![]() ![]() He attends the Story Seminar and, with McKee’s help, is able to finish the script. He doesn’t want it to be about people overcoming obstacles. In that film, Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicholas Cage) struggles to adapt the book The Orchid Thief into a screenplay. ![]() It’s a problem at the heart of Charlie Kaufman’s wonderful script for Adaptation, in which McKee features as the character played by Brian Cox. None of these characters would measure up well against McKee’s principles. People who walk away from their own narrative … People whose actions ‘don’t teach us anything about ourselves’. People whose weaknesses of character aren’t balanced by corresponding opposite characteristics, or who are not redeemed by acceptable chains of events. People whose bullies don’t come to harm in the final chapter. People who can’t stop themselves being bullied. I’m reminded of a recent and hilarious list compiled by M John Harrison of ‘things to avoid in popular fiction’, which begins: In other words, his principles are not enough. Indeed, many Hollywood films comply with McKee’s ideas of storytelling without rising above the level of appalling. Though he registers other modes of storytelling – experimental ‘anti-plot’, four and five act stories – it is very hard not to see his ‘principles’ as dictums for very conventional, populist stories. Structurally, McKee outlines the three-act story, so common in film. It centres around a protagonist with a need, who struggles to overcome obstacles to achieve that need. ![]() If McKee’s book is a good place to begin, his theory of storytelling is also extremely conventional. Yet I never recommend it without a slight clenching of the teeth. As a summary of the basics of storytelling – conflict, plot, character, structure – it is comprehensive. McKee’s book is one of the first I would suggest to a new writer looking for an example of how to structure a story. It was, after all, Robert McKee’s Story Seminar. McKee sees himself as a custodian of forgotten truths: at one point, he warned that anyone whose phone rang during the seminar would have to pay him twenty dollars, not for rudeness, but because they needed every moment to cover the essential task of understanding ‘story’.Īs I watched the seminar, at times an almost word-for-word rendition of McKee’s book Story: Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, I found the performance perhaps as fascinating as the content. On stage, he was a dominating personality, standing at the front of the room for up to twelve hours a day over three days to explicate his theories of storytelling, with asides for jokes and for his personal opinions, on sometimes completely unrelated issues. I admired his opinions about film, a subject on which he showed considerable taste, and at the same time felt wary of his certainty about himself and his notion of storytelling, his conviction that stories were a civilising force and that without them, living was unthinkable. A few years ago, I interviewed him for Inside Film. Robert McKee is the best-known screenwriting teacher in the world. ![]()
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