Has Screenwriters’ Reliance on Story Structure Actually Ruined the Movies?
by CHRISTOPHER BOONE
Christopher discusses the need to keep a structured and fresh approach to writing
Thanks to the wisdom of puppets, we recently learned how the hero’ s journey is a quite prevalent story structure in many successful films. But does the hero’ s journey story structure always work in movies? With the recent spate of summer blockbusters falling far short of expectations, pundits have searched for a common trend for their failure. A recent article from Slate has determined the repeated story structure of Hollywood films makes them all feel the same. More specifically, the article contends that Hollywood relies too heavily on the beat sheet from Blake Snyder’ s Save the Cat screenwriting book to tell its stories. Screenplays require structure, but are screenwriters relying too much on that structure to tell their stories? To make an original film today, maybe we shouldn’ t save the cat.
In his recent article on Slate, Peter Suderman made the following argument for why so many studio films feel the same:
( Theme is stated) 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.
Suderman cleverly adopts Snyder’ s Save the Cat beat sheet to organize his essay, and even points out how the beat sheet forced him to rearrange his essay’ s content, omit certain passages and add new material just to service the assigned beats. Then again, the beat sheet isn’ t designed for writing essays, so naturally he ran into some problems. For the uninitiated, Snyder’ s book Save the Cat lays out 15 specific story beats that he argues every screenplay must have, and even goes so far as to determine on exactly which pages those beats must happen in a screenplay.
Personally, I acknowledge that I have used a version of Snyder’ s beat sheet in the past when I have initially mapped out a story on notecards. Once I’ ve beat out my story, I shift my focus to the hard work of writing the scenes. Those scenes may get rearranged or even omitted to serve the story. New scenes that were never part of the original beats may pop up because the story demands it. I don’ t worry about which beats
112 | WGSA MAG July 2013
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