Screw The Cat, Save The Film

Have you noticed that most films are starting to feel eerily similar? There’s a reason for that. Some years back, a man named Blake Snyder wrote a book about screenwriting called “Save the Cat”, and many people blame that book. This has resulted in a specific problem that drives me nuts. Let’s discuss.

From the things I’ve read, “Save the Cat” proved to be an incredibly successful screenwriting book because it took a novel approach. Whereas most screenwriting books talk about things like how to develop characters, how to weave themes into your story, and the importance of crafting a climax, “Save the Cat” was different. “Save the Cat” laid out the specific formula the writer could follow to make a competent movie, everything from what elements each film must include to the order of the events and the number of pages each element should take in the screenplay.

Many people say this book caught fire in Hollywood and most films since 2006 have been written using the formulas and models include in the book... everything from romances to action films to science fiction films. Hence, many people blame this book for the increasing formularization of films.

Anyway, one of the ideas buried in this formularization is that the writer should always increase the challenge to the hero at every possible step. Unfortunately, while this sounds like good advice, it rarely is. In fact, what you end up with are films filled with scenes like this:

Step One: Villain escapes hero, runs into street, carjacks a car, and drives away.
Step Two: Hero chases villain. Hero also carjacks a car to catch villain.
Step Three: Hero discovers that the person he threw from the car took the key. Hero must stop and hotwire car.
Step Four: Hero starts driving. Now hero discovers that he has a flat tire. Hero must fix tire or steal another car.
Step Five: Luckily, the villain is held up in traffic.
Step Six: Hero fixes tire issue and starts moving. Engine starts smoking. Hero opens hood and see engine is dead. Must now get another car.
Step Seven: Villain now delayed by some new event.
Step Eight: Hero races after villain, but drawbridge goes up. Hero cannot jump bridge and must steal a boat.
Step Nine: Hero races boat out into water, but boat is out of gas. Hero must now swim. Hero reaches other side of river.
Step Ten: Villain sees hero and drives on sidewalk to get away from hero.
Step Eleven: Hero chases villain on sidewalk. Two guys with pain of glass walk in front of him, as does woman with baby carriage, and three nuns on a mercy mission, and falling meteorite.
Step Twelve: Villain barely escapes.

Exciting, right? Ha. Hardly. This is crap. Observe the audience’s thought process. They are excited by the chase to come. They love the idea that both have carjacked cars and will now race through the streets of Paris. They expect an exciting chase. Now the hero runs into “the key issue.” This actually adds to the suspense because it causes the audience to worry that the hero can’t make it.

Then it starts to go wrong. The hero has the flat tire. Suddenly, a hint of unbelievability enters the audience’s mind. Rather than seeing this as a tension raiser, they realize that it is highly unlikely that the key and the flat tire will occur at once. Now comes a real sin: the villain is held up in traffic. We know this was a fake decision by the filmmaker to keep the hero competitive in this race.

And that’s not the end. Nope. It keeps coming. Now we have the engine trouble. The odds of adding engine trouble to a missing key and flat tire are unbelievable low. And having the villain now delayed by some new event is simply not credible. Then the hero runs into the drawbridge issue and you suddenly realize, “This is nonsense. This is just the writing throwing up any challenge they can think of for the hero, whether it makes sense or not.” And it doesn’t stop there, it just keeps coming and coming.

By the time this sequence is over, you feel like the writer thinks you’re an idiot. You are bored to tears by the banality of the obstacles and you’ve completely lost your suspension of disbelief because the odds of this sequence of events happening is close to 0%. It feels like an unfunny comedy routine.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a theoretical issue either. I’m seeing more and more movies that feel this way. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was a huge offender in this regard, as was A Good Day To Die Hard. In both movies, you had these never-ending chase scenes where the writer simply threw up one obstacle after another at every single step. I’m sure they thought they were making it more dramatic, but after the first couple obstacles, it just became torture.

Let me reach into a different “genre” to complete the point. The greatest audience tease in the history of the world was Hulk Hogan. Hogan did the exact same routine in show after show, yet you fell for it every... single... time. And having seen him live, I can tell you that I’ve never seen another human being having more control over an audience than Hogan. What he understood, i.e. why this worked, was exactly how much abuse the audience could watch him take to get the maximum anguish from the audience without losing them to boredom. THAT is what filmmakers need to grasp. They need to understand that there is a point with an audience where all the frustration reaches its peak and you must let the hero prevail. If you don’t, then you go from an asskicking moment to a moment where the hero feels bumbling.

The problem with the formula is that it ignores this vital point. It just wrongly assumes that the more obstacles you can create, the higher the tension. That’s just not true, just like it’s not true that all stories can be told using the same formula. Hollywood needs to stop relying on theory and start relying on feel. No more stupid chase scenes where random things keep happening. No more final fights that last so lost most people are praying for it to end. No more wedging every round and oval and star-shaped peg into the same square hole.