This past weekend I attended the Robert McKee story seminar. You may recall that a few posts ago I wondered whether this course would be worth the extremely hefty price tag. Now I have my answer, and it's a resounding yes.
Much -- perhaps even most -- of the material was familiar to me already, but spending three days in a lecture hall listening to McKee talk about it (and draw graphs about it, and periodically rant and rave about it, and on one occasion sing about it) really helped me internalise it and apply it rigorously to my own work. I came out of day one with at least two ideas for improving the episodic, arcless second act of the script I've recently been redrafting.
The seminar was a long slog -- three days running 9 AM to 8:30 PM with three coffee breaks and an hour for lunch -- but McKee is such a good performer that the audience's attention seldom wandered. I use the word 'performer' deliberately. This was nothing like a university lecture. There were impressions, jokes, sociological asides, and random stories about what happens to women when Paul Newman walks into an ice cream parlour. The guy held my attention for a total of almost thirty hours, even at the end when I was literally dizzy with exhaustion. (I slept til 1 in the afternoon today, incidentally.) And he helped me fix my ailing script in the process. Were I wearing a hat, I would doff it repeatedly.
It seems not quite all my fellow students were as impressed as I was, though. On day three I overheard a couple of young American women complaining that the seminar was overlong, that McKee was repeating the same points over and over, and so on. Then one of them said, "I suppose if I were actually, you know, someone who writes scripts, I'd find it more useful."
Bless.
