A review by ericbuscemi
Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need by Blake Snyder

3.0

I read this after about the hundredth mention I saw of it on the r/movies subreddit. I could talk about how a lot of the advice is incredibly dated (the era of million dollar spec scripts not based on existing IPs is over) or about how the author's big claim to fame is writing a script for a movie which is 14% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot), but the truly astounding takeaway from this book is that it teaches you to write formulaically, down to which page every emotional beat should be on. Forget art, the author says, his method will sell. This screenwriting book is Exhibit A on the impact of late-stage capitalism on art. You may ask why I am still giving it three stars, and the answer is simple — it never pretends to be anything other than what it is, and its advice is solid (the bits on screenwriting, not the outdated bits on networking, etc.), that is, if your goal is to write a soulless screenplay that will now inevitably look like it was created by AI.