Got an Idea? Write a Movie with The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

Save The Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need. Blake Snyder. Michael Wiese Productions. 194 pages. No index. $19.95. http://www.mwp.com/

Have you ever seen a movie and wished that you could write something that would effect your audience the way that movie effected you? Can you come up with plot ideas but run out of steam half-way through the script? Then Blake Snyder's book Save the Cat is for you.

Snyder takes the aspiring screenwriter step-by-step through the creation process for a Hollywood movie. He's got the credentials for it. He's had two films produced Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot and Blank Check, and has sold over 13 "spec scripts." (Snyder doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the career of a screenwriter - most movie scripts people sell are "spec scripts," they don't make it to the sound stage, for one reason or another that is not the fault of the original writer. But...they did sell!)

Snyder is an engaging and amusing writer, with a firm grasp of his craft that he passes on to the reader in easy to understand steps.

He begins with the "log line" - the importance of the writer being able to summarize his or her movie in a single line.

"A cop comes to L. A. to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists."
Die Hard

"A newly married couple must spend Christmas Day at each of their four divorced parent's homes."
4 Christmases (a spec)

If you can't summarize your movie - telling what it's about in a single sentence, getting in a 'hook' to grab the reader's attention, then you probably don't have your movie defined clearly in your mind, and that is crucial.

Next he tackles the issues of cliches, insisting that the writer must give them "a twist." He defines ten types of movie categories:
Monster in the House, Golden Fleece, Out of the Bottle, Dude with A Problem, Rites of Passage, Buddy Love, Whydunit, The Fool Triumphant, Institutionalized, and Superhero, then goes on to detail each one and list the movies that fit in each category - some that you mightn't expect until you think about it.

It's About a Guy Who is the chapter in which he discusses, obviously, the main character - how it must be developed. He discusses character archetypes "(Isn't Russell Crowe Errol Flynn? Isn't Jim Carey Jerry Lewis? Isn't Tom Hanks Jimmy Stewart? Isn't Sandra Bullock Rosalind Russell?") and how to use them.

Chapter 4, Let's Beat it Out, is the chapter the screenwriter who starts out strong and then fizzles has been waiting for. Snyder provides a 15 point "beat sheet" which tells you where to put everything in your movie - every plot point, every piece of development, every advance and reverse, and why. He then illustrates what he means by employing it, in detailed fashion, with the Sandra Bullock movie Miss Congeniality. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book in learning how to write an entire script.

Building the Perfect Beast builds on the beat sheet. He explains how to storyboard the script with 40 - count 'em, 40 index cards. Everything about how characters need to interact, rises and falls, the general formula of practically every American movie ever made is diagrammed here.

Chapter 6 is a fun chapter, Snyder's "Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics." He discusses what he means by "Save the Cat" - show your protagonist to be likeable so the audience will care about him or her, "the Pope in the Pool," how to explain things to the audience without boring them, "Double Mumbo Jumbo" - don't have too much magic - or as Snyder puts it: "You cannot see aliens from outer space land in a UFO and then be bitten by a Vampire and now be both aliens and undead." (Well, you probably could if you were making an Ed Wood type movie, but you probably wouldn't want to do that.)

Other laws he explains are "Laying Pipe," "Black Vet aka Too Much Marzipan". "Watch out for that Glacier," and "The Covenant of the Arc." They all make sense!

The final chapter is devoted to helping writers fix problems with their scripts, from characters that are too flat to action that doesn't move to movies that just don't work.

Each chapter ends with a list of exercises so that you the screenwriter can get practice implementing the advice and techniques.

It's fun, it's informative, you'll be able to complete a good Hollywood script by working with this book.

There are only a couple of flaws. Though this may be the last book on screenwriting you'll ever need, it isn't the first. The aspiring screenwriter isn't told the fundamentals of preparing the format of the script- from detailing the camera angles desired for each shot (close-up, medium, long shot, panning, etc.) to where character's names should appear and where their dialog and actions should appear on the page. (The Hollywood Standard, also by MW Productions, is one book that explains how to do this.)

The other flaw is perhaps a major one, from the view of the jaded filmgoer. Snyder provides tried and true formulas for writing a script - a script for an American audience, come to that. Movies produced in other countries have a distinctly different feel, a different kind of plot development, something very few American films will ever have because scriptwriters don't go for anything new - they're trained to follow a certain formula - to give the audience what it expects to see. Snyder's book reinforces the rut. (Admittedly, even if they try something new, once the studio heads get their mitts on the script they'll change it back to more generic fare, but at least the original author would have tried!)

But, screenwriting is like any other craft. Once you learn your craft - and this book teaches it to you well - and you understand the reasons for the "rules"...you can break them. You can break out of the rut and actually give a jaded audience something genuinely different.

Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. What Is It?
2. Give Me the Same Thing, Only Different
3. It's About A Guy Who
4. Let's Beat it Out
5. Building the Perfect Beast
6. The Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics
7. What's Wrong With this Picture?
8. Final Fade In
Glossary