McKee looks to the contemporary flowering of storytelling on television, where writers are in charge, instead of film, as evidence that auteurism is absurd. One of McKee’s pet peeves is the auteur theory, the more than half-century old idea in film criticism that it is the director, not the writer, whose creative vision appears on the screen.
ROBERT MCKEE SOFTWARE
Though the character is something of a spoof on McKee’s quasi-scientific approach to a creative art form, McKee clearly sees it as an affectionate one - in the scene, spiral-bound copies of the “Adaptation” shooting script are for sale outside the conference room at the Sheraton for $20, alongside scripts for “Chinatown” and “Casablanca,” copies of the screenwriting software Final Draft and T-shirts with McKee’s face on them that say, “Write the Truth.” In the film, a screenwriter played by Nicolas Cage grapples with a case of writer’s block and attends a McKee seminar to ask for advice. With all the writers he has affected, it was perhaps inevitable that McKee eventually became a film character himself, played by Brian Cox in the 2002 metacomedy “Adaptation,” directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman. The case can be made - and critics including “Basic Instinct” writer Joe Eszterhas have - that McKee has been too influential, particularly among creative executives, resulting in a boring homogeneity of approach to story in Hollywood.
Companies and organizations including NASA, Microsoft, Disney and PBS have brought him in to speak to employees on the subject of story. That task grabbed ahold of me like a leech and wouldn’t let go.”Īmong the tens of thousands of people who have taken McKee’s course over the years are Andrew Stanton, Peter Jackson, Ed Burns, Jane Campion, Akiva Goldsman and Meg Ryan. In fiction writing, the question is, ‘What happens next?’ But in writing about writing the question is, ‘What is this?’ That, to me, was a bigger, more important, more engaging question than what happens next. “Writing about it engaged my intelligence in a way that fiction writing did not. “Teaching was more fascinating to me than doing it,” McKee said.
ROBERT MCKEE TV
He worked as a story analyst for United Artists and NBC, wrote episodes of TV shows such as “Spenser: For Hire” and “Kojak” and began teaching a popular course at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He studied Shakespeare at the Old Vic in London and spent years as an actor and director on Broadway in the 1970s before moving to Hollywood. People come out of the universities dissatisfied.”īorn in a Detroit suburb, McKee was a Fulbright scholar who earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a masters in theater, both from the University of Michigan. … They come out more in a fog than when they went in. You’re just a volcano of creativity, just let the magma pour out. “Oh, pour your heart out, write anything you want. “The teaching of writing at film schools is so undisciplined,” McKee said. He believes that film schools, by emphasizing expression over technique, are failing writers. With his white hair and sport coat, and a theatrical scowl reserved for movies he hates, McKee brings a ruthlessly honest, “Paper Chase”-style of pedagogy to the hopeful world of would-be writers. “Becoming a writer … it’s going to cost you time,” McKee said, looking out over the room of about 150 students, a diverse mix of ages and races. In April, at one such seminar in a windowless conference room at the LAX Sheraton, the 75-year-old McKee was pacing the stage and dispensing a tough-love sermon about the screenwriter’s life.
the quality writers have all migrated to TV.
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