{"id":5763,"date":"2023-03-10T15:49:31","date_gmt":"2023-03-10T23:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5763"},"modified":"2023-03-10T15:49:31","modified_gmt":"2023-03-10T23:49:31","slug":"new-yorker-trapped-in-robert-mckees-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5763","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker: Trapped in Robert McKee&#8217;s Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><Center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Robert-McKee-Story.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5764\" width=\"375\" height=\"560\"\/><\/center><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This year\u2019s list of Best Picture nominees feels dispiritingly familiar. \u201cTop Gun: Maverick\u201d and \u201cAvatar: The Way of Water\u201d are two colossally budgeted sequels written to internationally crowd-pleasing Hollywood specifications. And, though the non-sequel \u201cEverything Everywhere All at Once\u201d has been celebrated as a burst of cinematic creativity, its strenuous visual and sociopolitical exertions do not mask its adherence to the storytelling tropes of a superhero picture. No element of its narrative, in other words, would surprise the script guru Robert McKee, whose popular guide to screenwriting, \u201cStory: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting,\u201d was published more than twenty-five years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Among those averse to genre spectacle and Oscar-baiting melodrama, McKee has become a byword for screenwriting structures as cynical and manipulative as they are widely employed. (Akiva Goldsman, a specialist in big-budget adaptations of existing properties\u2014\u201cThe Client,\u201d \u201cBatman &amp; Robin,\u201d \u201cThe Da Vinci Code\u201d\u2014is probably McKee\u2019s most notable adherent.) When I lived in Los Angeles, it wasn\u2019t unusual to be in a caf\u00e9, surrounded by aspiring screenwriters with laptops running Final Draft, who were obsessing aloud over Inciting Incidents, Turning Points, and Major Dramatic Questions. In \u201cStory,\u201d McKee bestows these concepts (and many more) with capital letters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/trapped-in-robert-mckees-story?utm_source=nl&amp;utm_brand=tny&amp;utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_031023&amp;utm_campaign=aud-dev&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=tny_daily_digest&amp;bxid=5bd66e4d2ddf9c61943845b7&amp;cndid=20289616&amp;hasha=672da8a2a93433d19c8a10980cb1a883&amp;hashb=10de87e8a6ed67edffb383c745d071c58b725a65&amp;hashc=845e1edcfb63eff8dbcc3fd831ed996bf505a1989fec6d81817b2e678159a4f0&amp;esrc=CDS_OP&amp;mbid=CRMNYR012019\">Read the whole thing at the New Yorker.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This year\u2019s list of Best Picture nominees feels dispiritingly familiar. \u201cTop Gun: Maverick\u201d and \u201cAvatar: The Way of Water\u201d are two colossally budgeted sequels written to internationally crowd-pleasing Hollywood specifications. And, though the non-sequel \u201cEverything Everywhere All at Once\u201d has been celebrated as a burst of cinematic creativity, its strenuous visual and sociopolitical exertions do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,6,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-film","category-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5763"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5765,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5763\/revisions\/5765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}