Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Buddy Love

The Cat in the Sprawl: Blake Snyder’s Genres and Postnarrative Fiction

July 23, 2018 / / 23 Comments

The industry-standard storytelling program Save the Cat!, developed by late screenwriter Blake Snyder, provides two chief implements for writers of fiction.

The first is the “beat sheet,” which is just Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey by another (more user-friendly, less academically dense) set of names:  “Crossing the First Threshold” is renamed “Break into Two”; “Tests, Allies, Enemies” becomes “Fun and Games”; “Approach to the Inmost Cave” is simplified as “Midpoint”; and so forth.  The beat sheet offers an easy-to-use mythic blueprint for outlining a narrative.

Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” or monomyth

The second tool, which is really Snyder’s principal innovation, are his genre classifications—the ten different narrative variations on the hero’s journey, each with its own central dramatic question and particular set of story conventions:  Monster in the House is about a killer in a confined setting (Jaws, Halloween, Fatal Attraction); Dude with a Problem depicts an innocent hero thrust suddenly into a life-or-death battle (Die Hard, The Martian, Home Alone); Golden Fleece stories are about a quest undertaken for a defined and/or tangible prize (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ocean’s Eleven, Stand by Me), etc.

The beat sheet offers the writer a universal macrostructural narrative foundation; the genre categories prescribe the requirements/expectations germane to each of the ten subtypes of story models.  The most successful narratives are recognizable as a single genre only, whereas some of the biggest bombs and/or creative failures of recent memory (47 Ronin, Winter’s Tale, The Mountain Between Us) mixed and matched tropes from multiple genres, leaving the audience bewildered and disoriented.

Of course, the hero’s journey/beat sheet doesn’t apply to fiction in the new “postnarrative” mode of our hyperlinked Digital Age, which “is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now, [New York:  Penguin Group, 2013], 34).  So, given that, do Snyder’s genre types, then, have any relevance for nonlinear, open-ended “rabbit-hole” fiction—like Lost, Mr. Robot, This Is Us, and Westworld—for which “an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point” (ibid.)?

In a previous post titled “Saving the Cat from Itself,” I argued that postnarrativity, as a form, hadn’t yet been codified—merely identified—and therefore it would be a mistake to impose Snyder’s templates on series like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.  Beyond that, I haven’t much explored the matter, let alone settled it.

In today’s guest post, longtime friend of the blog Dave Lerner, a.k.a. dellstories, takes on the issue of whether the genre classifications of Save the Cat! have any applicability to postnarrativity.  Feel free to post follow-up questions for Dave in the comments section below, and kindly pay a visit to his Patreon page.  Take it away, Dave!

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Monster Hunting: Some Recent Movies Worth Watching This Halloween

September 28, 2017 / / 26 Comments

The spooky season is once again upon us—my favorite time of year—so I thought I’d share a few horror-movie recommendations.  Despite my curmudgeonly assertion this past spring that I don’t enjoy movies anymore, each suggestion below gives lie to that.

In compiling this selection, I tried to choose A) relatively recent movies, from the last few years, that B) you’ve likely never heard of, hence the reason worthy entries like Get Out, Split, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Conjuring, and The Witch didn’t make the cut.

What all of the following lacked in budget they more than compensate for in creativity; they remind me of what I found so exciting about filmmaking in my youth, before corporations controlled all of our popular entertainments, and Hollywood was ushered into our ignominious Era of the Endless Reboot.

As always, I’ve included each movie’s Save the Cat! genre classification.

 

It Follows (2014)

Genre:  Monster in the House (“Supra-natural Monster”)

This one you may have already heard of (it isn’t quite as obscure as some of the titles to come), but I had to include it for the simple reason that it’s the most terrifying horror film I’ve seen since I was a kid.

After a one-night stand, a college student finds herself afflicted with the mother of all STDs:  an invincible supernatural entity (which can shapeshift to appear as anyone:  an old woman, a middle-aged man, etc.) that follows her ploddingly but relentlessly—night and day, wherever she goes, however far she runs—and will kill her upon catching her.  The only way to rid herself of the demonic fiend?  Pass on the “curse” by sleeping with another person!  Of course, if the wraith kills that unlucky fool, it reverses course to work its way back up the vectorial chain—meaning there’s no way to permanently outrun the malignant spirit pursuing you!

