Robert McKee
Encyclopedia
Robert McKee, born 1941, is a creative writing
instructor who is widely known for his popular "Story Seminar", which he developed when he was a professor at the University of Southern California
. McKee is the author of a "screenwriters' bible" called Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. Many of Hollywood's
active screenwriters claim him as an inspiration.
Rather than simply handling "mechanical" aspects of fiction technique such as plot or dialogue
taken individually, McKee examines the narrative structure
of a work and what makes the story compelling or not. This could work equally as well as an analysis of any other genre
or form of narrative
, whether in screenplay
or any other form, and could also encompass nonfiction works as long as they attempt to "tell a story".
). He was profiled by Bob Simon of 60 Minutes for CBS news
, and CNN
recently did a profile and review of McKee and the Story Seminar. The notable writers and actors such as Geoffrey Rush
, Paul Haggis
, Akiva Goldsman
, William Goldman
, Joan Rivers
, Rob Row, David Bowie
, Kirk Douglas
, John Cleese
, Steve Pressfield, among many others have taken his seminar.
In 1990, Robert McKee was brought to New Zealand by the NZ Film Commission, and delivered a three-day seminar on screenplay and story structure in Auckland
and Wellington
. In the audience were Peter Jackson & Jane Campion
. The seminar had a major influence on Jackson, who went on to write and direct Heavenly Creatures
, The Lord of the Rings
, and King Kong
.
In 2000 McKee was a project consultant to major film and television production companies such as 20th Century Fox
, Disney, Paramount
, MTV
, as well as to major software firms (Microsoft
, NASA
, and television news departments. In addition, several companies such as ABC
, Disney, Miramax, PBS, Nickelodeon
and Paramount
regularly send their entire creative and writing staffs to his lectures.
In 2000, McKee won the 1999 International Moving Image Book Award for his book Story (Regan Books/HyperCollins). The book, currently in its 19th printing in the United States
and its 14th printing in the United Kingdom, has become required reading for film and cinema schools at Harvard
, Yale
, UCLA, USC
and Tulane
universities. The book was on the Los Angeles Times
best-seller list for 20 weeks.
It is translated into over 20 languages.
McKee’s other credits include writing and presenting the BBC
series Filmworks, the Channel Four series ‘Reel Secrets’, the BAFTA Award-winning J'accuse Citizen Kane television program which he wrote and presented, and the writing of Abraham, the four-hour mini-series on Turner Network Television
(TNT) which starred Richard Harris
, Barbara Hershey
and Maximilian Schell
.
. Upon receiving the Evans scholarship, he attended the University of Michigan
and earned a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature
. While an undergraduate, he acted in and directed over thirty productions. McKee’s creative writing professor was the noted Kenneth Thorpe Rowe
.
After completing his Bachelor of Arts
degree, McKee toured with the APA (Association of Producing Artists) Repertory Company, appearing on Broadway alongside Helen Hayes
, Rosemary Harris
and Will Geer
. He then received the Professional Theater Fellowship and returned to Ann Arbor, Michigan to earn his Master’s degree in Theater Arts.
Upon graduating, McKee directed the Toledo Repertory Company, acted with the American Drama Festival, and became Artistic Director of the Aaron Deroy Theater. From there he traveled to London to accept the position of Artist-in-Residence at the National Theatre
where he studied Shakespearean production at the Old Vic
theatre. He then returned to New York
and spent the next seven years as an actor/director in Broadway.
, McKee attended Cinema School at the University of Michigan. While there, he directed two short films: A Day Off, which he also wrote, and Talk To Me Like The Rain, adapted from a one-act play by Tennessee Williams
. These two films won the Cine Eagle Award, awards at the Brussels and Grenoble Film Festivals, and various prizes at the Delta, Rochester, Chicago and Baltimore Film Festivals.
In 1979, McKee moved to Los Angeles
, where he began to write screenplays and work as a story analyst for United Artists
and NBC
. He sold his first screenplay Dead Files to AVCO/Embassy Films, after which he joined the WGA (Writers Guild of America). His next screenplay, Hard Knocks, won the National Screenwriting Contest, and since then McKee has had eight feature film screenplays purchased or optioned, including the feature film script Trophy for Warner Bros.
