Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Save the Cat (Page 3 of 4)

He Said, She Said: Lessons in (Buddy) Love

July 3, 2015 / / 7 Comments

For as long as there’s been literary analysis, there has been an effort to determine just how many variations on plot there are, and to codify them accordingly.

Your high-school English teacher no doubt taught you that all conflict can be boiled down to four types:  “man versus man,” “man versus society,” “man versus nature,” “man versus himself.”  Remember that one?

French writer Georges Polti asserted there are Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1916); more recently, English author Christopher Booker argued for Seven Basic Plots (2004).

For my money, none of them quite “cracked the code” until screenwriter Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! identified ten types, or “genres,” and delineated the specific criteria (three apiece) that distinguish one from another—and they’re not what you’d think.  Rather than vague categorizations like “horror,” “comedy,” and “action,” Snyder classified his genres like so:

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Journey’s End: Rushkoff and the Collapse of Narrative

June 22, 2015 / / 21 Comments

And now for something completely different:  How about a magic trick?

Think of your favorite story—book or movie.  (Hell, say it aloud, if you’re inclined—I can’t hear you.)  If you’ve got several candidates, just pick one quickly, at random.

Got one firmly in mind?

Betcha I can tell you how the plot unfolds.

Here goes:  The protagonist is faced with an unforeseen crisis that upends the status quo, and, after some initial resistance, accepts the call to adventure.  Through a series of trials and setbacks in which both allies and enemies are made, our hero finds the strength to rise to the challenge and, in doing so, achieves personal catharsis (what we in Hollywood call the “character arc”), returning once again to an ordinary state of affairs… a little bit wiser for his troubles.  The End.

How’d I do?

It’s a little general, I’ll grant you—I probably wouldn’t wow them in Vegas with that act—but, at your story’s most basic structural level, that pretty much sums it up, no?

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Company of Fools: The Genre of “Amadeus”

April 23, 2015 / / 2 Comments

In a recent podcast, the custodians of Save the Cat! offered a very thin and unconvincing assessment of Birdman’s genre classification, the essence of which was this:  “Look—Michael Keaton’s got a Life Problem!  He goes about fixing it the Wrong Way!  Clearly this is a Rite of Passage!”

In a serendipitously timed blog post, I argued that Birdman is, in fact, a Fool Triumphant, and even held it up for comparison, like two perfectly aligned sketches on tracing paper backlit against a lamp, with a recent (and accurate) example of RoP, Jon Favreau’s Chef, as proof that those stories don’t share fundamental commonality with respect to their genre conventions.

Because that’s ultimately what distinguishes the codified narrative models of the late Blake Snyder from one another:  their conventional criteria—the requirements each particular genre is expected to deliver upon.  A golf cart and a city bus both have wheels and seats and a motor (i.e., a similar fundamental underlying structure), but you’d never mistake one for the other; you’d never expect one to perform the function of the other.

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“Birdman” Triumphant: A Genre Assessment of an Unconventional Narrative

April 3, 2015 / / 7 Comments

I recently engaged in a friendly e-mail debate with a fellow Save the Cat! practitioner over which genre to classify this year’s Academy Award Best Picture recipient, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

Any guesses?

It’s a tough one.  Is it a Superhero story?  Protagonist Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton in a welcome return to leading-man stature) seems to display secret superpowers.  (And the film is called Birdman, which sounds vaguely superheroic—certainly no conceptually sillier than, say, Ant-Man.)

Is it an Institutionalized—a story about an accomplished actor transitioning from one institution (Hollywood stardom) to another (Broadway credibility)?

Maybe it’s a Golden Fleece, with the prize being a successful stage production of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”?  Riggan has a lot invested in the show, after all, and Birdman details the tumultuous backstage events leading up to its anticipated premiere.

You could certainly make arguments for any of those, which only demonstrates just how tricky mastering Blake Snyder’s genre principles can be.

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Diversity on Television: Lessons in Characterization from “Jane the Virgin”

February 24, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Considering the vastly improved representation of minorities on network TV this season—Empire, Black-ish, Cristela, Fresh Off the Boat, How to Get Away with Murder—it isn’t altogether surprising that the most delightful, dynamic, dimensional character to grace the small screen at present has emerged from the freshman pack.  What did catch me off guard, I’ll be big enough to admit, is that it was the least likely character on the last show I expected.

After nearly a decade of identity crisis, anemic ratings, and critical indifference, The CW, bastion of star-crossed supernatural romance and small-screen superheroics, scored its first Golden Globe win this season—for an adaptation of a Venezuelan telenovela, no less:  Jane the Virgin.

