the screenwriting bible that is to blame for the tedious blandness of blockbusters
When I look at my watch during a movie (which I do occasionally do), it’s not because I’m bored. It’s because I’m checking to see if my guess about where in the runtime we are coincides with what just happened onscreen. (My guess is almost always correct.) I just didn’t know that someone had actually written a book breaking down the formula so specifically. Peter Suderman at Slate:
It’s not déjà vu. Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster.
The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking since the late 1970s.
There’s tons more, and it will all make you despair.
easter eggs
21 Jump Street | Avengers | Battleship | Blake Snyder | Dark Knight | Fast and Furious 6 | Oblivion | Olympus Has Fallen | Peter Suderman | Save the Cat | Skyfall | Slate | Star Trek Into Darkness