January 27, 2008

 

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The Writing Show (WS): Want to know what makes successful films work? This week’s guest has figured it out and breaks down fifty films to show you step-by-step how it’s done.

Welcome to the Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I’m Paula B. My guest this week is screenwriter/producer/author Blake Snyder. In his 20-year career, Blake Snyder has sold dozens of scripts, including co-writing “Blank Check,” which became a hit for Disney, and “Nuclear Family” for Steven Spielberg--both million-dollar sales. His book Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, was published in May 2005 and is now in its tenth printing. It has prompted standing-room-only author appearances in major cities around the world. Apparently, the book is not quite the last book on screenwriting you’ll ever need. The sequel, Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, the Screenwriter’s Guide to Every Story Ever Told, published in October 2007, shot to number 1 in the “screenwriting,” “screenplay,” and “movies, history and criticism” categories on Amazon.com.

After Blake’s interview, writer Jeff DeRego lets us in on the top eight writing trends that annoy him.

Welcome to the Writing Show, Blake. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.

Blake Snyder (BS): Paula, it’s great to be here. Thanks.

WS: I absolutely love your book Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, the Screenwriter’s Guide to Every Story Ever Told.

BS: Thank you.

WS: I can’t tell you how much I loved this book.

BS: Oh, I’m so glad, I’m so glad.

WS: As I was just saying to you before we got started, I could read this book over and over and over again and still get something out of it, so I just can’t wait to talk about it.

BS: Oh, I’m so glad. That’s terrific. It was a fun process to work on, but I agree with you, these movies are deep, and there’s lots of stuff to discuss about them. I’m glad you find it useful and enjoyable. That really makes me happy.

WS: Let’s get started with a little background. Tell us about the book. What is the book, and I’m sure in the process of that, you’ll tell us what ‘Save the Cat!’ actually means because that’s a very interesting way of putting things.

BS: Yes. I’m a screenwriter, and I’ve been a screenwriter for a long time, so me and my screenwriting buddies have lots of little sayings for things. When I wrote the very first book, which is called Save the Cats! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, what I wanted to do was kind of break from the traditional academic approach, which I grew up on and which formed my education as a screenwriter, and just be more slangy, a little bit more “inside baseball” kind of talk about screenwriting.

‘Save the cat’ is just one term that my screenwriting friends and I use a lot. This is the ‘save the cat’ moment: when you meet the hero of a movie for the first time and he does something nice, like, for instance, save a cat, that makes us like him and want to root for him and go on the journey with him. Since I coined that phrase, I’ve noticed that it’s more than just a little technique or a trick. I really have come to think that it’s a ritualistic moment between an audience and a movie. It’s when an audience really steps into the shoes of the hero, and it has to be.

I had a blog post about this recently on a movie called “I Am Legend” with Will Smith, where in the first six minutes, he actually saved the cat. He’s the last man on Earth, he’s living in New York City, he’s hunting wild deer among the abandoned streets of Manhattan and then comes upon the deer that he kills, or is chasing, rather, [which] is pounced on by this family of lions. Will Smith is about to take a shot at the lion that took his dinner when the lion’s family wanders onto the scene, including a young cub, and you see the very moment where Will holds back on shooting this animal because he has a young cub with him. Well, right away I like Will, and that’s what I would do. I would not kill that animal, and by doing that, suddenly we say, “He’s us, he’s me,” and we’re more prepared to go on the journey.

So a lot of these techniques are storytelling techniques we’ve been using for a long time. They are important, and if you skip that part in your screenplay, if you don’t have that moment where we go, “Oh, I like this guy”--even unlikable characters have to have that moment where we go, “Oh, I understand him”--it’s a lesser story. The need to understand these things is why I wrote the first book, which laid out the rules of screenwriting I hope in a fun way. And because that book was popular, I got a lot of e-mail from people who said, “We need more information,” and that’s how the second book came along. In Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, I dissect fifty movies. I tell about what I think makes them tick, what makes them work. I’m forever looking for the secret ingredients that make stories work, the immutable laws of screenplay physics that repeat again and again and again in storytelling and screenplay writing. So that’s why the book, and it was a lot of fun to write. I looked at over 200 movies closely to get the fifty that I finally picked for the book and then broke each of those movies down in what I think are digestible bites so you can take a look too.

