Not All BS is Bullshit

Just some of it, like the BS2 Beat Sheet

Sometimes it’s easy to forget the value of the classics when they’re misinterpreted and reappropriated by the great unwashed.¹

I’ve been charitable enough to re-read Save the Cat recently, and I am pleased to say that there is some useful stuff in there and that it’s a lot more nuanced than one makes it out to be. I can appreciate some of the subtlety and care with which Blake Snyder addresses his subject.

All in all, I think Blake Snyder was a good dude, and I do think it’s a loss to the screenwriting community that he died so young.

In the ten years or so since I last read the book, then, I have to wonder why I’ve developed such an aversion to it.

A few slip-ups in his reading of Pulp Fiction are forgivable, since Screenwriting texts are very individual and hardly academic works. People interpret things differently (and sometimes incorrectly, I’d say). Vincent fucking Vega is the protagonist of Pulp Fiction? Bastard, please.

Also, seriously–I haven’t seen Star Wars since the 90s and I can tell you Luke’s Aunt and Uncle get barbecued, not his parents. If I live to see a day where factual verifiability makes a comeback, I might just die less cranky.

If you’re a working writer, your method is as good as anyone else who’s making a living out of it; the reading public is looking for a wide scope of tactics rather than someone who’s trying to be consistent with a canon of work that has come before.

Hell, if you can throw out all the stuff that came before, douse it with Ronsonol, and toss a lit Redhead on it, all the better.

Where BS is Correct

Snyder also makes a key point that he’s speaking specifically for higher-concept, money-making films. He is willing to accept a challenge thrown at him, inviting discontents to e-mail him their arguments (spoiler: he’s dead), and he gets a few well-deserved jabs in on M. Night Shyamalan.

His theory of empathizing with the character is rudimentary at best–in short, we just need to side with the character–but at least he’s willing to admit that a character can simply be funny or an underdog as part of her “saving the cat.”

Exposition needs to be buried better. Indeed, although we all struggle.

Keep freaky things in a self-contained universe; don’t let the wider public know the aliens have landed.

Don’t spend too long setting up the world; if you do so, the momentum is lost.

Make sure the protagonist is active: my own personal weakness, well-articulated here.

Best of all, perhaps, Snyder makes the point that his 15-point Beat Sheet (the BS2), the root of much evil in today’s screenwriting world, is something that he didn’t even want to include in the book! To Snyder, it should have been a collection of good rules of thumb (that Snyder calls, humility be damned, “Laws of Screenplay Physics”).

Amen, brother. If only the publishers had agreed to that. We’d have a lot less same-same crap-crap polluting Netflix right now.

These are all really excellent points, and I think there’s merit in revisiting them from time to time. It’s a short book and people need to know to read it because the terminology has become totally ubiquitous in today’s screenwriting world.

Perhaps it’s time to do this with Syd Field and a couple more.

The Problem with BS

So if the problem with Blake Snyder’s work isn’t the work itself, what is it?

It seems we have a bit of the reverse problem of what happens today where people don’t read something or don’t watch something and then just shit all over it in Twatts to display virtuousness to a group of damaged people who are all eventually going to eat each other rather than fighting actual, important fights. But I digress…

Rather, what’s happening here is a bit more like what happens when people read something–or at least claim to read it–and don’t get a good handle on it. That is, or they are so unbelievably deluded that they can read a text and interpret it completely differently from the author’s intent.

This obviously happens with the Bible, although the author of Deuteronomy was a total prick, so perhaps intent is relative. But in general, there’s fair bit of nuance in Bible stories and perhaps different interpretations are a feature, not a bug.

Perhaps a better example is Andrea Dworkin, whom I’d recommend to anyone. Particularly Bible fans! Surprisingly cogent and even-handed, despite the insane things that professed followers have often attributed to her. In fact, I even agree with some of it.

The problem with any of these things is that when one reads a text with a chip on her shoulder, it is all too easy to cherry-pick the useful information and take it out of context, claiming that was the author’s intent.

(Cf. Most Twatter criticism of comedians).

In the case of Blake Snyder, the issue is that he wrote an accessible book on Screenwriting, a topic that notoriously invites fuckwits and dilettantes of all shapes and sizes.

And then…

Stay tuned for more next week!

[1] Meaning “money people” and others who wish to lift their leg on your projects; they already wish writers didn’t exist and shit like the BS2 just gives them more ammunition.

rowan