![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Truby and story
Jun. 28th, 2021 10:09 amWe ended up watching The Hitman's Bodyguard last night because neither of us were in the mood to brain*. It was an OK popcorn flick--we ended up spending $4 to rent it online and, as we put it, that was $2 each and we each received $2 worth of entertainment out of it. (Seeing Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson bounce off each other was most of it.)
As I think about it, though, part of my problem is that the screenwriters, script doctors, and producers adhered so damn obviously to John Truby's The Elements of Story formula that it ended up...formulaic. A very short rundown of the formula (note that no matter how many times they/Truby says there are 22 steps, there are many lists of various types of steps that do not add up to 22. Somewhere in his book/method/software there are 22 steps but they are made of various numbers of steps themselves).
Anyway, not going into it because I'd spend paragraphs and paragraphs listing numbers and steps and exactly what parts of the movie adhered to them, and there's no point because if you cared you could just watch the movie and read the book (or that summary post). It's just that it's such an obvious attempt to adhere to the Hollywood blockbuster formula (so that it's not a radical leap of faith for the studio to fund it) that it utterly fails to be memorable or touching or anything else other than a mildly entertaining popcorn film.
I'd love to see analyses of hit films and critically acclaimed films that show how they deviate or subvert Hollywood formulas. I know that the studios would treat them as flukes, much as every time an action film with a female lead is a hit, they treat it as a fluke instead of taking the lesson that a good film is good despite the gender of the lead (*coughAliencough*), but I'd still find it interesting.
I have found Truby's formula useful when trying to structure my thinking near the beginning of a project (as done for both Deadfall and Deadwater, but it may change with future projects), but there's a point where I throw it out and just put the story together as it wants to go. If I tried to continue using the formula, it would kill all the pleasure in writing dead dead dead for me.
*Part of mine was that I'm coming down off of some ADHD meds that I had switched to, but it turns out that I get an unpleasant side effect and so I'm spending a few days off of them before exploring another.
As I think about it, though, part of my problem is that the screenwriters, script doctors, and producers adhered so damn obviously to John Truby's The Elements of Story formula that it ended up...formulaic. A very short rundown of the formula (note that no matter how many times they/Truby says there are 22 steps, there are many lists of various types of steps that do not add up to 22. Somewhere in his book/method/software there are 22 steps but they are made of various numbers of steps themselves).
Anyway, not going into it because I'd spend paragraphs and paragraphs listing numbers and steps and exactly what parts of the movie adhered to them, and there's no point because if you cared you could just watch the movie and read the book (or that summary post). It's just that it's such an obvious attempt to adhere to the Hollywood blockbuster formula (so that it's not a radical leap of faith for the studio to fund it) that it utterly fails to be memorable or touching or anything else other than a mildly entertaining popcorn film.
I'd love to see analyses of hit films and critically acclaimed films that show how they deviate or subvert Hollywood formulas. I know that the studios would treat them as flukes, much as every time an action film with a female lead is a hit, they treat it as a fluke instead of taking the lesson that a good film is good despite the gender of the lead (*coughAliencough*), but I'd still find it interesting.
I have found Truby's formula useful when trying to structure my thinking near the beginning of a project (as done for both Deadfall and Deadwater, but it may change with future projects), but there's a point where I throw it out and just put the story together as it wants to go. If I tried to continue using the formula, it would kill all the pleasure in writing dead dead dead for me.
*Part of mine was that I'm coming down off of some ADHD meds that I had switched to, but it turns out that I get an unpleasant side effect and so I'm spending a few days off of them before exploring another.
