Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 22:34:14 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: WSFA Official List <wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com>,
 WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>,
 bsfsgeneral <bsfsgeneral at bsfs.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Save the Movie!
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Excerpt:
If you've gone to the movies recently, you may have felt a strangely
familiar feeling: You've seen this movie before. Not this exact movie, but
some of these exact story beats: the hero dressed down by his mentor in
the first 15 minutes (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship); the villain
who gets caught on purpose (The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Skyfall, Star
Trek Into Darkness); the moment of hopelessness and disarray a half-hour
before the movie ends (Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast
& Furious 6).

It's not deja 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.

The formula didn't come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a
screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll
Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec
screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant
on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking
since the late 1970s.
--- end excerpt ---

<http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html>

          mark