![]() ![]() The Art Film, McKee writes, “favors the intellect by smothering strong emotion under a blanket of mood, while through enigma, symbolism, or unresolved tensions it invites interpretation and analysis in the postfilm ritual of café criticism.” (As McKee makes clear several times in the book, he is not a fan of café criticism.) He frames deviation from Classical Design as nothing more than petulant reaction. ![]() The whole of “Story” reads like the passages quoted above, and exudes a hostility toward the deliberate breakage of narrative or cinematic convention. McKee celebrates what he calls Classical Design: “Timeless and transcultural, fundamental to every earthly society,” stories of Classical Design are “built around an active protagonist who struggles against primarily external forces of antagonism to pursue his or her desire, through continuous time, within a consistent and causally connected fictional reality, to a closed ending of absolute, irreversible change.” Against this almighty Archplot, McKee first contrasts the Miniplot, which “strives for simplicity and economy while retaining enough of the classical that the film will still satisfy the audience.” Then comes the Antiplot, which “doesn’t reduce the Classical but reverses it, contradicting traditional forms to exploit, perhaps ridicule the very idea of formal principles”-and which has a tendency for “extravagance and self-conscious overstatement.” Accusations of extravagance and overstatement may sound a bit rich when couched in this kind of prose, but McKee’s first career was as an actor: his pronouncements sound more convincing when he personally thunders them. In “Story,” McKee bestows these concepts (and many more) with capital letters. (Akiva Goldsman, a specialist in big-budget adaptations of existing properties-“The Client,” “Batman & Robin,” “The Da Vinci Code”-is probably McKee’s most notable adherent.) When I lived in Los Angeles, it wasn’t unusual to be in a café, surrounded by aspiring screenwriters with laptops running Final Draft, who were obsessing aloud over Inciting Incidents, Turning Points, and Major Dramatic Questions. No element of its narrative, in other words, would surprise the script guru Robert McKee, whose popular guide to screenwriting, “ Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting,” was published more than twenty-five years ago.Īmong those averse to genre spectacle and Oscar-baiting melodrama, McKee has become a byword for screenwriting structures as cynical and manipulative as they are widely employed. And, though the non-sequel “ Everything Everywhere All at Once” has been celebrated as a burst of cinematic creativity, its strenuous visual and sociopolitical exertions do not mask its adherence to the storytelling tropes of a superhero picture. ![]() “ Top Gun: Maverick” and “ Avatar: The Way of Water” are two colossally budgeted sequels written to internationally crowd-pleasing Hollywood specifications. This year’s list of Best Picture nominees feels dispiritingly familiar. ![]()
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