(the film, however, was not produced). In addition to his screenplays, McKee has had a number of scripts produced for television series such as Quincy, M.E.
(starring Jack Klugman
), Columbo (starring Peter Falk
), Spenser: for Hire
and Kojak
(starring Telly Savalas
).
, McKee joined the faculty of the School of Cinema-Television
at the University of Southern California (USC)
, where he began offering his famous STORY Seminar class. A year later, McKee opened the course to the public, giving a 3-day, 30-hour intensive class to sold-out audiences around the world.
Since 1984, more than 50,000 students have taken McKee's course, at various cities around the world: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Boston, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Helsinki, Oslo, Munich, Tel Aviv, Auckland, Singapore, Barcelona, Stockholm, São Paulo and more. In March 2011, he taught his seminar four days in a row in Bogotá, Colombia.
, for being someone who teaches screenwriting without ever having a script of his made into a film, though McKee is credited as writer of the 1994 TV movie Abraham. McKee has responded to such criticisms, saying, "The world is full of people who teach things they themselves cannot do", while admitting that even though he sold all of his written screenplays, he still lacks their screen credit since they were only optioned and not produced by the studios.
While McKee's work might appear to be a fresh approach to story structure, many of the ideas he discusses have been around since Aristotle
and notably appear in the work of William Archer
, John Howard Lawson
and Alexander Mackendrick
. Nevertheless, McKee himself tells his students that Aristotle is the basis for much of what he teaches and he often distributes some of John Howard Lawson's writings at his seminar: he acknowledges his forbears and never claims that he is inventing a brand new approach to story telling. Furthermore he claims that much of what he teaches was common knowledge 50 or 60 years ago, but that screenwriters have lost touch with the fundamentals of storytelling.
McKee also appears and is criticized in several works, for example, Missionnaire by French author Joann Sfar
.
-penned film Adaptation.
, McKee's character was portrayed by the Emmy Award
-winning actor Brian Cox. In the movie, the desperate screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage
) reluctantly goes to McKee’s course, but then – after being “shaken” by McKee’s tough-style response to his claim that “nothing happens in the real world” – Kaufman asks McKee to meet in person to discuss his failure to write the film adaptation
he is working on.
Though the story depicts McKee as little more than an amalgam of hack clichés on the subject of screen writing, Charlie's slacker brother Donald uses the knowledge obtained attending the famous seminar to write a spec script
he then sells for a large amount of money through his brother's agent. The film then concludes rather cynically with the very hackneyed, bang-up ending McKee is ridiculed for recommending, as well as a voice-over epilogue in which—by means of voice-over narration—Cage's Kaufman character admonishes himself for disobeying a cardinal rule of McKee's to avoid voice-over narration.
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...
instructor who is widely known for his popular "Story Seminar", which he developed when he was a professor at the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
. McKee is the author of a "screenwriters' bible" called Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. Many of Hollywood's
Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
Hollywood is a famous district in Los Angeles, California, United States situated west-northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word Hollywood is often used as a metonym of American cinema...
active screenwriters claim him as an inspiration.
Rather than simply handling "mechanical" aspects of fiction technique such as plot or dialogue
Dialogue
Dialogue is a literary and theatrical form consisting of a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people....
taken individually, McKee examines the narrative structure
Narrative structure
Narrative structure is generally described as the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which a narrative is presented to a reader, listener, or viewer....
of a work and what makes the story compelling or not. This could work equally as well as an analysis of any other genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
or form of narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
, whether in screenplay
Screenplay
A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
or any other form, and could also encompass nonfiction works as long as they attempt to "tell a story".
Life and Awards
Robert McKee is among the most widely known screenwriting lecturers. McKee's former students include 36 Academy Award winners, 164 Emmy Award winners, 19 WGA (Writers Guild of America) Award winners and 16 DGA (Directors Guild of America) Award winners (all participated in McKee's course before or after winning their award; not all were awarded for writingWriting
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
). He was profiled by Bob Simon of 60 Minutes for CBS news
CBS News
CBS News is the news division of American television and radio network CBS. The current chairman is Jeff Fager who is also the executive producer of 60 Minutes, while the current president of CBS News is David Rhodes. CBS News' flagship program is the CBS Evening News, hosted by the network's main...
