And another box has been checked off my list of things to do. Remember that Miller Analogies Test I took a week ago, the one that disappeared in a cloud of electrons? I took it again today, and this time it worked, and I’m done with that. The preliminary score I got when I finished was 475 out of 600, which disappointed me at first. But according to what I’ve been able to learn in a web search, it would seem to actually be a pretty good result, because of the way it’s calculated. Scores above 500, I read somewhere, are pretty rare.
Here’s an interesting item by way of Instapundit: Apparently there’s a reason all the movies you watch these days seem the same. It’s because everybody’s following the same identical template.
Apparently a guy named Blake Snyder wrote a book called Save the Cat!, published in 2005. It became a hot seller in Hollywood, and everybody has been following his pattern to the letter ever since.
When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.
This shouldn’t really surprise anyone. If any community in history has valued creativity more, and possessed less of it, and lived in greater fear of failing in creativity, than Hollywood, I can’t imagine what it could have been.
I’ve always been leery of step-by-step templates. Partly because I’m too lazy to count pages. For years I’ve written on the basis of a simple, general formula – Hero has problem. Tries to solve it. Fails, making things worse. Tries again. Fails again. Makes things even worse. Repeat until he either succeeds or fails in some way that’s significant.
Call me, Paramount. We’ll do lunch.
Good work on the Miller.
On movies, I wonder if viewers called for or sought out the movies made outside of Hollywood or those that aren’t shooting for the most popular action flick (summer blockbuster) of the year, they would find good, new stories. There are new people trying to tell good stories out there, but they aren’t getting large audiences yet.
From reports I read, 10% of Americans go to movies at least once a month and they buy 50% of the tickets sold. 56% of American adults rarely, if ever, go to the movies. We only go to Pixar movies in my family, but I think we’ll make it out to the two in this summer.
I don’t see any reason for you to be disappointed in the score. I assumed it was your native habit of being self-deprecatory that caused you to describe it that way.
In any case, you’ll do well where you go. It’s work more than anything that makes success, and you’re not afraid to work.
My wife likes romantic comedies – but she prefers the Bollywood ones. Hollywood has grown fat and lazy on its profits, and doesn’t realize it is on the decline.
The first funeral I went to was Snow White’s, and I didn’t care much for movies after that. I bet I haven’t seen more than two dozen movies in a theater in my whole life. It was never important to me, and rarely did I see a movie that I thought was good value for my good money.
But I LOVE the movie fanfares—such hope and promise in just a few measures. If only the movies were as exciting as the fanfares.