SAVE THE MOVIE!

Peter Suderman

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder
_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html

The 2005 screenwriting book that’s taken over Hollywood—and made every movie feel the
same.


19.07.2013
www.slate.com
If you’ve gone to the movies recently, you may have felt a strangely familiar
feeling: You’ve seen this movie before. Not this exact movie, but some of these
exact story beats: the hero dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes
(Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship); the villain who gets caught on purpose (The
Dark Knight, The Avengers, Skyfall, Star Trek Into Darkness); the moment of
hopelessness and disarray a half-hour before the movie ends (Olympus Has Fallen,
Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6).

It’s not déj{ 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.

When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through
Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t.
Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke
down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—
pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name
and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected
to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-
minute movie formula.

Snyder, who died in 2009, would almost certainly dispute this characterization. In
Save the Cat!, he stresses that his beat sheet is a structure, not a formula, one
based in time-tested screen-story principles. It’s a way of making a product that’s
likely to work—not a fill-in-the-blanks method of screenwriting.

Maybe that’s what Snyder intended. But that’s not how it turned out. In practice,
Snyder’s beat sheet has taken over Hollywood screenwriting. Movies big and
small stick closely to his beats and page counts. Intentionally or not, it’s become a
formula—a formula that threatens the world of original screenwriting as we
know it.
Screenplay gurus like Syd Field and Robert McKee touted the essential virtues of
three-act structure for decades. For Field and McKee, three-act structure is more
of an organizing principle—a way of understanding the shape of a story. Field’s
Story Paradigm, for example, has just a handful of general elements attached to
broad page ranges.

Field and McKee offered the screenwriter’s equivalent of cooking tips from your
grandmother—general tips and tricks to guide your process. Snyder, on the other
hand, offers a detailed recipe with step-by-step instructions.

Each of the 15 beats is attached to a specific page number or set of pages. And
Snyder makes it clear that each of these moments is a must-have in a well-
structured screenplay. The page counts don’t need to be followed strictly, Snyder
says, but it’s important to get the proportions fairly close. You can see the
complete beat sheet, with page numbers and a summary of each beat, in a sidebar
here.

Let’s take a journey through this year’s blockbusters and blockbuster wannabes
and see the big trailer-ready ways in which Snyder’s beat sheet pops up over and
over again. Look at January’s Gangster Squad. After an opening image that sets up
the conflict between Josh Brolin’s hard-charging cop, Sgt. John O’Mara, and the
criminal forces of mob boss Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), O’Mara is called in to see
his gruff police superior. “We got rules around here, smartass,” the chief growls.
“Do yourself a favor. Learn ’em.” That’s Snyder’s second beat, theme stated. And
it’s right at the seven-minute mark, almost exactly when it’s supposed to happen
in a 110-minute movie. The rest of the Snyder playbook is there, too: a story-
starting catalyst midway through the first act, a shootout at the midpoint that
ups the ante, an all-is-lost moment—including a death—between the 75- and 80-
minute mark, and a concluding final act in which the baddies are dispatched in
ranking order, just as Snyder instructs.

Or look at March’s Jack the Giant Slayer. There’s an opening image that sets up
each of the young protagonists’ problems and states the theme at the five-minute
mark, a catalyst at the 12-minute mark, an act break between the 25- and 30-
minute mark when Jack climbs the beanstalk, and a false victory 90 minutes in,
when it looks as if the evil giants have been definitively defeated.

Oz the Great and Powerful is a fun riff on director Sam Raimi’s quirky early horror
films. But check your watch a quarter of the way through and you’ll find a tornado
that whisks Oz, and the movie, into its first act. Once Oz has landed, he meets
Theodora, the love interest—and the B-plot. Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby
adaptation was reorganized to fit the formula, with a party-filled fun and games
second quarter that leads to the decline of the third, in which tragedy looms as
the bad guys close in.

Field and McKee were obsessed with the theoretical underpinnings of

storytelling. But Snyder’s book is far more straightforward. And that’s why it’s
conquered the big screen so thoroughly. Indeed, if you’re on the lookout, you can
find Snyder’s beats, in the order he prescribes, executed more or less as Snyder
instructs, in virtually every major release in theaters today. Even the master
storytellers at Pixar stick quite close to Snyder’s playbook: Watching Monsters
University this summer, I loved the way it toyed with underdog sports and college
movie conventions. Yet the story hits every one of Snyder’s beats, including an
opening image that’s mirrored in the final scene, an act break when Mike and
Sully reluctantly join forces to compete in the Scare Games, a false victory about
three-quarters of the way through when (spoiler!) they “win” the final Scare
Games challenge, and an all-is-lost moment followed by an emotionally charged
dark night of the soul next to a moonlit lake afterward.