WS: In the book, you not only dissect the movies, but you divide them into ten genres. I think that’s amazing because all the examples that you use certainly do fall into those genres, although I think in a couple cases you might have a bit of overlap. I’m just wondering how were you able to take all those movies and boil them down to ten? That must have taken an awful lot of thinking.

BS: Yeah. It was a lot of fun, though, and the truth is that I’ve been doing this for a while. But in the two years it took me to write this book, I learned a lot, and I hope that that translates to the page. I was excited about some stuff that I found looking at all these movies, and part of that relates particularly to genre, the type of story that it is. If you tell me, “I’m writing a western,” that doesn’t tell me anything. It tells me a setting, it may tell me a kind of a tone, but I could tell you ten different “westerns” that are completely different story types that I think are better described as those story types. So in the first book, I mentioned that I had these ten--again, me and my screenwriting pals would refer to certain movies in certain ways-- and I talked a little bit about that in the book.

I think my initiation into story-telling was years and years ago when I was in my early twenties, and my friend Jim Haggett said a remarkable thing to me, which was, “Did you know that ‘Aliens’ and ‘Jaws’ are the same movie?” And to me, that was just jarring. I was a young screenwriter trying to figure out how stories work, and when he said that, I thought, “What are you talking about?” He went on to say, “Well, they have three things in common: a monster; a supernatural evil that is intent on eating the cast; a house, meaning an enclosed space into which that monster was let loose to ply his trade.” And the most important thing Jim said was, “Both of these movies have a sin.” “What are you talking about?” “Well, the sin of greed is what lets Bruce, the shark, lunch on the buffet that is Amity.” And the same thing, the sin of greed is what makes the spaceship, Nostromo, with Sigourney Weaver aboard stop at that forbidden planet and pick up that monster. The company has sent them to pick it up knowing that the crew is expendable. Well, Sigourney doesn’t know that in the beginning of the movie, but by the end, she will, and the slow reveal of what the community sin has been is what that movie’s about.

And it’s the same thing with all those movies. So we started calling these movies “monster in the house.” That was our shorthand for that type of movie, and if you look at those movies, well, by God, they repeat again and again – monster, house, sin, monster, house, sin. You can take it all the way back to “The Minotaur and the Maze,” the Greek myth. There’s a cool monster. It’s half man, half bull. There’s a cool house, this dark scary maze, and the sin of that story is incest. The story of uncovering that sin is what “The Minotaur and the Maze” is about.

Why do we like to hear these stories again and again, and what is it about them that we as new writers, writers for our era, have to know to tell a satisfying version of that? Well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out in this new book, and it’s not just that one genre, “monster in the house.” That’s the first chapter, but there are ten unique story types that I think better describe what type of story you may be working on than saying, “ It’s a western.” It doesn’t even matter about tone either. A great “monster in the house” movie is “Cable Guy” with Matthew Broderick and Jim Carrey. Great monster, Jim Carrey, this wacky cable guy. Great house, Matthew Broderick’s wife. And the sin is pretty clear: Matthew lets the monster in the house when he asks for free cable. By committing that sin, he lets Jim Carrey into his life. So even though it’s a comedy--a dark comedy, but even so, it’s a comedy--it’s the same story template with the same message.

So if you’re writing a movie like this and you leave out the sin part, it’s like leaving out the “Save the Cat!” part. You may get to the end of your story, but it’ll be less satisfying because it’s not why we want to hear the story. We want to hear about sin if you’re writing a ‘monster in the house’ movie, and that just goes for all the other categories, too. I have ten in all, and I think they pretty much cover the waterfront in terms of the ten different types of stories we like to hear and that Hollywood likes to make.

WS: Can you tell us what the other ones are?

BS: Oh, sure. This is really fascinating stuff. I would find these things during the course of the last few years writing this book and just be blown away and want to rush to the computer and type this up and tell everybody about it. You keep seeing these patterns and things that are just remarkable, and you have to break out of what you think is a typical story type.

I think one of my favorite ones is the second chapter called “Golden Fleece,” which is basically quest movies. It’s “Jason and the Argonauts.” Jason is going to be king if he can just bring back this golden fleece. Collect a team of guys, including Hercules, the Vin Diesel of his era, and off they go. Various adventures ensue, and finally when you get to the end, Jason learns the real lesson of his trip, which is about himself. It’s not about the golden fleece, it’s about what he’s learned along the way. A road, a team, and a prize: that’s what makes up the golden fleece story.

