Listen if you want to know whether Blake Snyder, Michael Hauge and Christopher Vogler's structural theories actually apply to Academy Award-nominated screenplays

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.

We map both against Snyder, Hauge, and Vogler, looking for where the beats land, where they don't, and — more usefully — what those gaps reveal about how the films actually work. As Chas puts it: "the answer as to whether these structural theories apply is actually less important than what the act of testing them against great films teaches us

PHILOMENA turns out to be a dual-protagonist script that makes the frameworks interesting precisely because it doesn't fit cleanly.

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB seemingly has a cleaner structure — the A-plot is Ron Woodruff's drug-smuggling operation — but the more interesting structural question is the B-story: Stu identifies it as "the battle for Ron's soul," with Rayon and Eve staging Ron's transformation from a man "sick in both body and soul" into something else.

The structural question we keep returning to: if a great film breaks the rules, does that mean there are no rules, or that it found something better?

And we skim over a few other ideas: why we picked these films over other nominees, the problem with Page 12 catalysts, and whether "Save the Cat" moments are actually doing what Snyder says they are.

As always: SPOILERS ABOUND and all copyright material used under fair use for educational purposes.

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→ Read the transcript for this episode.

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"They aren't the Bible. They aren't the holy grail of screenwriting. You need to do more than read these books to become a screenwriter." — Chas Fisher @ 00:03:36

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CHAPTERS

FILMS

SCRIPTS

LINKS

EPISODES IN THE SCREENPLAY GURUS SERIES

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Full show notes at: https://draft-zero.com/2014/dz-01/

Download episode: DZ-01.mp3