Outrageous Statement that Makes You Want to Reject the Book Outright: “Existential dilemmas are what close on Saturday night, as the low-performing art house gem Memento proves. Gimmick or really dull movie? You decide.”

Areas Where It’s Less Than Helpful:

1. Snyder’s first book was way too snide and arrogantly anti-intellectual. Look at that quote! How many things are wrong with that statement?? I initially skimmed the book, found quotes like that, and quit reading. It was only after the book became a phenomenon that I tried it again, and realized there was a lot of great analysis buried beneath the arrogance.
2. As part of his overly-bluff tone, Snyder is far too specific about which page number each beat should happen on, causing many to dismiss his work as a “paint-by-numbers” formula.
3. His central point, that bad-ass heroes like Jolie’s Lara Croft aren’t actually sympathetic, and heroes should go back to saving cats occasionally, is a good one, but he gives too few examples of varieties of “cat saving,” leaving the reader adrift.

Useful Wisdom:

1. Thankfully (and poignantly) Snyder’s posthumous follow-up book was far more mature and humble that his first. It’s in this book that he lays out his whole structure, which is, for my money, the best of the bunch:
2. One of his best no-no’s that is often-quoted today is “double mumbo-jumbo”, which says you can’t have two unrelated sources of weirdness in the same story.
3. Snyder insists that every scene should reverse the change from positive to negative or vice versa. This is the same as saying that every scene should be a reversal. I mostly agree, but not entirely.
4. Snyder focuses a lot on the power of opening and closing images, with the latter preferably being the opposite of the former. Directors rarely do this literally, but if you think of this as some sort of symbolic object that reverses meaning from the first scene to the last, it can be a powerful tool.
5. One idea that’s in Snyder’s structure and no others is the “False victory and/or false defeat,” with one happening around page 60 and the next around page 75. Again, this isn’t always true, but once he points it out, you do start to notice it a lot.
6. …and lots more. These books are really packed with good pithy little nuggets of advice, if you can make it past his initial snotty attitude. Snyder shall be missed.

1. As with most books, the description of the structure is too vague and generic, while the definitions of the jargon are too specific and arbitrary.
2. In general, this theory gives too much equal weight to each of the eight sequences. There’s no sense of rising action. Unsurprisingly, devotees of this approach tend to write episodic screenplays.

1. If you look at what we’ve studied so far (please enlarge!), you’ll notice right away that this one’s significantly different. The sequence camp deserves credit simply for stubbornly resisting the three-act orthodoxy, and reminding screenwriters that there are totally different ways of looking at things.
2. In sharp contrast to Field, Daniel/Guilino stress that the hero, rather than meandering through the second act while waiting for the climax, should always be trying to solve the problem right away and the only reason that it takes so long is that everything keeps getting turned on its head, which makes sure that the screenplay keeps expanding in scope.
3. I love the idea presented here that, after the ¾ mark, the “dramatic question is answered” and now the hero starts working against everything they’ve worked for up until that point. This isn’t always true, but once Gulino pointed it out, I realized how often this happens. Basically the hero realizes that he/she’s been building a house of cards and spends the rest of the movie trying to tear it down.
4. It took me years to figure out that the main difference between the second quarter and third quarter of a screenplay was “the easy way vs. the hard way”. Gulino, unlike Field, does mention this, though he doesn’t emphasize it very much.
5. I like how Gulino explicitly focuses on the audience’s experience of the story, and the need to build false expectations in order to create irony.

