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Syd is now a benevolent Tough Guy, a grandfather-type figure who has calmed down over the years from his wild youth when, as a student at Hollywood High School, he was a member of a “gang” called the Athenians – yeah, a name not quite as menacing as the Bloods – that would inspire the James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause. Syd Field is considered the first Screenwriting Guru, and his famous book Screenplay – The Foundations of Screenwriting is sometimes called the Bible of Screenwriting, which would make Field more Prophet than Guru. Let us all chant together the mantra: “Those who can’t do, teach!” (And those who can’t teach, administrate.)
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One’s next question, then, may be, What series of blockbusters did he write to establish his credentials as someone now deemed a screenwriting oracle? The answer is NONE! Yep, Robert McKee has never written a workable script. Robert McKee is one of those rare specimens that actually makes a substantial living in the screenwriting business. Another aspiring guru is William Akers, who must have recognized the importance among successful gurus to practice tough love, hence the title of his book, Your Screenplay Sucks! What a Tough Guy. Two other top screenplay writing gurus, Syd Field and Blake Snyder, are both, to a man, Tough Guys. You can see that McKee has a schtick and it is called being a Tough Guy. Here is a one-minute clip of McKee earning his living: That pretty much sums up the relationship between wannabe screenwriters, most of whom are impractical dreamers, and the screenwriting Gurus who exploit the wannabe’s desperation to become rich with one swoop of their script being bought by a studio.Īn actor, Brain Cox, played script Guru, Robert McKee, in the film “Adaptation,” which was the product of a true writer, Charlie Kaufman. Few of them achieved this goal, but there were more than a few entrepreneurs who did make a sound, reliable living by furnishing these desperate prospectors with food, clothing, tools, legal counsel, and everything else essential to modern civilization. In 1849, some 300,000-people swarmed northern California to prospect for gold with the impractical dream of becoming rich with one swoop of a tin pan. Yet he did not pay me for having fixed HIS grammar. At one point, he laughed at how I had written “toe the line” rather then the correct “tow the line,” to which I laughed back at this Expert that “toe” IS the proper usage. We went over his proposed revisions on the phone. I did pay some other guy a more modest sum of $350 to analyze the same script. The lesson learned was that my ambition to pen a script that could perhaps earn me at least an option and a paycheck worth ten grand entailed that I spend ten grand.
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The Internet is teeming with “experts,” “consultants” – in a word, Gurus - ready to dissect your work and then offer a detailed analysis on how to transform it into the next “Chinatown.” I remember in my own early days as a gullible novice in the trade when some guy said he would totally rewrite my first script for the whopping price of $10,000. In short, the best way to be successful in the screenwriting business is to prey upon those desperate people who want – want so bad – to become screenwriters. And into which bank account is going all their cash earned from shabby jobs at Uber, Applebee’s and the post office? Hint: the name on the account starts with “Rob…” and ends with “…Kee.” Note that all these aspiring script writers are not getting paid for their efforts. Robert McKee is a screenplay writing guru who does seminars around the world, which explains why he is about to make his triumphant return to America laden with the spoils from having robbed naïve people who suffer from the delusion of thinking that because they like movies, and because they are illiterate, they can break into Hollywood. You may be wondering, Who the hell is this modern day General MacArthur, Robert McKee? I am talking of course of the imminent “return to the U.S.” of Robert McKee. I have been, of late, receiving emails telling of momentous news on par with the Pope having just announced his departure from the Vatican so he can become a Buddhist Monk with a side gig as a hedge fund group on Wall Street.