And yet, it’s not just those typical kinds of geographical journeys. You’ll see that same dynamic play out in a movie like the Walter Matthau version of “Bad News Bears.” Oooh, a road, a team, and a prize. Walter Matthau is a Jason with sciatica, and he’s on this journey, which is to get the prize: the Little League trophy. He collects a team, this rag-tag group of kids who are the losers of the group of Little League players, and they march off to go get the prize. They don’t even win, and that’s very typical of a golden fleece story. They don’t have to win to get the benefits of the journey. And yet, it’s just like “Jason and the Argonauts.”

You see that movie also in “Oceans Eleven.” Aha! George Clooney. A road, a team, and a prize. Heist movies, sports movies, journey journey movies, true trips: all of these are golden fleece stories, and they have the same dynamic. So if you’re writing one, if you’re writing a heist movie, and I say, “You should go watch ‘Bad News Bears,’” you may think I’m crazy, but it really informs what that story’s about. And that was the most amazing thing for me. Suddenly you say, “Wow, okay. Great.”

Golden fleece is one type. I have one called “out of the bottle,” which is about magic movies. I have one called “dude with a problem,” which is stories about ordinary heroes in extraordinary circumstances. One called “right of passage.” One is called “fool triumphant,” which is “fish-out-of-water stories.” I have “Whydunit.” I don’t like to say, “Whodunit;” I like to say “Whydunit” because that’s what those movies are about. “Institutionalized:” These are stories about groups. And I think my favorite is the final chapter, “Superhero.” This is the opposite of “dude with a problem.” It’s an extraordinary person in an ordinary world, and again, we’ve told that story a lot. Moses, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Spiderman. Same story. And isn’t that interesting? The more you go into this stuff you dip into this very deep well of long-time storytelling traditions. And are we happy to be part of it? Our joy, our responsibility is being the caretaker of this generation’s, this era’s batch of stories. So how are we going to put our twist on it and make it something new? It never gets old, and that’s what is just so fascinating for me. I’m talking about screenwriting and movie writing. A lot of times it seems just silly—you go down to the movie theater, and it’s just this week’s entertainment--but there is some real meaning behind the stories that work. So it’s our job to figure out what that is.

WS: Is it something that screenwriters and producers and studios just instinctively know when they look at a script or when they work on a script, or are they aware of all these elements that have to be there?

BS: I think one of the great things I found is, for a long time I thought, “Oh God, do I have to call up the screenwriter and ask him what he was thinking here when he wrote this?” And then I realized that he may not even be the best person to ask, and neither would the director [be], and neither would the producer. I think some of these thoughts come to us from higher sources. I think we’re just little radio antennas that collect the information that’s out there and reformulate it. The stories that work, work on kind of a pre-thinking level. I’ve been in situations many times in studios where you’re sitting there in a notes meeting, and everyone in the room has a sense of, “That payoff isn’t quite enough in act 3, and that sense of justice for a character that has done wrong isn’t quite enough.” Well, how do you know that? How do we all come to this conclusion? How can we all balance this in our minds and figure out what’s appropriate for this particular character or this particular story? I don’t know. I just think there is a pre-thinking part in all of that goes, “This story is satisfying,” “This story is not satisfying.” I think that goes for studios too. You may not know exactly why something works or doesn’t work, but you feel it, and that’s what the development process is. You just hopefully have people that are actively interested in telling the best story you can. I think that’s generally true of everybody. In the experience I’ve had no one goes in and says, “I know, let’s make a bad story.” They really do go in to try to make the best one we can, and I think that comes from the gut. Experience, certainly. If you have experience breaking a thousand stories, well, you get better at it. You certainly get quicker at figuring out what’s wrong. But I always say this, “It’s like the statue of David is in the block of marble, and your job is to get the pieces out that don’t fit. Chip away the pieces that are stopping this statue from becoming.” I think it’s a process of revealing the stuff that doesn’t work rather than micromanaging and trying to make it work. It’s getting out of the way.

WS: That’s a great metaphor. I love that. Like sculpting.

BS: Yeah, and the idea is the sculpture’s already in there. It’s just dying to get out.

