On Robert McKee

So CHUD.com's doing a list of The Best and Worst Movie Voice-Overs (Round 1: DUNE and A CHRISTMAS STORY), inspired by the infamous screenwriting guru Robert McKee. Well, Bryan Cox playing Robert McKee in ADAPTATION:

"And God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character."

I already knew that the mere mention of McKee's name would bring out such comments such as "Brad"'s:

McKee is a hack of the highest order -- a failed screenwriter who makes a pile of money lecturing wannabe writers and studio development execs on things any monkey with a keyboard can pick up by watching movies. The end result; everyone following the same template, banging out the same crappy movies with the same beats, same turns, same plots.

I'd heard this commonly-held opinion about McKee even before I ponied up for his super-intensive three-day seminar (9am to 8:30pm, with fifteen minutes breaks every two hours and an hour break for lunch, but still), and had been warned by adaptor--who lives in the Land of Screenwriters, where McKee's name is most controversial--that McKee has his own strong beliefs and ideas, and that I should go into it with a grain of salt.

Thankfully, that was the best advice I could have gotten. McKee's like one of those awesome professors you had in college: dead-on brilliant and right 75% of the time, and when he's wrong, he's at least entertainingly wrong. Ultimately, his course didn't teach me anything I didn't already know on some level, but it was an awesome way to restructure the rules of storytelling.

Actually, "rules" isn't right at all. That's what people like Brad seem to think he's teaching, and McKee made it very clear that he's not teaching rules (which say, "You must do this") but rather principles (which say, "This has always worked."). His main idea is to teach classical storytelling design, with the opinion that one has to master to craft before one can really start effectively deconstructing it.

One reason there are so many shitty stories these days, he believes, is because people want to jump right into minimalism or dadaism or whatever without an understanding of the conventions they're trying to subvert! He says there is no cinematic avant-garde anymore, because all we're getting is people regurgitating the avant-garde of forty years ago! He also pointed out that Igmar Bergman followed classical design for decades, mastering it before he finally began taking it apart.

When you combine that with McKee's enthralling lecturing style (it was honestly one of the greatest solo performances I've ever seen), the result was an absolutely fantastic and thought-provoking experience for me. Yeah, I didn't always agree with him, and sometimes he was spectacularly wrong, but as long as one has a basic understanding of story going in, you'll have an absolutely amazing time exploring all the nuts and bolts of storytelling. Because when he was right, which was most of the time, he was fucking right.

But you know what I want now? I want a second opinion. I want a rebuttal to McKee's teachings. Oh, there are plenty of anti-McKee screeds out there, but they all sound like Brad's: bitter, sour-grapes bitching from people who obviously don't understand McKee's teaching at all, who've never read his book or taken his seminar and are going pretty much by word of mouth (or misunderstanding his role in ADAPTATION).

And they're not simple ideas that can be summed up in a book sleeve or by some schmuck in his LJ. To really understand them... well, there's a reason why the seminar is over three days. Even his "principles" all have caveats and complexity and subtlety and disclaimers. I'd like to see a serious discussion about storytelling arise, with people genuinely exploring what makes a good story and what's missing from Hollywood/literature/comics/TV/whatever today.

I'd like someone to intelligently, sensibly respond and perhaps even rebuke McKee's ideas. Someone who understands his theories and can offer an equally-intelligent rebuttal. So far, the closest I've seen to one is... well, this list on CHUD.

That said, right after I my response to "Brad," pretty much saying all this, another guy--"Joe"--immediately left the following comment:

Robert McKee is full of shit and needs to be impaled by a giant cock.

Perhaps going to CHUD.com is kinda the opposite direction from where I should be looking.

Photos: US West Coast, Day 2, Part 2 (Big Sur to Santa Cruz)

In retrospect, perhaps I was too hard on Hearst Castle. Really, had I been allowed to explore the grounds alone--where I could freely but respectfully wander through the beautiful estate and have my own experience, rather than the one the Hearst Estate wanted me to have--my experience and subsequent report might have been very different indeed. The ideal experiences on this trip have been the ones with just the right balance of direction and freedom.

Really, that balance is at the heart of why I'm doing all this in the first place. But it's far from a simple exploration, as there are many obstacles in the way. Not the least of which being myself. I've been spending much of the time pushing myself into doing things I wouldn't normally do, battling with excuses ("Ten bucks? To visit Sea Lion caves? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh...") and often times just falling back on that most meaningless of all excuses: the schedule. Gotta keep to the schedule.

It's bullshit, of course. My "schedule" is a half-assed collection of things that might be worth seeing on my way North. Because for me, it always been the destination, not the journey. And I'm trying to change that. I'm trying to open my eyes and throw myself into a bigger world with better experiences.

But I'm rambling. I keep trying to sort out these thoughts, but it's like... shit, the closest metaphor I can come up with is that fake spider-web cottony stuff with the little plastic spiders embedded in it. You know, those Halloween decorations? Yeah, like that, only my life right now.

( Let's just get to the photos of Big Sur, shall we? )

When they did "Garfield Minus Garfield," here's where he went

Why I love fiveseconddelay, in two acts.

Act One:



*INTERMISSION*

Act Two:



*curtain*



It never fails to amaze me that people who love XKCD and Perry Bible Fellowship don't care for Red Meat. How very strange. But not as wonderfully strange as FSD.