(Plus subplots-that first Die Hard included three or four of those yet, amazingly, did not seem overwritten.) And films can employ thread structure, as Pulp Fiction and The English Patient did, and they can be fully-formed chapters in larger stories, such as the Lord of the Rings and Matrix trilogies. A low-key character comedy like Napoleon Dynamite might feature only 10-15 big beats, while a hard-charging action pic like Die Hard I might cram 20+ beats into two hours. Or, you’ve chosen one story path but can now see that changing just two beats could make the story bigger and much funnier? You tell me-isn’t that worth adding a step to your writing process?Īnd movies? Here, there’s quite a range.
Or, maybe your original story unintentionally morphs into a second story? Or employs ridiculous plot twists? Hard to miss. Perhaps your lead character suddenly stops driving the plot, letting supporting characters take over? That sticks out on a beat sheet. It’s an at-a-glance blueprint that makes it easy, or at least easier, to quickly identify story problems and missed opportunities. We’re talking about a one-page list of major plot points, the skeleton of your story. Nor do I mean the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet version described in the venerable Save the Cat screenwriting guides, which some deem too prescriptive and restrictive to suit every story.
STORY AT A GLANCE: Well, first, to be clear, when I say “beat sheet,” I do not mean the industry definition that refers to a story outline written for one episode of a drama series.
Okay, so just what is a beat sheet? And how many beats should a story have? And how do beats relate to a story’s dramatic structure? But the idea that the office of the presidency would become a provender of entertainment, the idea that one of the president’s key functions would be to provide the public with a few voyeuristic thrills is a relatively new phenomenon.Script EXTRA: Done Outlining? Ready to Type Fade In? Think Again Clintons as a result of the contested 2000 election) commissioned Clotaire Rapaille, a medical anthropologist, to hold therapy sessions with groups of voters to analyze their most primal associations with the American presidency, Gabler goes on to write, “What he discovered is that Americans see their president as a kind of ‘movie character’ whose primary function is to provide ‘cheap entertainment’ for the country…. First describing how Lee Atwater (as campaign manager for the elder Bush whose son would succeed the. These discussions of the comedy industry serve as a crash course in concepts learned from practical experience, allowing readers to take in information and connect it back to the art of storytelling, rather than coming across like a list of steps one must follow to crank out uninspired comedic content.Īt the end of the nineties decade, only months before the demise of the two-term Clinton presidency, Neal Gabler described what the American presidency had become under the influence of the spin that Bill and Hillary Clinton and Kenneth Starr, assisted by an accommodating American media, created. As if writing a synthesised literature review on comedy itself, Blake creates a thoroughly sourced text with example films, scenes, and characters from media in our popular culture. Interwoven with such practical information is a brief history of comedy, spanning from vaudeville to the current era.
Practical tips are shared throughout this section, such as writing style, crafting the perfect title, and what information must be included in the first ten pages of a film script. The text’s first five chapters serve as an introduction to writing comedy and the industry’s structure of jokes, sketches, and films. Despite the common belief that comedy cannot be taught, Blake fights these assumptions through the text’s 272 pages, covering the formulas and patterns of successful comedy films. However, Marc Blake’s Writing the Comedy Movie defies White’s suggestion, clarifying the rules of comedy writing in an engaging and academic text. White once suggested that analysing humour is much like dissecting a frog, in that it dies in the process (17).