Jane offers something a little different than its Big Network counterparts—something harder to categorize:  deftly written dramedy that concurrently satirizes and honors its telenovela heritage, complete with idiosyncratic flourishes like a whimsical narrator and on-screen text commentary.  Some of its characters, like Jane’s father, telenovela superstar Rogelio de la Vega (portrayed by Mexican actor Jaime Camil), are as consciously absurd as the series’ plot twists.  Yet in spite of his ostensible function as straight-faced comic relief, an analysis of Rogelio’s five traits shows him to be a case study in psychological complexity and originality.

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Stoking the Fire: Finding Versatility in Genre Conventions

January 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy represents cinematic perfection to me:  Batman Begins (2005) was the Batman movie I’d waited my whole life to see; then, much like Batman himself emerging from the cover of shadow when least expected, came The Dark Knight (2008), a gripping thriller à la Michael Mann’s Heat in which the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro roles were assumed, quite credibly somehow, by Batman and the Joker; and just as no artist before Nolan had tackled the early days of Batman’s crime-fighting career (including his apprenticeship and inspiration to go vigilante), no one had authored its concluding chapter, either, until The Dark Knight Rises (2012)—it is, if you take my meaning, the Last Batman Story.  For a character that had been in continuous publication—across multiple media—for seventy years at the time these films were produced, Nolan managed to find new, vital aspects of Batman’s rich hagiography to explore.

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Thoughts on “Ghostbusters II”: The Sequel

January 11, 2015 / / 16 Comments

My analysis of Ghostbusters II provoked some healthy debate when it was posted on Proton Charging’s Facebook page yesterday.  It is a testament to Ghostbusters—the movie, the franchise, and the sequel—that it continues to inspire such a passionate following over twenty-five years after the last installment was released.

Speaking of which, I suspect the development of Ghostbusters II went something like this:  Someone on the creative team—probably Dan Aykroyd—became taken with the notion of a river of slime as a key element of the sequel (I believe I’ve even seen drafts of the script in which “River of Slime” was suggested as the movie’s subtitle).  It probably didn’t take long to realize, however, that a river of slime is a noncorporeal entity—flowing ectoplasm has no agenda beyond existing, no antagonistic impulses whatsoever—and this Monster in the House movie was clearly in need of a monster—i.e., someone the Ghostbusters could actually fight.  Hence, Vigo the Carpathian was conceived.

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To Survive and Thrive: Strategic Genre Switches in “The Hunger Games”

December 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments

You sensed it right from the start:  The familiar plot machinations of The Hunger Games series weren’t there to comfort us (in their perversely dystopian way) in the latest theatrical entry, Mockingjay, Part 1.  The world and characters were the same, sure, yet we found ourselves, like the protagonist herself, immediately disoriented in this third go-round; nothing about this adventure, for us or for her, could be deemed business as usual.

So, what changed?

I’ve written a great deal about how indispensable I find Blake Snyder’s ten story models, but have offered little thus far in the way of illustration.  The Hunger Games series, a powerhouse big-studio franchise if ever there was one, provides an object lesson in two distinct types of Save the Cat! genres.

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Fallacies of Storytelling: More on Goals

December 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

It turns out the subject of character goals was in the air this week.

This morning, the “Cats” over at Save the Cat! (which does not include the innovator of the techniques they practice, Blake Snyder, as he regrettably passed away in 2009 quite unexpectedly and prematurely) posted a podcast in which they advocate for the requirement of a tangible, external goal on the part of a story’s protagonist, citing, among other examples, Academy Award Best Picture winner American Beauty (1999) as a case study.  If you read yesterday’s post, you know how I feel about this, but I elaborated my position in the comments section of the Save the Cat! website, which I am also making available here:

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Fallacies of Storytelling: The Protagonist’s Goal

December 4, 2014 / / 4 Comments

Back to the Future.  Escape from New York.  Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Saving Private Ryan.  Even in a cultural media vacuum, what narrative fundamental do the titles to those movies tell you about their respective plots?

They are goal-driven.

Goals can be an invaluable tool to establish suspense, propel a plot, and create an active protagonist.  But, like any storytelling appliance, they are an elective, not a mandate.  In the movie business, insecure creative execs will insist on their inclusion in every screenplay—a silver bullet for any plot that fails to effectively engross (which relates to an industry-wide problem I addressed in my first post:  the misapplication of craft).

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