WS: That is so encouraging for people who want to write to know that it’s there and all they have to do is find it rather than thinking, “Do I have it in me?”

BS: Yeah. And the truth of it is to keep at working at it until it’s right. It isn’t about applying your concept of it. It’s really just finding what’s already there, finding what works. That’s been my experience, and it really is remarkable in studio meetings where everybody in the whole room has the same idea, and everybody in the room feels something’s not working right.

Again, I always go back to “sense of justice.” What’s the proper punishment for this character, because that always comes up because act 3 is always the hardest. Finishing off how does this end is always hard. For characters who are battered, do they deserve what they get and why? Why do they deserve what they get? Did they work hard enough to be rewarded, and what’s the proper penalty for being the snitch or being the multitude of characters that orbit the hero? What’s the proper payoff? I don’t know why, but I’m thinking of “Real Genius,” that Val Kilmer movie where they’re all geniuses over at MIT. There’s a snitch character with glasses, and he’s not killed or thrown out of school, he’s just embarrassed. Well, that’s sort of appropriate for him. The ending for him is he’ll just be embarrassed. That’s what the snitch guy deserves, and we know that. Again, we’re reflecting real life. The snitch doesn’t deserve the electric chair’ he just deserves to be shunned. How do we know that?

I think it’s life experience, it’s what seems right. But again, I go back to [the idea that] we’re just little radio antennas, and I just think we’re being told the stories. I hate to get too weird about it, but the more I go on, the more I realize we’re not necessarily all in control here.

WS: Let’s talk a little more about what you do in the book, because you don’t just divide everything into ten genres, you also break down these movies into beats. I’m going to ask you what a beat is in a minute, but every one has the same story beats. It’s not that the scripts all do exactly the same thing…well, maybe you can explain it better than I.

BS: One of the things in the first book that I was really proud of and that’s got a lot of good response was something named after me. On a goofy day, I was drinking too much coffee, seriously. I call it “the Blake Snyder beat sheet.” It’s a one-page document where fifteen beats are laid out for a story, and within those fifteen beats, you can tell any story.

In my workshop, I talk about the fifteen beats of a commercial for Pledge furniture wax. You can tell those fifteen beats in thirty seconds, or you can tell it across a feature-length film or a series, like “Star Wars.” Those fifteen beats are, again, back to the pre-thinking part of our gut that tells the rhythm of what a good story is, and all that it’s about in my opinion is transformation. You start a character off one way, and he ends up another way. That’s why we’re telling the story, because the only reason to tell the story is this is the most interesting thing that ever happened to the hero. That’s why we’re telling it. And what that interesting thing usually is is some sort of change, some moment in their life, some adventure where they were transformed. That’s what it’s about.

Jim Carrey starts off as a liar in “Liar, Liar” and ends up not. What happened? I say in the first book many executives and many actors, too, will read the first ten pages of a script and the last ten pages of a script to see if their character changed, because that’s a good story. So plotting out how that transformation occurs is what the beat sheet is. It puts a character into what I call the transformation machine of act two. That’s what act two is. Screenplays are three-act structures, and when the hero enters act two, he doesn’t come back. That’s as true for you and me, too, which is me the writer, and you the audience. We are standing on the train platform, getting on a train, and we’re not coming back. We are going to be permanently changed by going on this trip, and that’s what the hero does too.

So those fifteen points demarcate how that change takes place, and all these things are really about dragging your feet. Who wants to change? No one wants to change. Even if it’s a good change, no one really wants to go through it. It’s painful. The transformation machine is terrible, and we all do it, and that’s why we want to see others do it for us, because it’s painful. In the class, I always talk about every story is basically “caterpillar becomes butterfly.” Well, I can’t imagine what a frightening feeling it would be to be a caterpillar happily crawling around on leaves on trees, waving hi to your caterpillar buddies, and then one day, some horrible feeling happens in your body. What is this? I begin to disappear. I begin to lose my grip on reality. I begin to change, and suddenly, I’m a cocoon, and what a horrible process that is. I’m in this dark place having died. Everything I know is dead, and yet, I get this second urge, which is “I’m going to break out of this thing, and then when I do, I become something I would never have imagined, which is a butterfly.” And that’s every story. It’s scary to change. It’s a death moment to go into that state where you’re in a cocoon, and you’ve given up everything you know. What a horrible thought. What a horrible thing, and yet, on the other side of that, if you’ve done the steps appropriately, if you’ve had the faith, you become something else.

