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A review by teelock
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
5.0
McKee has been criticized by writer Joe Eszterhas, for teaching screenwriting without ever having a script of his made into a film. (However, McKee is credited as writer of the 1994 TV movie Abraham.) McKee has responded to such criticisms, saying, "The world is full of people who teach things they themselves cannot do", while admitting that even though he sold all of his written screenplays, he still lacks their screen credit since they were only optioned and not ever produced by the studios.
Many of the ideas he discusses have been around since Aristotle and notably appear in the work of William Archer, John Howard Lawson and Alexander Mackendrick. Nevertheless, McKee himself tells his students that Aristotle is the basis for much of what he teaches, credits much of his writing on conflict and drama to the teaching of Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, and he often distributes some of John Howard Lawson's writings at his seminar: he acknowledges his forebears and never claims that he is inventing a brand new approach to storytelling. Furthermore, he claims that much of what he teaches was common knowledge 50 or 60 years ago, but that screenwriters have lost touch with the fundamentals of storytelling. In a CBC interview he said that to give his lecture in the 1930s, '40s or '50s "would have been ludicrous". McKee also appears and is criticized in several works, for example, Missionnaire by French author Joann Sfar.
Many of the ideas he discusses have been around since Aristotle and notably appear in the work of William Archer, John Howard Lawson and Alexander Mackendrick. Nevertheless, McKee himself tells his students that Aristotle is the basis for much of what he teaches, credits much of his writing on conflict and drama to the teaching of Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, and he often distributes some of John Howard Lawson's writings at his seminar: he acknowledges his forebears and never claims that he is inventing a brand new approach to storytelling. Furthermore, he claims that much of what he teaches was common knowledge 50 or 60 years ago, but that screenwriters have lost touch with the fundamentals of storytelling. In a CBC interview he said that to give his lecture in the 1930s, '40s or '50s "would have been ludicrous". McKee also appears and is criticized in several works, for example, Missionnaire by French author Joann Sfar.