Blake Snyder. Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. Studio City CA: Michael Wiese, 2005. Print.
Save the Cat is a direct and clear book on screenwriting. It has many anecdotes and illustrations. The author does not merely tell us how, he shows us.
Snyder is writes mostly for films, so he assumes an hour-and-a-half to two-hour film as his writing goal. Still, there is much that other writers can learn from this book.
First of all, he talks about the logline, the one- or two-sentence summary of the film. Does it sound appealing? Is there irony? Remember, irony can be humorous or harsh, but good stories involve something unexpected. Here is a logline for Shakespeare’s As You Like It. If I worked on it for a while, the way a screenwriting team would, it might sound better, but this at least gives the idea:
A wrestling champion and a daughter of a deposed Duke he is in love with, both separately escape the wrath of the current Duke by fleeing to the forest, the princess disguising herself as a young man to avoid suspicion. In the forest, she discovers both the wrestler and her father but decides to keep her disguise to observe whether the young man truly loves her.
This not only is the only way to pitch a script, it also lets you, the writer, see if the story will work.
Snyder notes that a good protagonist is one who offers the most conflict in whatever situation the story is about, who has the most to grow emotionally, and who is demographically pleasing. (For films, that means under forty, since the prime moviegoers are young men under twenty-five.)
He notes that some serial protagonists like James Bond can remain popular and not change much because of the dangerous and powerful antagonists they encounter: e.g., Goldfinger, Blofeld, Dr. No, agents of SMERSH. Indeed, a good story also has a strong antagonist and one who is an immediate threat. He cites one film about a volcano that was boring because the first hour nothing much happened as people were waiting for the volcano which might or might not erupt. Snyder calls this no-no “Watch out for that glacier!”
The title comes from a recommendation for writers for near the beginning of the story. If the protagonist might not be immediately sympathetic (e.g., a hard-nosed cop), then have him do something like rescue a kitten to show his human side.
He gives a great example of this from the beginning of Sea of Love. Al Pacino is a cop who has just busted a group of scam artists by getting them to come to a sting that said they would meet the New York Yankees baseball team. On his way back to the station, Pacino meets one of the hoods who is arriving late with his eight-year-old son. Because the boy is with him, Pacino flashes his badge, the men nod at each other, and the criminal heads back home with the boy. This shows Pacino has a heart and does not want to completely spoil the kid’s day. As the man leaves, Pacino says, “Catch you later!”
Not only should the protagonist save the cat, it is also not a bad idea to give the backstory in a succinct and interesting manner. Snyder calls this “the pope in the pool.” In a screenplay called The Plot to Kill the Pope, we learn about the actual plot to kill the pope while the pope is talking to some advisors as he is taking a lap or two in the Vatican’s swimming pool. The background is explained in dialogue while something else is happening—something that the audience may wonder about (“Does the Vatican have a swimming pool?”) while getting the necessary details.
I recall this being done well in the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. After the initial escape scene, we see Professor Jones lecturing in a college classroom trying to ignore the flirtatious coeds. What he is saying is relevant to the story, but it is done in an entertaining manner.
Some other things to avoid: “Double Mumbo Jumbo” (just one kind of magical or science fiction idea per film; flubber meets aliens is bound to fail); “Black Vet” (too many story ideas; this was a parody of an actual TV show that said “he is a veterinarian AND a veteran!”); and “Keep the press out” (this complicates things unnecessarily, unless, of course, the story is about someone in journalism).
Most of these things make sense for novels and other kinds of stories. That includes certain formulas which appear in nearly every successful film.
Set up the conflict/exposition (pages 1-25 in a script). Then build to false climax where everything seems to be going OK, to halfway through the story (pp. 26-55). This is followed by action which brings things to the “fragrance of death,” where it seems like everything is lost and there is no hope (pp. 55-85). Then there is the turnaround, the protagonist discovers or learns what he has to learn, makes a change, and ends ups victorious (pp. 86-100). A script for a typical film runs from 90 to 130 pages (in other words, about 80 to 120 minutes).
Good storytellers usually write about a team. Even if there is a major protagonist, he or she is part of a group that support and help each other. Another formula, repeated hundreds of times, if there is a team of bad guys, knock off the confederates one by one until the numero uno is the only one left. Such a monomachy goes back at least to Hector vs. Achilles in Homer.
Save the Cat is entertaining to read, but well worth it for any writer or critic to get some ideas about how to writer an effective screenplay.
Two final observations: (1) Snyder recommends everyone interested in writing for film or television to read Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Although I had heard about Campbell and had studied Frazer’s The Golden Bough and similar works in college, I had never read this book until a student who was interested in screenwriting suggested it to me.
(2) The author tells us how he has sold screenplays for lots of money (one he sold to Spielberg for a million dollars), yet none of the films he describes this way in his book have ever made it to the big screen. And Save the Cat was published in 2005. Recently I read about August Wilson’s Fences, which was recently made into a film. Wilson actually wrote the screenplay, adapting it from his theatrical play. That tells us that someone in Hollywood had bought the rights or Wilson would not have adapted it. Since Wilson died in 2005, it also tells us that the script still knocked around La-La Land for at least a decade before someone actually picked it up produced it. The mills of the gods grind slowly…