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For more than 15 years, Robert McKee's students have been taking Hollywood's top honors. His "Story Seminar" is the world's ultimate seminar for screenwriters, filmmakers, and novelists. Now, Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting reveals the award-winning methods of the man universally regarded as the world's premier teacher on screenwriting and story. With Hollywood and publishing companies paying record sums for great stories, and audiences clamoring for originality, McKee's Story gives you the strategies you need to win the war on clichés. Story is about form, not formula. McKee's insights cut to the hidden sources of storytelling, the decisive differences between mediocrity and excellence. This audio goes well beyond the essential mechanics of screenwriting and is packed with examples from such film classics as "Casablanca" and "Chinatown." Then, scene by sequence by act, he illuminates the principles of story design that take a writer's vision to brilliant realization. Story elevates the craft of screenwriting to an art form. Take it from the pros; if you're serious about your writing, this is the audio that will help you to get your story from page to screen.… (more)
User reviews
Seriously, just get a copy.
Mckee has some strong views about films and he’s not going to let you learn about the nuts and bolts of story without beating you over the head with those views every chance he gets. European cinema? Load of rubbish, last 20 years of cinema? Load of rubbish, Hollywood & Asian cinema?
Overall – The style is not for me but there are useful things to glean
BTW, this was very geared toward screenwriting (yeah, I know it says that right in the title). I hoped to apply it to novel writing, and I was not disappointed, but there were certain concepts that didn't apply to novel writing. Still, he's really good about differentiating between the story formats and how they apply, and I would suggest it for anyone who deals with story in any form.
Aristotle's observations of drama, is very far from the early dramaturgy as 18th century Lessing for instance. In the twenties when dramaturgy started to become a subject on its own in Central Europe (where it started) there was already in the beginning two different
That McKee finds himself "The Aristotle of Our Time" is just indicating the level of understanding of what Aristotle was. The society in which he worked and lives was so fundamentally different from ours that comparisons cannot really be made with what Aristotle thought, but rather how we believe that we understand the meaning and content of these texts, as most scholars dealing with the history of ideas will tell you. That other language-user and guru, Johnny Carson, once advised "It's funnier to say things funny than to say funny things". And I think there's an analogy to be drawn from that insight with how stories should be told.
I was in a writer's group with a very scholarly type once, and we were all sent off to write up an analysis of a script, in the format a reader would present to someone higher up the script-assessment food chain (role-playing game). What he came up with was certain proof that many of the scholarly struggle to see the wood for the trees, and worse, think they're superior beings as a result of this shortcoming. The art of movie writing is to concoct a script that will get made into a film with a multi-million dollar budget. Scripts that don't get made don't count. In the context of this contest, scholarly insight is essentially useless, but an ability to name the parts is essential. Musicologists revere the Beatles (or at least they should) and yet the Beatles' intellectual musical training consisted of living their lives while listening to and playing the kind of music they loved. I suspect that this is how films are made too. To paraphrase a nice line from a fine film - the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. Arguing with McKee as an intellectual is futile. He is who he is, and he's achieved what he's achieved - the thing defines itself by being whatever it is. "The Aristotle of our time" Sounds a bit silly... worse... pointless. He's Mckee, innit?
Here's my suggestion for what qualifies as true greatness - you write something that has popular appeal, meets the demand of and catches the wave of its time, and subtlety and cunningly woven into it is your personal message to the world, the credo that you wish to express. It changes the way people see things, and the world becomes a better place for it. If you have managed that, respec'. No cash could trump that achievement. Here’s another piece of advice for what’s worth: Write sober and then ruminate on it at about 9pm with alcohol and/or weed and a notepad. Write down all the crazy ideas and possible sentences that come to you (but don't touch the actual writing, obviously. You'll regret that the next day).
NB. Funny thing is, McKee's never really written anything of note. Maybe I’m just confusing two completely different skillsets, writing and teaching. I do that sometimes…
Story is nominally written for screenwriters, but the lessons here are applicable for any fiction writer.
I don't get the world of entertainment. It's not a blight like marketing but I'm lukewarm on it.