“Story”
Written by Robert McKee
(Harpercollins, 1997)
by Sean Gannon
Screenwriters, take note—there’s a required text for you.
Robert McKee, from whom you may receive the occasional fliers advertising his five-hundred-dollar-a-weekend seminars in L.A. & New York, has written an articulate, thoughtful book which I believe is a distillation of his lecture. And it’s very clear why he can command the kind of fee he does.
Story discusses a broad range of screenwriting issues, approaching and attacking them philosophically, defining terms and invoking examples from the cinema and the writings and techniques of story masters from Aristotle through William Goldman. And yet, McKee covers lots of specific ideas and problems in great detail, getting into nuts-and-bolts issues like scene beats and word choices.
It’s pretty damned exhaustive—topping out at nearly 500 pages. And I never lost interest once.
McKee begins by analyzing, appropriately, a story—and what constitutes, more specifically, our goal—a good story, well told. Story is metaphor for life, and we must approach it, and the characters and plot, as such—realistic, but not real. However accurately we want to reflect our world, we must utilize event structure to construct a creative demonstration of truth as we believe it to be. The story is there to prove your idea, through action, without explanation.
(Yes, one might say, but what about true stories brought to the screen? The truth is what happened, so it should be in the script. No, McKee warns, truth is not what happens—truth is what we think about what happens.)
“Story” thoroughly flushes out bedrock principles that by now we know and work toward, but don’t meticulously employ in our work. Take scenes, for instance. Of course, every scene has to work toward the main story and its spine, and we all presummably look through our scenes and weed out the ones that can be removed without affecting the story. But we shouldn’t finish there. “No scene that doesn’t turn,” McKee argues—every scene should bring about a change in at least one value from positive to negative or vice versa, and it can only happen through conflict or revelation.
Even “conflict” as a term is dissected into three categories—personal (conflict with oneself), inter-personal (with others), and external (with nature, the world). McKee argues that the best scenes are complex—meaning, in which the protagonist deals with conflict on more than one of these levels. The French toast scene from “Kramer vs. Kramer” is cited as an example. Meryl Streep has left her workaholic husband (Dustin Hoffman) and their boy, and he finds himself responsible for making breakfast for him. No problem, he convinces himself. But it is a disaster, resulting in himself getting burned, the boy crying, and egg yolks everywhere. And the reason this scene is so effective is that the conflict turns the scene on all three levels—he discovers he is not capable of replacing his wife (personal), so the value of faith in himself turns from positive to negative; his son finds his father untrustworthy (inter-personal), changing from positive to negative the value of the son’s confidence in Kramer; and his own kitchen routs him (external), turning negative the value of his control of his surroundings.
This is just one brief example of one element. Did I mention it’s almost 500 pages long?
“Story” is, dare I say it?, a must-read. McKee effortlessly paves over vast tracts of the mucky territory of scriptwriting techniques through which we writers plod in our struggle for meaningful scripts that are cleanly structured. While I have not attended McKee’s lecture (some of my friends have), I would certainly check out the book first. It’s more complete than a weekend lecture can be. It costs less than one tenth the price of the lecture. And you don’t have to, following his analysis of Casablanca, listen to McKee’s soulful, crooning rendition of “As Time Goes By.”
Read it.