Just like an STD, It Follows leaves a stinging sensation you just can’t seem to shake once exposed.  (I’m actually looking over my shoulder as I type this at 12:45 in the afternoon.)

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Foundations of Storytelling, Part 1: The Logline

March 23, 2017 / / 57 Comments

This is the first post in an occasional series.

With the Second World War looming, a daring archaeologist-adventurer is tasked by the U.S. government to find the Ark of the Covenant—a Biblical artifact of invincible power, lost for millennia in the desert sands of Egypt—before it can be acquired by the Nazis.

On Christmas Eve, an off-duty police officer is inadvertently ensnared in a life-or-death game of cat-and-mouse in an L.A. skyscraper when his wife’s office party is taken hostage by a dozen armed terrorists.

Over the Fourth of July holiday, a resort-island sheriff finds himself in deep water—literally—when his beach is stalked by an aggressive great white shark that won’t go away.

All of the above story concepts should sound familiar—that’s why I chose them.  Yes, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, and Jaws are all popular—now classic—works of commercial cinema.  But they are also excellent exemplars of storytelling at their most basic, macrostructural levels, as demonstrated by the catchy summaries above, known in Hollywood as “the logline.”

When a single image, let alone a single sentence, imparts the essence of a story, the underlying concept is a powerful, primal one

 

THE LOGLINE AS A SELLING TOOL

The logline is a sales pitch:  In a single compact sentence, it conveys the protagonist (respectively:  the adventurous archaeologist; the off-duty cop; the beach-resort sheriff), the antagonist (the Nazis; the terrorists; the shark), the conflict and stakes (possession of the Ark for control of the world; the confined life-and-death struggle; the destruction of a man-eating leviathan), the setting (1930s Egypt; an L.A. skyscraper at Christmas; a summer resort), and the tone/genre (action/adventure; action-thriller; adventure/horror).  You can even reasonably glean the Save the Cat! category of each:

  • Raiders as Golden Fleece (Subgenre:  “Epic Fleece”)
  • Die Hard as Dude with a Problem (“Law Enforcement Problem”)
  • Jaws as Monster in the House (“Pure Monster”)

A cogent synopsis like any of the above allows a prospective buyer to “see” the creative vision for the movie, ideally triggering the three-word response every screenwriter longs to hear:  “Tell me more.”

Note what isn’t included in the logline:  The names of any of the characters.  Thematic concerns.  Emotional arcs.  Subplots.  Descriptions of particular set pieces.  That’s the “tell me more” stuff, and none of it is necessary—it is, in fact, needlessly extraneous—for the “elevator pitch,” so called for the brief window one has to hook to an exec before he steps off onto his floor (read:  loses interest).  The point of a logline is to communicate the story’s most fundamental aspects, and to capture what’s viscerally exciting about the premise.

I mean, if you’d never seen Raiders, Die Hard, or Jaws—if you knew nothing else about them other than the information contained in those loglines—you’d already have a sense of why these are, or could at least make for, gripping stories.  Pitch any one of them to a movie executive, and he can immediately envision the scenes—or at least the potential for them—suggested by the central premise.  Each one piques curiosity and, one step further, inspires the imagination.

The Raiders logline is so compelling because it takes (what was at the time) an arcane scholarly discipline, archaeology, and credibly applies it to an action-film archetype, typically the province of superspies like 007.  It also features historical elements that don’t seem like they should belong together—Nazis and Biblical relics—to envision something simultaneously smart and thrilling.

The Die Hard and Jaws loglines are exciting because they take their police-officer protagonists and essentially reduce them to “everyman” status (unlike Raiders, which features a specialist as its hero) by putting them in overwhelmingly harrowing situations that play to some of our most primal fears:  terrorism and sharks.  In short, they have that compelling What if? factor.

That’s how those stories got sold, and how the movies themselves got made.  We don’t need any information beyond what we get in those loglines to want to see the finished product.  As such, condensing a story to its logline is an absolutely essential skill for any screenwriter.

Let me amend that:  It is an essential skill for all storytellers, novelists included—perhaps especially.  And its applications are far broader than simply marketing.

