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If you're interested in screenwriting or film structure, I recommend watching the videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/clickokdotcodotuk
The guy regularly deconstructs some of the latest movies and puts the videos online.
Everyone that I have spoken to that has watched the videos finds them useful. I'm a big fan.
Thanks for the link - I'm not sure I entirely agree that many of these stories have the same beginning and end though, which makes the loop structure a bit of a flawed foundation.
Watched his "There is only one story structure" and "X-Men: First Class" videos, the guy's a hack. His stuff is extremely reductive, and since he doesn't establish a frame of reference for the journey, he can pick and choose information that fits into his model.
There's a lot of Campbellian keywords and abbreviations, yeah, but there's no sense of why those terms are important.
It fails since he's just talking with authority describing something, but making no effort at all to explain what it is about a story's structure that makes it compelling.
"You cannot write a successful screenplay without it."
O RLY? How about all those successful ones that you're, let's call it, analyzing that predate your, let's call it, method? And 510+ stages? That's about one for every line of dialogue in a script. It's amazing there's any variety at all in successful movies if they're all trying to follow some elaborate, pre-determined structure.
I agree with paulou, it seems to me to be just fast-talking, selective, uninsightful bollocks, dressed up with scrawly arrows, mild condescension and the world's longest web page.
I find nothing of interest or merit here at all, although the FAQ page is amusing in its barely-contained frustration at how clueless and unskilled the reader is.
Additionally, this page may well contain more PayPal buttons than every other web site in the world put together.
Last edited by fcw (2011-07-08 20:15:29)
I've studied and even written about the same stuff, and it's interesting but really only applies to adventure stories. Straight drama, character studies, murder mysteries, thrillers, horror stories, and episode stories generally don't adhere to this pattern. Some thrillers are about losing innocence but that's a different story from gaining status or growing up.
How does this pattern apply to Revolutionary Road or Wild Strawberries or Psycho?
He does You Only Live Twice—highly structured adventure, to be sure—but Bond doesn't grow up, gain status, lose innocence, or win a kingdom even metaphorically in any of those stories because they're highly episodic. He doesn't even learn anything by disguising himself as a local and practicing martial arts with his allies (as claimed).
And the idea that "all stories start and end with a state of perfection" is hilarious, especially since he admits that most stories skip the "real" start and begin when the state of perfection has already been lost. What about stories where the world remains in turmoil at the end? In his video for The Matrix—an absolutely archetypal hero's journey—he glosses over this by saying "because this is a trilogy, we know it carries on." Not in 1999 it wasn't, and neither was Star Wars in 1977.
And what is the "state of perfection" at the beginning and end of Taxi Driver? Travis isn't actively stalking anyone? And Saving Private Ryan? The war goes on—without Damon OR Hanks.
I think that, while it's useful to talk about common plot points in general terms (travel to an exotic land, meet the villain, train with a mentor...), it's foolish to say that every good story follows the same pattern beyond "the protagonist faces adversity, then learns something useful, then uses that knowledge to overcome the adversity."
Last edited by Zarban (2011-07-08 22:36:17)
Yeah, it's a characteristic feature of most enduring franchises, such as James Bond or Indiana Jones or Doctor Who, that Our Heroes already arrive fully formed, and stay that way throughout the story.
They might be put through an emotional wringer, or dangled from a succession of precipices, but neither Bond nor Indy nor the Doctor are generally on a Hero's Journey, yet that doesn't harm the success of the stories that can be told, when a good writer is involved.
By the way, did you notice the colossal number of different How to write a ... guides you can buy, and the unbelievable number of "advanced worksheets" you can also buy?
Or that, some time during February 2009, the method that you cannot write a successful screenplay without suddenly blossomed from 188 stages to 510+ without so much as a fanfare?
It almost as if the author is so busy writing about writing successful screenplays, that he hasn't hadn't time to write any successful screenplays.
Last edited by fcw (2011-07-08 21:18:13)
Or that, some time during February 2009, the method that you cannot write a successful screenplay without suddenly blossomed from 188 stages to 510+ without so much as a fanfare?
Reminds me of a sports betting website that use to run radio infomercials at the same time I was making a delivery at work. One week they were talking about using their experience to tell you who to bet on, including the hint they knew how the games were to be fixed, and suddenly one week they're touting a computer program that's running simulations. No mention why the change. It was also amusing that the program used 100 variables which were mostly subjective...
This guy is like TVTropes.org only way more annoying.
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