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A review by patrickwadden
Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need by Blake Snyder
2.0
To be fair, Blake Snyder reveals in the opening pages of the book that he thinks, lives & dies by the dollar. He claims this book will make you a screenwriter, which I believe to be technically true, as long as you don't mind making extremely generic and repetitive films for your career. If you want a guaranteed income in the screen biz, this ain't bad. If you want to make art, move along.
Blake Snyder has boiled down the essentials of writing into what some may call science, but I would call a set-in-stone no-fun formula. Literally, beat for beat and with little leeway for subversion of genre/ creativity. He does not speak one word of how critically appraised by fans or academics films should be, but instead is concerned with creating a bidding war for your script.
He comes off very confident, burgeoning a tad bit on cocky for me, which he does have the paycheck to show for it (as he explicitly tells you in chapter one), but his movies are panned across the board. And I guess to a certain extent you need to sound this way when you're writing a book in the 2nd perspective, a teaching book. But I can't help but compare this with the great 'Adventures of the Screentrade' by William Goldman. Although that book was much older, I took much more away from the self-conscious Bill that constantly doubted his writings and would wear this on his sleeve, while he wrote great pieces!
If there's anything I wanted from this book after getting dug into it is one little paragraph saying "here are all the rules and the page-by-page of making a movie but try to break one rule for your next piece and see how that affects it..."
If the Pen is indeed mightier than the sword, by GOD, don't live & die by your own pen.
Blake Snyder has boiled down the essentials of writing into what some may call science, but I would call a set-in-stone no-fun formula. Literally, beat for beat and with little leeway for subversion of genre/ creativity. He does not speak one word of how critically appraised by fans or academics films should be, but instead is concerned with creating a bidding war for your script.
He comes off very confident, burgeoning a tad bit on cocky for me, which he does have the paycheck to show for it (as he explicitly tells you in chapter one), but his movies are panned across the board. And I guess to a certain extent you need to sound this way when you're writing a book in the 2nd perspective, a teaching book. But I can't help but compare this with the great 'Adventures of the Screentrade' by William Goldman. Although that book was much older, I took much more away from the self-conscious Bill that constantly doubted his writings and would wear this on his sleeve, while he wrote great pieces!
If there's anything I wanted from this book after getting dug into it is one little paragraph saying "here are all the rules and the page-by-page of making a movie but try to break one rule for your next piece and see how that affects it..."
If the Pen is indeed mightier than the sword, by GOD, don't live & die by your own pen.