, and CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
recently did a profile and review of McKee and the Story Seminar. The notable writers and actors such as Geoffrey Rush
Geoffrey Rush
Geoffrey Roy Rush is an Australian actor and film producer. He is one of the few people who has won the "Triple Crown of Acting": an Academy Award, a Tony Award and an Emmy Award. He has won one Academy Award for acting , three British Academy Film Awards , two Golden Globe Awards and four Screen...
, Paul Haggis
Paul Haggis
Paul Edward Haggis is a Canadian screenwriter, producer, and director. He spent his early career producing and directing various American and Canadian television network series.-Early life and education:...
, Akiva Goldsman
Akiva Goldsman
Akiva J. Goldsman from Walker Valley, New York is an American screenwriter and film producer. He received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the 2001 film, A Beautiful Mind, which also won the Oscar for Best Picture....
, William Goldman
William Goldman
William Goldman is an American novelist, playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.-Early life and education:...
, Joan Rivers
Joan Rivers
Joan Rivers is an American comedian, television personality and actress. She is known for her brash manner; her loud, raspy voice with a heavy New York accent; and her numerous cosmetic surgeries...
, Rob Row, David Bowie
David Bowie
David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...
, Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas is an American stage and film actor, film producer and author. His popular films include Out of the Past , Champion , Ace in the Hole , The Bad and the Beautiful , Lust for Life , Paths of Glory , Gunfight at the O.K...
, John Cleese
John Cleese
John Marwood Cleese is an English actor, comedian, writer, and film producer. He achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report...
, Steve Pressfield, among many others have taken his seminar.
In 1990, Robert McKee was brought to New Zealand by the NZ Film Commission, and delivered a three-day seminar on screenplay and story structure in Auckland
Auckland
The Auckland metropolitan area , in the North Island of New Zealand, is the largest and most populous urban area in the country with residents, percent of the country's population. Auckland also has the largest Polynesian population of any city in the world...
and Wellington
Wellington
Wellington is the capital city and third most populous urban area of New Zealand, although it is likely to have surpassed Christchurch due to the exodus following the Canterbury Earthquake. It is at the southwestern tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Rimutaka Range...
. In the audience were Peter Jackson & Jane Campion
Jane Campion
Jane Campion is a filmmaker and screenwriter. She is one of the most internationally successful New Zealand directors, although most of her work has been made in or financed by other countries, principally Australia – where she now lives – and the United States...
. The seminar had a major influence on Jackson, who went on to write and direct Heavenly Creatures
Heavenly Creatures
Heavenly Creatures is a 1994 film directed by Peter Jackson, from a screenplay he co-wrote with his wife Fran Walsh, about the notorious 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case in Christchurch, New Zealand. Filmed on location in Christchurch, it features Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet in their screen debuts...
, The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings film trilogy
The Lord of the Rings is an epic film trilogy consisting of three fantasy adventure films based on the three-volume book of the same name by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. The films are The Fellowship of the Ring , The Two Towers and The Return of the King .The films were directed by Peter...
, and King Kong
King Kong (2005 film)
King Kong is a 2005 fantasy adventure film directed by Peter Jackson. It is a remake of the 1933 film of the same name and stars Naomi Watts, Jack Black and Adrien Brody. Andy Serkis, through performance capture, portrays Kong....
.
In 2000 McKee was a project consultant to major film and television production companies such as 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
, Disney, Paramount
Paramount
-Companies:*Paramount Motion Pictures Group, a motion picture holding company owned by Viacom*Paramount Pictures, a motion picture studio*Paramount Vantage, specialty film division of Paramount Pictures*CBS Paramount Television, a television studio and library...
, MTV
MTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
, as well as to major software firms (Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
, and television news departments. In addition, several companies such as ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
, Disney, Miramax, PBS, Nickelodeon
Nickelodeon
Nickelodeon is a US cable TV channel.Nickelodeon may also refer to:-In television:*Spinoffs of the Nickelodeon channel:** Nickelodeon Magazine, a children's magazine.** Nickelodeon Universe, an amusement park....
and Paramount
Paramount Television
Paramount Television was an American television production/distribution company that was active from January 1, 1968 to August 27, 2006.Its successor is CBS Television Studios, formerly CBS Paramount Television...
regularly send their entire creative and writing staffs to his lectures.
