Robert McKee, Christopher Hitchens

I never heard of Robert McKee, or if I did, I didn't remember hearing about him. He wrote a book on script writing, and he's some kind of guru now. He charges hundreds of dollars for his script-writing seminars and has people traveling from around the world to attend.

I had seen a TV scriptwriter who spoke here in town. They videotaped and keep showing it on community access TV. The guy had worked quite a bit on Murder She Wrote among other things. At one point, he complained about the readers---the recent college graduates hired by the studios to read scripts. He said that they had been influenced too strongly by a certain professor, and now they were looking for things in scripts that don't necessarily appear in good scripts. They're judging scripts according to outmoded rules about structure made up by someone who doesn't work in the field and good scripts were being rejected as a result.

He didn't name names, but I think he meant McKee.

I saw McKee being interviewed in English by a Russian broadcaster on RT. Hard to tell what to think of him. He hasn't liked Woody Allen's movies in years, he thought that old movies were better than new movies. The interviewer commented that many Russian people prefer movies from the Soviet era to the Russia's current output.

So anyway, I looked the guy up. Read a little. Watched Russell Brand on YouTube standing outside McKee's seminar gushing over how great he was. Russell Brand was pretty good at that!

I looked up criticism of him and found an interesting article on Salon.com.

Jason Zinoman was working on a book about the history of the horror film. He had talked to countless horror directors. He became interested in writing his own script and, in 2009, attended McKee's seminar which he then discussed in at article here:

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2009/11/robert-mckee-200911?currentPage=1

He points out problems with McKee's views on horror movies and other genres, changes in POV, the role of the hero or main character in horror films, the role of suspense.

But one thing I found interesting was Zinoman's views about what made McKee so influential.

He writes:

So how does McKee get away with being repeatedly wrong while still charging $250 for his daylong course and $645 for four-day seminars? [Prices have gone up since then.] .... By now, we know that his bluster is an act, a carefully constructed device to win your trust. And if you follow a few rules, you can pull it off, too.

Rule One: Drop names shamelessly. McKee tells us that he once received a doctor recommendation from his friend John Cleese, bummed a cigarette from Toni Morrison, and corrected his pal Paul Haggis when he confused two genres over lunch. But my favorite is his anecdote about telling Stephen Hawking (whom he calls “Hawkings”) that he has never read a book by the scientist but is fascinated by the Big Bang. I imagine Hawking rolling quickly away.

Rule Two: Never express a scintilla of doubt. McKee is insightful about some things, especially with regard to structure, but his relative knowledge or ignorance of a subject in no way affects the manner in which he discusses it. He holds forth on politics (“Terrorism is a police problem and that’s all it is”) and the theater (“there is very little crime drama onstage”) as confidently as he does on the Incitement Incident.

Rule Three: Start in a rage and end with poetry. In Adaptation, a wildly imaginative movie that first sends up, then celebrates, and ultimately condescends to McKee, the teacher advises the screenwriter that any flawed movie can be saved with a “big finish.”

This was sort of interesting considering what Katha Pollitt just wrote about Christopher Hitchens. I posted it here a few days ago. She said,

...I think part of the reason why he was so prolific—and the reason he had such an outsize career and such an outsize effect on his readers—is that he was possibly the least troubled with self-doubt of all the writers on earth. For a man who started out as an International Socialist and ended up banging the drum for the war in Iraq and accusing Michelle Obama of fealty to African dictators on the basis of a stray remark in her undergraduate thesis, he seems to have spent little time wondering how he got from one place to another, much less if he’d lost anything on the way. After he left The Nation he said he had a “libertarian gene.” It’s a rum sort of libertarianism, and a rum sort of gene, that expresses itself first as membership in a Trotskyist sect, and then as support for the signal deed of an administration that stood for everything he had spent his life fighting, from economic inequality to government promotion of religion.

You can read the whole thing here:

http://www.thenation.com/blog/165222/regarding-christopher