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Classifying the “Star Trek” Movies by Their “Save the Cat!” Genre Categories

December 16, 2016 / / 18 Comments

Star Trek turned fifty this year (something older than me, mercifully), but you needn’t be a fan to appreciate some of the lessons writers of fiction can take from its successes and failures during its five-decade voyage.  I mean, I probably wouldn’t myself qualify as a “Trekkie”—I simply don’t get caught up in the minutiae.  What I’ve always responded to in Trek is its thoughtful storytelling and philosophical profundity.  “Even the original series, for all its chintziness,” someone told me when I was thirteen, “it was still the thinking man’s show.”

I recall watching The Original Series in syndication, and being swept away by the classic time-travel episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”; finally I understood that Trek was about ideas, and those could be just as thrilling—more so, in fact—than set pieces.  Anyone who was around for it certainly remembers the excitement when The Next Generation premiered, unknowingly kicking off perhaps the first major-media “shared fictional universe” two decades before Marvel got there.  I watched the pilot with my father—which was a big deal, since television wasn’t his thing (the nightly news excepting)—and I haven’t forgotten his lovely, two-word appraisal of the first episode when it was over:  “It’s kind,” he said, with no further elaboration.

It took some years to fully appreciate that assessment.  Having grown up on the adventures of James T. Kirk, the original captain’s renegade spirit and cowboy diplomacy appealed to my juvenile worldview; Picard, on the other hand, seemed like a high-school principal in comparison.  But over time, I came to identify with Picard’s genteel, introspective mindset, and every line he uttered—even the technobabble—sounded like poetry from the mouth of Patrick Stewart, who endowed his performance with such dignity and conviction.  For me, the best part of Star Trek was getting Picard’s closing takeaway on the issue du jour.

The franchise continued to grow as I did, and my wife, whom I started dating at nineteen, was as much a fan as I was, it turned out, and we looked forward every few years to the next feature film, until the series finally, against all expectation, sputtered out with Nemesis (2002) and Enterprise (2001–2005).  Among other reasons for that, Trek had been eclipsed by a new sci-fi franchise—The Matrix—that spoke to the ethos of our new Digital Age.  Perhaps more than any other genre, science fiction needs to reflect its times, and times change; finality is something to be accepted—embraced, even—not feared.  The Enterprise, thusly, had been decommissioned.

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Going Fishing: Classic Movies for the Summer Season

August 16, 2016 / / 15 Comments

It’s the dog days of August here in L.A., and I thought it might be fun to share some of my favorite summer flicks—the ones set in or somehow about the sunny season.  Like my St. Patrick’s Day compilation, this only reflects my personal preferences, not the Best Summer Movies Ever.  As a bonus, I’ve included each film’s Save the Cat! genre classification.

 

The ‘Burbs (1989)

Genre:  Whydunit (“Personal Whydunit”)

Burbs

It didn’t get a particularly warm critical or box-office reception upon initial release, but time has bestowed much-deserved cult status upon Joe Dante’s stylish, quotable horror-comedy, starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, and Carrie Fisher.  Hanks is a Middle American suburbanite who begins to suspect, over the Memorial Day holiday, that the peculiar new neighbors on the block may in fact be satanic murderers.  Dante managed quite a tonal balancing act here in a movie that’s aged remarkably well, and the chemistry and comedic interplay among the cast is aces.  It’s the perfect movie to cozy up to with “a couple hundred beers” when, like Hanks’ hapless protagonist, you’ve opted for a holiday-weekend staycation.  The ‘Burbs is in some respects about the trouble we get into when we have too much free time on our hands—one of three movies on this list to tackle that subject, and all, oddly enough, co-starring Corey Feldman.

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On Tap: What to Watch This Saint Patrick’s Day

March 14, 2016 / / 7 Comments

I grew up an Irish Catholic kid in an Irish Catholic Bronx neighborhood, the northern half of which was so heavily populated with off-the-boat immigrants, in fact, brogues were commonplace.  I spent half my childhood in the bars along Broadway while Dad and I were ostensibly out “running errands,” and it was only upon the unforeseen revelation of his alcohol addiction when I was eleven that all those afternoons spent in the company of middle-aged men with apparently nowhere else to be but some dim, smoky watering hole under the intermittent rattling of the el tracks took on new, illuminating context.