In 2000, McKee won the 1999 International Moving Image Book Award for his book Story (Regan Books/HyperCollins). The book, currently in its 19th printing in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and its 14th printing in the United Kingdom, has become required reading for film and cinema schools at Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, Yale
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, UCLA, USC
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
and Tulane
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...
universities. The book was on the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
best-seller list for 20 weeks.
It is translated into over 20 languages.
McKee’s other credits include writing and presenting the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
series Filmworks, the Channel Four series ‘Reel Secrets’, the BAFTA Award-winning J'accuse Citizen Kane television program which he wrote and presented, and the writing of Abraham, the four-hour mini-series on Turner Network Television
Turner Network Television
Turner Network Television is an American cable television channel created by media mogul Ted Turner and currently owned by the Turner Broadcasting System division of Time Warner...
(TNT) which starred Richard Harris
Richard Harris
Richard St John Harris was an Irish actor, singer-songwriter, theatrical producer, film director and writer....
, Barbara Hershey
Barbara Hershey
Barbara Hershey , also known as Barbara Seagull, is an American actress. In a career spanning nearly 50 years, she has played a variety of roles on television and in cinema, in several genres including westerns and comedies...
and Maximilian Schell
Maximilian Schell
Maximilian Schell is an Austrian-born Swiss actor who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961...
.
Early life in the theater
Robert McKee, a Fulbright Scholar, began his theater career at the age of 9, playing the title role in a community theater production of ‘Martin the Shoemaker’. He continued acting as a teenager in theater productions in his hometown of Detroit, MichiganDetroit, Michigan
Detroit is the major city among the primary cultural, financial, and transportation centers in the Metro Detroit area, a region of 5.2 million people. As the seat of Wayne County, the city of Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and serves as a major port on the Detroit River...
. Upon receiving the Evans scholarship, he attended the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
and earned a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
. While an undergraduate, he acted in and directed over thirty productions. McKee’s creative writing professor was the noted Kenneth Thorpe Rowe
Kenneth Thorpe Rowe
Kenneth Thorpe Rowe was a professor and much-loved teacher at the University of Michigan. Rowe taught Shakespeare and modern drama, but was best known as an influential teacher of playwriting.-Approach to playwriting:...
.
After completing his Bachelor of Arts
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
degree, McKee toured with the APA (Association of Producing Artists) Repertory Company, appearing on Broadway alongside Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes Brown was an American actress whose career spanned almost 70 years. She eventually garnered the nickname "First Lady of the American Theatre" and was one of twelve people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award...
, Rosemary Harris
Rosemary Harris
Rosemary Ann Harris is an English actress and a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Throughout her career she has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award and has won a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a Tony Award, an Obie, and five Drama Desk Awards.-Early life:Harris was born in...
and Will Geer
Will Geer
Will Geer was an American actor and social activist. His original name was William Aughe Ghere. He is remembered for his portrayal of Grandpa Zebulon Tyler Walton in the 1970s TV series, The Waltons....
. He then received the Professional Theater Fellowship and returned to Ann Arbor, Michigan to earn his Master’s degree in Theater Arts.
Upon graduating, McKee directed the Toledo Repertory Company, acted with the American Drama Festival, and became Artistic Director of the Aaron Deroy Theater. From there he traveled to London to accept the position of Artist-in-Residence at the National Theatre
Royal National Theatre
The Royal National Theatre in London is one of the United Kingdom's two most prominent publicly funded theatre companies, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company...
where he studied Shakespearean production at the Old Vic
Old Vic
The Old Vic is a theatre located just south-east of Waterloo Station in London on the corner of The Cut and Waterloo Road. Established in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, it was taken over by Emma Cons in 1880 when it was known formally as the Royal Victoria Hall. In 1898, a niece of Cons, Lilian...
theatre. He then returned to New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
and spent the next seven years as an actor/director in Broadway.
Mid-life in the film industry
After deciding to move his career to filmFilm
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, McKee attended Cinema School at the University of Michigan. While there, he directed two short films: A Day Off, which he also wrote, and Talk To Me Like The Rain, adapted from a one-act play by Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
. These two films won the Cine Eagle Award, awards at the Brussels and Grenoble Film Festivals, and various prizes at the Delta, Rochester, Chicago and Baltimore Film Festivals.