Outrageous Statement that Makes You Want to Reject the Book Outright: (On how well you have to know your characters) “I’ll write more than 20 pages, starting with my character’s parents and grandparents on both sides, and then I’ll even use past lives and astrology to further insight into my character.” Ah, the ‘70s…

Areas Where It’s Less Than Helpful:

1. Field, like most screenwriting gurus, is maddeningly generic. Anyone who charges money for their seminars loses the luxury of saying “well maybe my ideas don’t apply to your story.” They have to insist that their ideas are universally applicable, which turns them into mush.
2. And so phrases like “inciting incident” and “plot point” are too vague to be useful. Here’s a typical paragraph: “The function of the Plot Point is simple: It moves the story forward. Plot Point I and Plot Point II are the story points that hold the paradigm in place. They are the anchors of your story line” Oh, okay. Wait, what? It’s meaninglessness. It provides no real guidance.
3. The now-omnipresent phrase “Inciting incident” makes no differentiation between the problem, the opportunity and the conflict. I’ll delve into that more soon...
4. The other huge problem with Field’s structure, as you can see from the diagram, is that it leaves you totally adrift in the second act, without even a recognized midpoint, writers have no clue how to get through the meat of their screenplays. The result is that a lot of Field’s devotees wind up just marking time until the climax finally begins.

Useful Wisdom:

1. For good or ill, Field ideas were generally applicable enough to give the entire industry some common terminology, such as “Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3,” which does greatly help the notes process.
2. Field is the most laid-back of the major gurus. His tone is calm and helpful, he does a great job linking everything back to examples.
3. He’s great with character creation and gives good examples of ways to show character through behavior.

Outrageous Statement that Makes You Want to Reject the Book Outright: The first line has not exactly aged well: “Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse … it will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.”

Areas Where It’s Less Than Helpful:

Campbell was a great man who humbled the world into seeing their myths from anthropological and artistic perspective, but attempts to apply his structure, derived from religious and foundation myths, directly to screenplays are very problematic....

1. Campbell’s heroes start from a happy status quo, untroubled when the story begins, but this makes for very dull characters. There’s no volatile reaction between the character’s internal problems and the external action of the plot.
2. Campbell’s very big on mentors, which I never see the need for.
3. While Campbell’s circular chart is very elegant, how often do movie heroes, other than Frodo, actually “return with the elixir” to rescue their homelands? Movie execs quote this all the time, but I don’t think it applies.

Useful Wisdom:

1. Obviously, we all owe Campbell for doing the research that proved there was such a thing as universal storytelling structure, and that it arose not from the genius of any one culture (as Aristotle would have it), but from the inherent needs of the stories themselves, with independent cultures all over the world discovering similar rules.
2. One aspect of Campbell’s structure that I do find myself quoting a lot is the idea of “finding the special weapon in the cave” during the third quarter of the story (whether the special weapon is an object, a vital piece of information, or just a self-realization). A hero’s ultimate triumph should come from the failure of their original plan, not the success of it.

Outrageous Statement that Makes You Want to Reject the Book Outright: “The character will be good if the purpose is good. This rule is relative to each class. Even a woman may be good, and also a slave; though the woman may be said to be an inferior being, and the slave quite worthless.” Okee-Dokee then.

Areas Where It’s Less Than Helpful: I was assigned to read this on the first day of film school, but it didn’t do me much good. Students are hardwired to reject restrictions, so they pick up structure books looking for an excuse to fling them across the room, and Aristotle has no shortage of those:

1. All heroes must come from royal families (An idea that poisoned English and French drama for centuries.)
2. The whole drama should take place in one day in one place. (Ditto)
3. In general, like most of the gurus we’ll look at, he’s overly didactic (“These are the only possible ways”), practically begging the student to find an exception and therefore reject everything.
4. He had little use for happy endings, referring to the third act strictly as “the unraveling.” He didn’t leave any room for triumph.

Useful Wisdom: That said, re-reading it for this entry, I was shocked at how many of the book’s truths I had rejected only to “discover” them for myself much later. These include:

1. Drama is about a person’s problem, not their life in general: “For tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.”
2. One problem should rule the story: “It should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle and an end.”
3. The purpose of good writing is to take the “and then, and then” randomness of life and transform this into the “and so, and so” flow that exists only in fiction. (For some reason, Aristotle’s Greek is usually translated into Latin here, so this is called post hoc vs. propter hoc)
4. The best dramas end in a realization (ignorance to wisdom) and a reversal (good fortune to bad, or vice versa). These can happen one after another, but in the very best stories, they happen simultaneously.