While in college, I worked at an Irish deli on Mosholu Avenue for a married couple, a former cop and housewife with grown children, who eventually sold the business and retired to—you guessed it—Ireland.  (Wish I knew whatever became of them.)  Scenes from the Harrison Ford/Brad Pitt IRA thriller The Devil’s Own were filmed at a nearby neighborhood bar (a friend of mine even took video footage from his apartment window of Pitt exiting the establishment), presumably for the kind of authenticity no amount of Hollywood set dressing can properly replicate.

Most people I know genuinely hate the sound of bagpipes—was it Frank McCourt who said they sound like dying cats?—but, for me, they are a reminder of my own heritage and upbringing; I recall the muffled wail of them every Saint Patrick’s Day from behind the door of 2C, the apartment in our building occupied by my dad’s best friend, when we’d come home through the second-floor service entrance adjacent to the garage.

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Pop-Culture Digest: Musings on Annalise Keating, Postnarrativity, and “Twilight”

October 13, 2015 / / 14 Comments

Readers of this blog (I trust I’m not being quixotically presumptuous by my use of the plural form) have come to expect in-depth, long-form essays here, but today I’d like to try something different:  I thought I’d offer brief commentary on three unrelated pop-cultural developments that are directly relevant to articles I posted this past summer.

 

MURDER!

In my analysis of the first season of How to Get Away with Murder, I concluded by asserting that series creator Peter Nowalk left himself little choice but to reconfigure protagonist Annalise Keating’s psychological profile (yet again) on account of how carelessly he exhausted her backstory in the initial fifteen-episode run.  And, boy, he did not waste any time proving me correct.

Right in the season premiere, we learned (via one of several clunky pieces of exposition) that Annalise has a “wild-child” side (who knew?), and later we saw her partying the night away under the strobe lights of a dance club—with her students, no less!

No, sorry—that doesn’t play.  Here’s why:  It is a complete violation of one of her core traits (and a defense mechanism, at that)—“publicly composed and guarded.”

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He Said, She Said: Lessons in (Buddy) Love

July 3, 2015 / / 7 Comments

For as long as there’s been literary analysis, there has been an effort to determine just how many variations on plot there are, and to codify them accordingly.

Your high-school English teacher no doubt taught you that all conflict can be boiled down to four types:  “man versus man,” “man versus society,” “man versus nature,” “man versus himself.”  Remember that one?

French writer Georges Polti asserted there are Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1916); more recently, English author Christopher Booker argued for Seven Basic Plots (2004).

For my money, none of them quite “cracked the code” until screenwriter Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! identified ten types, or “genres,” and delineated the specific criteria (three apiece) that distinguish one from another—and they’re not what you’d think.  Rather than vague categorizations like “horror,” “comedy,” and “action,” Snyder classified his genres like so:

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“Birdman” Triumphant: A Genre Assessment of an Unconventional Narrative

April 3, 2015 / / 7 Comments

I recently engaged in a friendly e-mail debate with a fellow Save the Cat! practitioner over which genre to classify this year’s Academy Award Best Picture recipient, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

Any guesses?

It’s a tough one.  Is it a Superhero story?  Protagonist Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton in a welcome return to leading-man stature) seems to display secret superpowers.  (And the film is called Birdman, which sounds vaguely superheroic—certainly no conceptually sillier than, say, Ant-Man.)

Is it an Institutionalized—a story about an accomplished actor transitioning from one institution (Hollywood stardom) to another (Broadway credibility)?

Maybe it’s a Golden Fleece, with the prize being a successful stage production of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”?  Riggan has a lot invested in the show, after all, and Birdman details the tumultuous backstage events leading up to its anticipated premiere.

You could certainly make arguments for any of those, which only demonstrates just how tricky mastering Blake Snyder’s genre principles can be.

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To Survive and Thrive: Strategic Genre Switches in “The Hunger Games”

December 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments

You sensed it right from the start:  The familiar plot machinations of The Hunger Games series weren’t there to comfort us (in their perversely dystopian way) in the latest theatrical entry, Mockingjay, Part 1.  The world and characters were the same, sure, yet we found ourselves, like the protagonist herself, immediately disoriented in this third go-round; nothing about this adventure, for us or for her, could be deemed business as usual.

So, what changed?

I’ve written a great deal about how indispensable I find Blake Snyder’s ten story models, but have offered little thus far in the way of illustration.  The Hunger Games series, a powerhouse big-studio franchise if ever there was one, provides an object lesson in two distinct types of Save the Cat! genres.

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