ISBN: 1932907009
List Price: $19.95
Amazon Price: $12.97
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 5
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Summary: This is the one that made everything click
Maybe you're like me: You've read all the screenwriting books you're "supposed" to read; you know the ones I'm talking about. And you have all this information swilling around in your brain about genre and character and structure ... yet none of it gels in a way that is remotely useful when it comes time to sit at the keyboard. You're missing some elusive something that will make it all fall into place, some secret alchemy that those successful ratbags know and are deliberately keeping from the rest of us.
That was me. Completely stalled, wracked in a frustrated limbo of knowing I have what it takes, but crippled and unable to move. In desperation, I finally decided to find a writer's group or a professional mentor, no matter what it cost. Then I read this book; and this book is both. And more.
Never has a book made such an immediate and profound impact on me. Any one of the sections would be worth the price in itself. The chapter on genre was the most brilliant and insightful I've ever read: after months of going around in circles trying to figure out whether the piece I was working on was a DramaCrimeActionComedy or not, I had almost given up on the concept altogether. Then I read Snyder's 10 "home-made" genres that group films not by their section in the video store, but by their stripped-down, broad story-type. It's a total paradigm-shift that's been beautifully honed to perfection. And it's just one of many sections that for me was the intellectual equivalent of taking off tight shoes.
I could go on, but I'm not going to. If you've ever wanted to have someone sit next to you while you write, someone who can finally give you the goods - not a dry academic or a smug industry-type but one of the alchemists who writes and sells spec scripts for a living - then for the love of Mike, buy this book.
It's subtitled, "The last book on screenwriting you'll ever need." A bold statement, but for me, absolutely true. And I have a feeling that if I'd bought this one first, it would have been the ONLY one I'd have ever needed.
Summary: The last book
Blake breaks down the unspoken rules of what sells in Hollywood into easy to read short sharp chapters.
If you have talent and you read his book then it may well be the last book on screenwriting you will ever need.
As for the people saying it is not the last book you will need, well thats good, he's currently writing another one called 'Save The Cat Goes To The Movies' !
Summary: This Book Saved My Life!
First off, I don't usually write rave reviews or a headline like the one above. And maybe a part of my loving this book is that this book came at the right time in my writing life. Which is to say that it's possible that other books would have impacted me the way that this one did. Having said that, I can only say that after reading it, I feel certain that I will finish a script I was totally stymied on.
I do not like many movies, and I like precious few commercial ones. So I have been quite resistant to thinking in terms of loglines and the correct page numbers when your "beats" must occur. As a result it was hard for me to relate to portins of this book -- e.g. Blake's rapture over the title "Legally Blond" or his excited beat-by-beat breakdown of "Miss Congeniality," a movie he obviously likes and that I haven't seen but know I would hate.
But after reading this book, I figured, what the hell (when you're stuck, you'll try about anything). I'm going to try to create a logline for my movie. And guess what? I couldn't do it. I couldn't come up with a succinct way to describe my movie, as Blake suggests in the book.
My first reaction (lasted about a month) was: who cares? The movies I love can't be described in a logline. End of story. But then as I kept pushing myself to create a good logline, I started to realize that my movie was muddled. And this had a lot to do with why I was stuck. So I kept re-working my logline until my logline met Blake's conditions for a good logline. And this led to me seeing my story more clearly.
Is my story now more commercial, less artistic? I don't know. Less original? I hope not. All I know is I'm moving forward. And I can't help but give this book a lot of credit for this.
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