WS: But sometimes that something else is something worse.

BS: Yeah, but those are different kinds of stories. I would say all stories are about transformation. All stories are about a change. And even the stories with an anti-hero are ones where in that moment right before they are killed, they realize that they were wrong. They realize that their lives were wasted or whatever, and again, it’s all about some sort of moment of amazement, some moment of a revelation.

I talk in the book about a movie called “Open Water,” which is an independent movie. A couple gets lost out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, eaten by sharks. Well, they transformed. They are now shark food, but what it’s about really is the realization of the emptiness of their lives. A lot going on in that movie, a lot more than just sharks circling, and it’s more of a come-uppance tale in a sense because of that.

But all these stories fit in that pattern. That’s why I think the beat sheet that I have in both books is so much fun. I apply that beat sheet to those fifty movies, and every one of the fifty movies falls into the fifteen beats. There are some oddball ones that do too, like the movie “Crash.” Multiple story lines, multiple hero tales. And yet, if you chart it out, they all fall into those fifteen points of transformation. So no matter what kind of story you’re writing, I think you can apply these fifteen beats to make it better and make it work and make it more satisfying. I think when it doesn’t work, it’s when you’re not applying those beats to it.

WS: Tell us more about these beats. Give us some examples of what these beats are.

BS: I guess you start by saying most screenplays are three-act structures, and this was sort of my education in storytelling. I learned from a guy named Syd Field. I read his book early on. Syd had this wonderful idea that at minute twenty-five or page 25 of a screenplay, the hero made a proactive choice to go in a new direction, and the same thing could be applied to when you break into act three at page 85. Well, for me as a writer who was used to going, “Fade in, let ’er rip,” and then just typing as fast as I could and running out of gas on page 50, those two points were just remarkable things for me and may still hold true in my beat sheet. I have the break into act two on page 25 and the break into act three on page 85 still, because I think those are important parts. My big revelation was a point in the middle called mid-point in every movie, and you’ll see it. The great thing about these fifteen points on this beat sheet is now that you know, if you read these fifteen points and study movies by it, every movie falls into the pattern. It’s just incredible. At mid-point, you have things like ‘the stakes are raised’ and something called “false victory.”

The best example I can give you is “Titanic.” The false victory in that movie is Kate Winslet and Leo DeCaprio fall into bed together. Well, that’s as good as it’s ever going to get for Kate and Leo. That’s their peaking there, that false victory, followed closely by the “stakes are raised” moment, which is “Titanic hits iceberg.” That two-beat process is every mid-point of every movie. Something peaks, and then the “stakes are raised” beat happens. Titanic hits iceberg, ship starts to sink, that leads to the final conclusion. So it’s things like that, and I have fifteen of them all the way through. It’s a little too complicated to go through each one without demonstrating one particular movie or showing you visually how it works, but they are in every film, and there are some really beautiful ones. But it all goes back to the basic premise: transformation and the resistance to transformation. That’s what creates dramatic tension.

WS: Let’s talk about some of the other small elements of these beats. For example, one of your favorites is “stasis equals death.” What does that mean?

BS: I’m so glad you brought that up because it is one of my favorites. Again, it goes back to the whole “resistance to change” thing. The “stasis equals death” moment happens at the end of the set-up on a movie when we’ve met the character or the hero or the heroes, and this is just before what Joseph Campbell refers to as the “call to adventure.” We’ve met the hero, we’ve learned what the hero’s world is, and then the telegram comes, then the knock at the door. You’ve just inherited your mother’s house in the country, and by the way, it’s haunted. But before that moment, there is a sense that the character’s life will go nowhere unless some change does happen. Stasis means things staying the same, and that means death. If things stay the same for this hero, they will die.

My favorite example is Kathleen Turner in “Romancing the Stone.” Kathleen Turner is a romance novelist, Joan Wilder, and she has a vivid imagination and an imaginary male love interest who she has yet to see in her dreams. In the set-up of that movie, we meet her. She’s successful, she lives in a nice Manhattan apartment, and she has one friend, her agent. She finishes her new book, and she gets toasted by her agent, taken out for a drink, and then there’s a scene where Kathleen Turner just puts the new book up with all the other books that she has written, puts it up there on the shelf, and there’s just a beat where we go, “If she doesn’t get out of that apartment, she’s going to die.”

