.colinmarshall revisits the script guru Robert McKee’s popular guide to screenwriting, “Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting,” which was published more than 25 years ago.
,” was published more than twenty-five years ago. Among 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.
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. In “Story,” McKee bestows these concepts with capital letters. 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. The whole of “Story” reads like the passages quoted above, and exudes a hostility toward the deliberate breakage of narrative or cinematic convention. 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.” He frames deviation from Classical Design as nothing more than petulant reaction. “The avant-garde exists to oppose the popular and commercial, until it too becomes popular and commercial, then it turns to attack itself,” he writes. If Art Films “went hot and were raking in money,” the avant-garde would “seize the Classical for its own.” Such passages make me wonder to what extent McKee believes all this, or if he’s simply swept along by his own zeal for the one true screenwriting faith. This quasi-religious confidence in his message accounts, in part, for his seminars’ decades of robust attendance, as does the blunt, sometimes profane manner in which he expresses that message. Yet, for all his sound and fury onstage, McKee did not put himself forth as a lawgiver in his seminars, nor does he in “Story,” whose introduction promises “principles, not rules” and “eternal, universal forms, not formulas.” His interpreters have nevertheless derived from his work sets of commandments, meant to assure deliverance to Hollywood fame and fortune. And, when a film fails, McKee shows no hesitation in explaining how its screenwriter strayed from the path. Yet, among his defining examples of the Archplot, McKee includes such cinephilically unimpeachable pictures as “The Grand Illusion,” “Seven Samurai,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and “The Seventh Seal.” For Ingmar Bergman, in particular, he exhibits a near-reverent appreciation, calling him “one of the cinema’s best directors because he is, in my opinion, the cinema’s finest screenwriter.” Along with the likes of Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Alain Resnais, Bergman was one of the “brilliant Continental filmmakers” who “challenged Hollywood’s dominance” in the decades after the Second World War, but, “with the death or retirement of these masters, the last twenty-five years have seen a slow decay in the quality of European films.”
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