Yet once you know the formula, the seams begin to show. Movies all start to seem
the same, and many scenes start to feel forced and arbitrary, like screenplay Mad
Libs. Why does Kirk get dressed down for irresponsibility by Admiral Pike early
in Star Trek Into Darkness? Because someone had to deliver the theme to the
main character. Why does Gina Carano’s sidekick character defect to the villain’s
team for no reason whatsoever almost exactly three-quarters of the way through
Fast & Furious 6? Because it’s the all-is-lost moment, so everything needs to be in
shambles for the heroes. Why does Gerard Butler’s character in Olympus Has
Fallen suddenly call his wife after a climactic failed White House assault three-
quarters of the way through? Because the second act always ends with a quiet
moment of reflection—the dark night of the soul.

And if the villain of the past few years of movies is the adolescent male for whom
it seems all big-Hollywood product is engineered, Snyder’s guidelines have
helped that bad guy close the door to other potential audiences. Save the Cat!
doesn’t go so far as to require that protagonists be men. But the book does tell
aspiring screenwriters to stick to stories about the young, because that’s “the
crowd that shows up for movies.” Following this advice to its logical conclusion
means far more stories about young men—since that’s who shows up at the
multiplex the most. It’s not an accident that the chapter on creating a hero is
called “It’s About A Guy Who … ” not “It’s About A Person Who … ” And with a
young male protagonist, women are literally relegated to the B-plot—the love
interest, or “helper,” who assists the male protagonist in overcoming his personal
problems. It’s not an accident that Raimi’s megabudget Oz movie featured not
Dorothy but a male protagonist.

Watching poorly executed movies with Snyder’s formula in mind can become a
tiresome and repetitive slog. How many times can you watch a young man
struggle with his problems, gain new power, then save the world? It’s enough to
make you wonder: Is overreliance on Snyder’s story formula killing movies?

If so, then all is lost. The major studios increasingly rely on a small number of
megabudget blockbusters for their profits. But big budgets mean big risks. And
the only way to mitigate those risks is to stick with what’s been known to work
before. In other words, formula—and the more precise the formula, the better.
America’s greatest art form is headed straight, as the Snyderized Star Trek sequel
notes, Into Darkness.

It’s not that the formula can’t produce good, fun movies: Monsters University is
very enjoyable. Star Wars, Die Hard, The Matrix, and The Avengers all follow
something like the story path that Snyder laid out. But it does mean that
Hollywood produces way too many movies about adolescent men coming to grips
with who they are (think John Carter, Battleship, The Bourne Legacy, Tron: Legacy,
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, virtually every superhero movie, and the
entirety of the J.J. Abrams canon).

It also means that there’s far less wiggle room for even minor experimentation.
Think of a classic popcorn flick like Jurassic Park. It’s a pretty classic three-act
story, and it includes virtually all of the elements found in Snyder’s beat sheet.
But they are out of order and out of proportion. Now compare that to a modern
megablockbuster like The Amazing Spider-Man, which follows the Snyder
structure beat by beat. There’s a reason that even Steven Spielberg is complaining
that Hollywood is too reliant on formulaic blockbusters.

We can appeal to screenwriters to buck the trend. But why would they? The
formula is incredibly useful. Indeed, I relied on Snyder’s beat sheet to write this
piece, using every beat, in the order he lists. (Try reading this piece from the
beginning and see if you can spot all the beats. Or click here to see a version of the
essay in which they are all labeled.)

I could see the advantages of the beat sheet. It helped me order my thoughts and
figure out what I should say next. But I also found myself writing to fit the needs
of the formula rather than the good of the essay—some sections were cut short,
others deleted entirely, and other bits included mostly to hit the beat sheet’s
marks. It made writing easier, in other words, but it also made me less creative.

That’s why you’ve got that strangely familiar feeling at the movies. Hollywood
needs to learn a screenplay style life-lesson of its own: Sure, sometimes you can
let the formula guide you. But that shouldn’t be the only thing you know how to
do.