That’s what “stasis equals death” is for a lot of characters. Change is coming. Change needs to come. You see it all the time. In the movie “Wedding Crashers,” the set-up of that movie is two buddies, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, go to weddings and meet girls to sleep with them because of the romance and vulnerability of weddings. At the end of that kind of funny sequence, it’s a little smarmy, but we get past that because it’s Owen and Vince, and they are kind of lovable knuckleheads. There’s a moment where they’re very successful at this. They are very good at what they do, and then at the end of that hilarious montage, Owen Wilson is in bed with one of these women that he’s seduced by pretending to be someone else and forgets her name. She basically says, “Are you 50% full of it or 75% full of it,” and he says he doesn’t know. Next scene is Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn on the steps of the Washington Monument, and Owen Wilson turns to Vince and says, “You know what? I think we’re too old to be doing this.” That’s the “stasis equals death moment.”

That particular story is about two immature men who have to grow up, but like my caterpillar example, it’s painful. Nobody wants to change. And yet, if these characters don’t change, they’re going to die, and that’s what the “stasis equals death” moment is. Now that you know that moment, you’ll see this in a lot of movies. Resistance to change is part of the early process of a story. As bad as it is for Kathleen Turner to be sitting there in her apartment when she gets the call to adventure, which is “Come save your sister in South America,” it’s comfortable in my little apartment. I’ve set up a world where it may be static, but it’s comfortable. I know what it is. And yet the “stasis equals death” moment tells us that even they know they’ve got to move on.

I love that beat, and I haven’t heard anybody else talk about it, but I’ve seen it in lots of movies. I’ve seen it in lots of stories, and again, if it isn’t in your story, think about it because I think it’s an important part of the process.

WS: You have some other little ideas like that. For example, I love this one, I love what you call it: the “lemon seed.” What’s a lemon seed?.

BS: That refers to something that happens at the mid-point of the movie. One of the other things that is very indicative of mid-point to me is, that’s where you accelerate the pace of the film. It’s back to plot. The fun and games are over, and now we’re going to rush, run to the end, to the finish line. And the lemon seed is really just a kind of visualization that I use in class to inspire you to think about at the mid-point. You think about a lemon seed between your thumb and forefinger, a slippery little lemon seed. At the mid-point, you want to start to squeeze; that’s what mid-point to the end of the movie really is. It’s pressure applied to the heroes, pressure from bad guys, pressure from the team, pressure, and you want to push, push, push, push, push to the acceleration point at the end where it squirts out in the climax of act three. Whenever I turn the corner at a mid-point and start heading toward the finish line, I always think about push it, pressure. We want to think about the lemon seed. That’s, again, most movies. The lemon seed is “Titanic hits iceberg, cold water rushes in, everything’s at risk,” and it’s faster, faster, faster to the end point. So while you’re in the process of writing, you may not know from lemon seeds, but I hope that somewhere in the back of your mind, you think, “Ah, I’ve got to write faster here. I gotta have more happen here.” Even though you may not consciously be thinking of that, I hope that somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re thinking lemon seed, because I do. What I do when I’m working is push it toward the end.

WS: That’s a hard image to forget.

BS: See? Yeah. That’s part of it, too.

WS: It’s very evocative. What’s a “button?”

BS: A “button” is the punch line that gets you out of a scene usually. What’s the button on the scene? It’s usually some little laugh, joke, or a line, an action, something that sort of ends the scene. “What’s the button?” “We need a better button here.” I hear that a lot in studio conferences. The scene sort of ends, kind of drags out, but we need to end it. “Can we have a line or something that makes it end?” That’s the “button.”

WS: Here you have something, another thing with death, and it’s starting to sound a little bit like Brian Fuller, who seems to create a lot of television shows that have to do with death, but you have “the whiff of death.” Is that anything like “stasis equals death,” or is that something else?

BS: Well, it’s all part of the process. My caterpillar example, I think, is appropriate. If all stories are about transformation, the transformation has to involve all kinds of death. Page 75 is the “all is lost” moment in my beat sheet, and it’s a very crucial point. That is where mentors go to die. That’s where Obi-Wan dies. All mentors go to die on page 75.