In 1979, McKee moved to Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, where he began to write screenplays and work as a story analyst for United Artists
United Artists
United Artists Corporation is an American film studio. The original studio of that name was founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks....
and NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
. He sold his first screenplay Dead Files to AVCO/Embassy Films, after which he joined the WGA (Writers Guild of America). His next screenplay, Hard Knocks, won the National Screenwriting Contest, and since then McKee has had eight feature film screenplays purchased or optioned, including the feature film script Trophy for Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
(the film, however, was not produced). In addition to his screenplays, McKee has had a number of scripts produced for television series such as Quincy, M.E.
Quincy, M.E.
Quincy, M.E., also called Quincy, is a United States television series from Universal Studios that aired from October 3, 1976, to September 5, 1983, on NBC...
(starring Jack Klugman
Jack Klugman
Jacob Joachim "Jack" Klugman is an American stage, film and television actor known for his roles in sitcoms, movies, and television and on Broadway...
), Columbo (starring Peter Falk
Peter Falk
Peter Michael Falk was an American actor, best known for his role as Lieutenant Columbo in the television series Columbo...
), Spenser: for Hire
Spenser: For Hire
Spenser: For Hire is a mystery television series based on Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels. The series, developed for TV by John Wilder, differs from the novels, mostly in its lesser degree of detail....
and Kojak
Kojak
Kojak is an American television series starring Telly Savalas as the title character, bald New York City Police Department Detective Lieutenant Theo Kojak. It aired from October 24, 1973, to March 18, 1978, on CBS. It took the time slot of the popular Cannon series, which was moved one hour earlier...
(starring Telly Savalas
Telly Savalas
Aristotelis "Telly" Savalas was an American film and television actor and singer, whose career spanned four decades. Best known for playing the title role in the 1970s crime drama Kojak, Savalas was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Birdman of Alcatraz...
).
Starting the STORY seminar
In 1983, as Fulbright ScholarFulbright Program
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...
, McKee joined the faculty of the School of Cinema-Television
USC School of Cinematic Arts
The USC School of Cinematic Arts, until 2006 named the School of Cinema-Television , is a film school within the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. It is the oldest and largest such school in the United States, established in 1929 as a joint venture with the Academy of...
at the University of Southern California (USC)
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
, where he began offering his famous STORY Seminar class. A year later, McKee opened the course to the public, giving a 3-day, 30-hour intensive class to sold-out audiences around the world.
Since 1984, more than 50,000 students have taken McKee's course, at various cities around the world: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Boston, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Helsinki, Oslo, Munich, Tel Aviv, Auckland, Singapore, Barcelona, Stockholm, São Paulo and more. In March 2011, he taught his seminar four days in a row in Bogotá, Colombia.
Criticism
McKee has been criticized by Joe EszterhasJoe Eszterhas
József A. "Joe" Eszterhas is a Hungarian-American writer, best known for his work on the pulp erotic films Basic Instinct and Showgirls. He has also written several non-fiction books, including an autobiography entitled Hollywood Animal.-Early life:Eszterhas was born in Csákánydoroszló, Hungary,...
, for being someone who teaches screenwriting without ever having a script of his made into a film, though McKee is credited as writer of the 1994 TV movie Abraham. McKee has responded to such criticisms, saying, "The world is full of people who teach things they themselves cannot do", while admitting that even though he sold all of his written screenplays, he still lacks their screen credit since they were only optioned and not produced by the studios.
While McKee's work might appear to be a fresh approach to story structure, many of the ideas he discusses have been around since Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
and notably appear in the work of William Archer
William Archer
William Archer may refer to:* William S. Archer , U.S. Senator and Representative from Virginia* William Archer Irish naturalist and microscopist especially interested in Protozoa and Desmids...
, John Howard Lawson
John Howard Lawson
John Howard Lawson was an American writer. He was head of the Hollywood division of the Communist Party USA. He was also the cell's cultural manager, and answered directly to V.J. Jerome, the Party's New York-based cultural chief...
and Alexander Mackendrick
Alexander Mackendrick
Alexander Mackendrick was a Scottish American director and teacher. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and later moved to Scotland...
