaphor. It's kind of like Jung's collective unconscious. When I view our stories, myths, movies from that perspective I am definitely not bored or disappointed. I am engaged in a vital way. It's religion.
ReplyDeleteSo, no, I am not surprised or disappointed that someone has written a book about screenwriting that has distilled movie plots down to their basics. Star Wars, The Matrix, The Fellowship of the Ring - they're all the same movie. There's probably a way to compare the 40-Year-Old Virgin to those films as well. In fact, I know there is.
Matt - you might enjoy this.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/36-films-se7en-1995.php