WS: Really? That’s amazing.

BS: Yeah, it is, isn’t it? And that’s only because it’s part of the process. The hero now has to do the rest on his own. If the mentor’s lingering around, the hero won’t have the chance to do it himself, and he has to learn how to do that. But also, this is the part where people get fired, where people are evicted from their apartments, where girlfriends and boyfriends break up with the hero, and the reason for that is we have to get rid of all the crap. We have to get rid of what we thought was important at the beginning of this movie.

If you go back to the caterpillar example, I have to give up the concept that being a caterpillar is all there is, and I’m going to have to trust that on the other side of this is butterfly, something really, truly remarkable. Well, that’s the place in “Alien,” for instance. There’s a character called--I found in the writing of the book in all “monster in the house” movies--called the “half man,” which I love. This is somebody who has had an interaction with the monster before and come away damaged because of it. Brian Cox is the half man in the movie “The Ring.” Robert Shaw is the half man in “Jaws,” and in “Alien,” it’s Ian Holm who is sort of half man and half robot, I guess. He dies on page 75, and that’s about the time that Sigourney Weaver discovers the truth about why they went and picked up this alien: the crew is expendable, and the alien is valuable because they want to study it for defense technology. They don’t care if the crew dies. Well, that’s the death of an old idea for Sigourney Weaver. When she started this movie, she believed in a hierarchy of the ship’s command and control. She believed in the mission. She believed in the company. She believed in the rules. And now she realizes that the rules are nothing, and everything she knows is wrong. So the death of old ideas happens on page 75, and that’s the “all is lost” point.

To have a true “all is lost” point, you have to have something actually die. I always put that into my scripts, anyway. The “whiff of death” means something real dies, even if it’s a goldfish in the hero’s apartment. I think it’s symbolic of shedding of the old. You see this repeated again and again for the same reason: all stories are about transformation; transformation involves sloughing off of old concepts. And that’s, by the way, the story we like to hear. It describes everything we know about our own lives, too. It goes back to repeating a pattern that is found in real life. It’s painful to change; change has to occur; for change to occur, something has to be given up, and that’s hard. So to see somebody else go through that encourages us, lets us know that we’re not alone, inspires us to be brave, and surrender to unseen powers. That moment has to occur, and you see it again and again: comedies, action pictures, everything. It’s in there for a real specific reason.

And by the way, I love it. I love talking about it. I love this storytelling process. I get very enthusiastic about the study of story. I get very, very enthusiastic about it, because it’s so incredibly interesting. Why do we have to keep going through this again and again? Couldn’t we just be told one story once and get it? But I think they’re designed to keep us on track every day; we need a miracle every day. You can’t have enough stories. You can’t be given a miracle enough, because you need new evidence all the time. That’s just human, and again, it goes back to “the statue’s in there all along.” The statue is in there the whole time. We’re just the facilitators of letting it out, so that you can be inspired, because that’s what needs to happen to continue on. I get chills. I literally do.

WS: I can tell from the way you write because you’re obviously so excited about the concept, and so am I now that I’ve read the book. It’s just so much fun to look at all these stories and talk about why they work and what would happen if you changed it this way and that way.

Let me just ask you a couple more things about some of the terminology that you use. You talk about the “promise of the premise” a lot in the book. What do you mean by that?

BS: Well, that’s really handy for screenwriters, and a big part of this book, too, is how can you write more successful screenplays? How can you increase your odds of selling a script? In my early days, I wrote twenty unsold spec screenplays before I finally got it, that I was writing the wrong kind of screenplay, and I nearly quit, and so I don’t want you to quit. I want you to find your sale faster because I want you to keep going. One of the things I talk about in the book is the importance of the concept of your movie. To me, what the idea of the story is is the key thing. What’s your idea about? I sold a script last year, I’ve sold thirteen spec screenplays, by the way, in my career. I’m very proud of those.

WS: That’s wonderful.

BS: Yeah. Some for millions of dollars, some not for millions of dollars, but as I say in class, every time you take a dollar from the man, it’s a victory for us all. Last year, I sold a script called “Granny,” which is a horror movie. It’s a slasher movie for teenagers, and it’s basically Granny is a senior serial killer who kills teenagers who violate the rules of etiquette, and the poster is, “Granny, she’s off her rocker.” That’s the selling point of “Granny.” That’s what the premise of that particular movie is. It was also easy to write. David Stevens and I sat down and wrote this script, and the idea came to me at the mall.

