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Screenplay Gurus

2 episodes  ·  Mar 2014 – Mar 2014

"most of his emphasis about the beats is in the first act. That’s where he gives the most information. You know, you’ve got to have your opening image, you’ve got to state the theme, you’ve got to do the setup, you’ve got to do your catalyst inciting incident. You have to have your debate, which I think is Snyder’s term, effectively for the call to adventure and the refusal of the call. We’ll get to the hero’s journey, but that’s kind of that same section. And then you break into the second act, right? And then it becomes, oh, then you got your B story, your midpoint, your rise to your third and then beginning your third act."

— Stu Willis  |  DZ-1: Do Screenplay Gurus win you Oscars?

DZ-1: Do Screenplay Gurus win you Oscars?

Do Oscar-Nominated screenwriters follow the structural formulas prescribed by the 'gurus' and books?
Three of the most widely read structure books in screenwriting — Snyder’s Save the Cat, Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, and Michael Hauge’s Six Stages — all make essentially the same claim: this is how great films are built. In our debut episode, we run that claim against two Oscar-nominated films to see if it holds: PHILOMENA and DALLAS BUYERS CLUB… →
⏱ 1h 40m
1 MAR 2014
Listen if you want to know whether Blake Snyder, Michael Hauge and Christopher Vogler's structural theories actually apply to Academy Award-nominated screenplays
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DZ-2: Do the Screenplay Gurus score big at the Box Office?

Do the biggest original films of 2013 follow more archetypal - or formulaic - structures?
Part 2 of our Screenplay Gurus series takes the same lens from Part 1 — Vogler, Snyder and Hauge — and points it at the two highest-grossing original films of 2013: GRAVITY and FROZEN. No franchise, no sequel. Just the two films that audiences went to see in the biggest numbers that year, and the question of what their scripts actually look like when you run them against the guru formulas… →
⏱ 1h 33m
17 MAR 2014
Listen if you need to know which guru frameworks actually deliver in Act Three.
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