| | | | | | way, "Truby's Story Coach is only a click away . . . for tips and tools that radically improve the commercial potential of your script." 41 And programs like Dramatica profess to guide the novice writer through all the necessary steps leading to a great screenplay. The software, so the ad goes, "focuses a writer on the underlying dramatics of their [sic] story, or 'deep structure.' By helping writers clarify their intent and underlying argument, Dramatica can help fix story problems and strengthen character and theme."42 Carri re has bitterly, but correctly in my view, summarized this mechanistic approach: "It expresses the American desire to codify everything, not only the screenplay, but cinema as a whole: to take its measure by reducing it to a number of little drawers, with a label on each classifying the contents. . . ."43 Had writing gurus and Dramatica been around when Ince was alive, he not only would have embraced them but also would have made them standard fixtures on his lot. | | | | | | | | | What is this classical model incessantly preached about by Field and company? Someone wants something. Obstacles (people, situations, whatever) stand in the way of the objective. Struggles ensue. Most often, the protagonist triumphs in the end, possibly learning something about him/herself in the process. There are three acts to the journey: the set-up, the confrontation, and the conclusion. And plot points (at least in Field's version) pepper specific pages of the screenplay. This paradigm, to use the fashionable jargon, is now so wellknown that even someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger has no problem explaining its fine points to the viewers of Entertainment Tonight. | | | | | | | | | The central ingredient taken for granted by the formula is that characters are men and women who know themselves fully and transparently. Let us talk about this. Are protagonists in films truly lifelike? Are they human beings who have matured under the twin influence of genes and the environment? Movie characters show few signs of this dual heritage. Once upon a time, Emile Zola wrote no less than twenty volumes tracing the negative impact of a sexual union on the following generations. The interest in Francis Galton's eugenics, however, faded quickly as other writers felt it was too reductionist in nature and too restrictive for good literature. Today, even though most scientists agree that genes do play a part in the formation of our character, such influence is almost never activated | | | | |