But anyway, the point is that we are a premise-based business. I think we need to know what the movie is about easily, and in just a few words, I was able to tell you basically what “Granny is”--a new way to do a slasher movie and I think kind of witty--but at least it falls into a category that we know what that is. Well, that’s your premise, and I am a big believer in pitching your premises to people. I think you have to know what your movie idea is about and make it intriguing. So the promise of the premise is what the movie delivers us. It usually comes in a section right after the break into act two that I call “fun and games.” This is usually the part where we see what this movie is about.

In “Miss Congeniality,” which I used in the first book--and I use light, high-concept comedies a lot not because it’s the only movie there is, but I think because it’s easy to see how these things work. In “Miss Congeniality,” Sandra Bullock, she’s a tomboy FBI agent who—“break into two”--goes undercover as a contestant in the Miss America Pageant. Okay. So the “fun and games” of that movie, the promise of the premise of that movie, is tomboy Sandra Bullock getting waxed and putting on her mini-skirt and teetering in her heels and doing that funny water glass demonstration at the contest and all that funny stuff. Well, you find that chunk of the movie right there in the “fun and games” section. It’s right after the “break into two.” That’s the pitch, and by the way, that’s the poster.

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Look at the poster of “Miss Congeniality.” There’s Sandra. She’s wearing her gown, her sash, her crown, and in her thigh, in her garter, a gun. That’s the “promise of the premise,” and we deliver on the promise of the premise in the “fun and games” section of most movies. In detective stories, that’s where the detective takes the case at page 25 and then proceeds to look at the first clues. That’s the “fun and games” of the movie, and by the way, it’s usually the best part of the movie, in my opinion. In “Chinatown,” that’s the part where Jack Nicholson is down at the beach at 3:00 in the morning, and suddenly water rushes out from the drainage tunnel. What the hell’s going on? What is this about? What’s going on here? To me, that’s the best part of the detective story is the mystery of “what the heck is happening?” and all these weird clues that are piling up. What’s going on here?

Well, that’s the “promise of the premise.” When I paid my money to see “Chinatown,” I wanted to have that feeling. I wanted to be intrigued by this mystery. It’s almost a let-down sometimes when you finally tell them what it is, but at least for that little chunk of time, you are really in the “promise of the premise.” It’s the best part of a lot of movies.

Recently--I didn’t see “Transformers” in the theater, but I saw it on the plane, the Michael Bay movie--and no doubt about it, the “promise of the premise” was the best part. What’s going on? This young man has been called into action by these strange, by this car that transforms, and it’s one of the good transform….. I don’t know how it goes, but that’s the most intriguing part of the movie. The mid-point, when you finally hear the plot, you’re like, “Oh, okay, I guess we have to finish this sucker off. I guess we have to finish the plot and finish how it all works out. Yeah. There’ll be a big battle in end,” and guess what? There is. But the most fun part is the mystery of that, like the part from page 25 to 55, where we’re going, “What is this, and how does this work, and what’s that?” That’s why it paid to see this movie. You’re going to have to do the bookkeeping and tell a finish, and hopefully, you’ll do better than I think they did it in “Transformers.” You’ll tell a more intriguing finish with a better twist at the end, but the best part usually is that section right there. And I’m very proud of that section. I mean, no one knew what to call it, and I think “fun and games” is really a good description.

WS: Oh, I agree. I think that’s wonderful. Blake, can you give us your Web address?.

BS: It’s my name, BlakeSnyder.com, and it has a lot of cool stuff on there: some free downloads that are coming soon. We’ll have these tools like the beat sheet you can download and print out and use as many times as you want and a lot of really cool stuff like that.

WS: Thank you so much for being with us today on the Writing Show, Blake. I just love this book. I have to read the title again. Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, the Screenwriter’s Guide to Every Story Ever Told by Blake Snyder. I can’t recommend the book highly enough.

BS: Thanks so much. I really appreciate it, and I love your Web site. I want to go on record and say that, too. It’s fantastic, and I think we’re in the same business, which is inspiring others to be creative, and I think it’s wonderful.

© Paula Hollywood, Inc. 2008