. Nevertheless, McKee himself tells his students that Aristotle is the basis for much of what he teaches and he often distributes some of John Howard Lawson's writings at his seminar: he acknowledges his forbears and never claims that he is inventing a brand new approach to story telling. Furthermore he claims that much of what he teaches was common knowledge 50 or 60 years ago, but that screenwriters have lost touch with the fundamentals of storytelling.
McKee also appears and is criticized in several works, for example, Missionnaire by French author Joann Sfar
Joann Sfar
Joann Sfar is a French comics artist, comic book creator and film director.-Life and career:Sfar was born in Nice. He is considered one of the most important artists of the new wave of Franco-Belgian comics. Many of his comics were published by L'Association which was founded in 1990 by...
.
Popular culture
In the Charlie KaufmanCharlie Kaufman
Charles Stuart "Charlie" Kaufman is an American screenwriter, producer, and director. His film work includes Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York...
-penned film Adaptation.
Adaptation.
Adaptation. is a 2002 American comedy-drama film directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman. The film is based on Susan Orlean's non-fiction book The Orchid Thief through self-referential events...
, McKee's character was portrayed by the Emmy Award
Emmy Award
An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...
-winning actor Brian Cox. In the movie, the desperate screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage is an American actor, producer and director, having appeared in over 60 films including Raising Arizona , The Rock , Face/Off , Gone in 60 Seconds , Adaptation , National Treasure , Ghost Rider , Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans , and...
) reluctantly goes to McKee’s course, but then – after being “shaken” by McKee’s tough-style response to his claim that “nothing happens in the real world” – Kaufman asks McKee to meet in person to discuss his failure to write the film adaptation
Film adaptation
Film adaptation is the transfer of a written work to a feature film. It is a type of derivative work.A common form of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis of a feature film, but film adaptation includes the use of non-fiction , autobiography, comic book, scripture, plays, and even...
he is working on.
Though the story depicts McKee as little more than an amalgam of hack clichés on the subject of screen writing, Charlie's slacker brother Donald uses the knowledge obtained attending the famous seminar to write a spec script
Spec script
A spec script, also known as a speculative screenplay, is a non-commissioned unsolicited screenplay. It is usually written by a screenwriter who hopes to have the script optioned and eventually purchased by a producer, production company, or studio....
he then sells for a large amount of money through his brother's agent. The film then concludes rather cynically with the very hackneyed, bang-up ending McKee is ridiculed for recommending, as well as a voice-over epilogue in which—by means of voice-over narration—Cage's Kaufman character admonishes himself for disobeying a cardinal rule of McKee's to avoid voice-over narration.
Anecdotes
- McKee is known to object to the French-originated "auteur theoryAuteur theoryIn film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur"...
", which states that the director is the de-facto author of a movie. McKee states otherwise, that the writer/screenwriter is in fact the most important creator of the movie. - In a HaaretzHaaretzHaaretz is Israel's oldest daily newspaper. It was founded in 1918 and is now published in both Hebrew and English in Berliner format. The English edition is published and sold together with the International Herald Tribune. Both Hebrew and English editions can be read on the Internet...
story http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/782893.html (in Hebrew) on November 2, 2006 McKee was quoted as saying in front of a Tel Aviv audience that Israelis have a rough sense of humor, completely different from the known worldwide Jewish one, since Israelis are living in a harsh reality which leads them to lose their sense of humor.
External links
- Robert McKee's Story Seminar — Official Web site
- Interview with Robert McKee by The New Yorker
- CNN article — Advice for the aspiring
- CNN article — A writing guru's very own 'Story'
- McKee's visit to Israel — Video article by Ynet News — in this words association-style interview, McKee relates to the following terms in the following order (in the video, the words are composed in Hebrew letter cubes): 1) Blank page, 2) Art of storytelling, 3) Inspiration, 4) Disappointment, 5) Thrill, 6) Mind control, 7) America, 8) Time.
- Screenwriting Guru — by Brett Forest
- Alice Cinema — French article
- BBC World Service — How to Write (interactive guide)
- Robert McKee — Lessons from a screenwriting guru
- A short summary on the Screenwriters Federation Website
- What people are saying about the McKee course — an open forum
- http://www.magallanica.com Robert Mckee in Latin America 2009-2011 (Mario Velasco and Patricio Lynch).