Robert McKee

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For the Maryland politician, see Robert A. McKee.
Robert McKee at the Story Seminar given at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, October 2005
Robert McKee at the Story Seminar given at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, October 2005

Robert McKee is a creative writing instructor who is widely known for his popular "Story Seminar", which he developed when he was a professor at the University of Southern California. McKee is the author of a "screenwriters' bible" called Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. Many of Hollywood's active screenwriters claim him as an inspiration. Rather than simply handling "mechanical" aspects of fiction technique such as plot or dialogue taken individually, McKee examines the narrative structure of a work and what makes the story compelling or not. This could work equally as well as an analysis of any other genre or form of narrative, whether in screenplay or any other form, and could also encompass nonfiction works as long as they attempt to "tell a story".

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[edit] Early life in the theater

Robert McKee began his theater career at the age of 9, playing the title role in a community theater production of ‘Martin the Shoemaker’. He continued acting as a teenager in theater productions in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. Upon receiving the Evans scholarship, he attended the University of Michigan and earned a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature. While an undergraduate, he acted in and directed over thirty productions. McKee’s creative writing professor was the noted Kenneth Thorpe Rowe.

After completing his Bachelor of Arts degree, McKee toured with the APA (Association of Producing Artists) Repertory Company, appearing on Broadway alongside Helen Hayes, Rosemary Harris and Will Geer. He then received the Professional Theater Fellowship and returned to Ann Arbor, Michigan to earn his Master’s degree in Theater Arts.

Upon graduating, McKee directed the Toledo Repertory Company, acted with the American Drama Festival, and became Artistic Director of the Aaron Deroy Theater. From there he traveled to London to accept the position of Artist-in-Residence at the National Theater where he studied Shakespearean production at the Old Vic theater. He then returned to New York and spent the next seven years as an actor/director in Broadway.

[edit] Mid-life in the film industry

After deciding to move his career to film, McKee attended Cinema School at the University of Michigan. While there, he directed two short films:A Day Off, which he also wrote, and Talk To Me Like The Rain, adapted from a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. These two films won the Cine Eagle Award, awards at the Brussels and Grenoble Film Festivals, and various prizes at the Delta, Rochester, Chicago and Baltimore Film Festivals.

In 1979, McKee moved to Los Angeles, where he began to write screenplays and work as a story analyst for United Artists and NBC. He sold his first screenplay Dead Files to AVCO/Embassy Films, after which he joined the WGA (Writers Guild of America). His next screenplay, Hard Knocks, won the National Screenwriting Contest, and since then McKee has had eight feature film screenplays purchased or optioned, including the feature film script Trophy for Warner Bros. (the film, however, was not produced). In addition to his screenplays, McKee has had a number of scripts produced for critically acclaimed dramatic television series as Quincy, M.E. (starring Jack Klugman), Columbo (starring Peter Falk), Spenser: for Hire and Kojak (starring Telly Savalas).

[edit] Starting the STORY seminar

In 1983, as Fulbright Scholar, McKee joined the faculty of the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California (USC), where he began offering his famous STORY Seminar class. A year later, McKee opened the course to the public, giving a 3-day, 30-hour intensive class to sold-out audiences around the world.

Since 1984, more than 50,000 students have taken McKee's course, at various cities around the world: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Boston, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Helsinki, Oslo, Munich, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Barcelona and more.

[edit] Current life and awards

Robert McKee is among the most widely known screenwriting lecturers. According to his web site, McKee's former students include 26 Academy Award winners, 125 Emmy Award winners, 19 WGA (Writers Guild of America) Award winners and 16 DGA (Directors Guild of America) Award winners (all participated in McKee's course before or after winning their award; not all were awarded for writing). He was profiled by Bob Simon of ’60 Minutes’ for CBS news, and CNN recently did a profile and review of McKee and the Story Seminar. The actors Kirk Douglas and John Cleese have taken his seminar.[1]

McKee continues to be a project consultant to major film and television production companies, as well as to major software firms (Microsoft, etc.) and television news departments.[2] In addition, several companies such as ABC, Disney, Miramax, PBS, Nickelodeon and Paramount regularly send their entire creative and writing staffs to his lectures.[1]

In 2000, McKee won the International Moving Image Book Award for his book STORY (Regan Books/HyperCollins). The book, currently in its 19th printing in the United States and its 14th printing in the UK, has become required reading for film and cinema schools at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, USC and Tulane universities.[3][4] The book was on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list for 20 weeks.

McKee’s other credits include writing and presenting the BBC series Filmworks, the Channel Four series ‘Reel Secrets’, the BAFTA Award-winning J’ACCUSE CITIZEN KANE television program which he wrote and hosted, and the writing of Abraham, the four-hour mini-series on Turner Network Television (TNT) which starred Richard Harris, Barbara Hershey and Maximilian Schell.

[edit] Criticism

McKee is often quoted [1] as saying that Casablanca (1942) is the greatest screenplay of all time. Several critics tackle this by saying that Casablanca actually had no tight script, or hardly any script that was taken in a serious account by the director. A line in the IMDb trivia article on Casablanca states:

"No one knew right up until the filming of the last scene whether Ilsa would end up with Rick or Laszlo. During the course of the picture, when Ingrid Bergman asked director Michael Curtiz with which man her character was in love, she was told to "play it in between". Since the ending was not the final scene shot, there are some scenes where she *was* aware of how everything would turn out, and these include the scene in the black market with Rick and the scene in the Blue Parrot where Ferrari offers the Laszlos one exit visa." [2]

In response, McKee claims that Ingrid Bergman had misunderstood the situation: the ending was known, but was kept secret from her until the last possible minute.

McKee has been criticized by Joe Eszterhas, for being someone who teaches screenwriting without ever having a script of his made into a film.[5][6] McKee has responded to such criticisms, saying, "The world is full of people who teach things they themselves cannot do", while admitting that even though he sold all of his written screenplays, he still lacks their screen credit since they were only optioned and not produced by the studios.[1]

McKee also appears and is criticized in several works : for example, the movie Adaptation. by Charlie Kaufman and the comic Missionnaire by the French author Joann Sfar, have parts about him.

[edit] Special appearance

In the Charlie Kaufman-penned, 4-time Academy Award-nominated movie Adaptation., McKee's character was portrayed by the Emmy Award-winning actor Brian Cox, who was McKee's personal choice for the role. In the movie, the desperate-for-a-draft screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) reluctantly went to McKee’s course, but then – after being “shook” by McKee’s tough-style response to his claim that “nothing happens in the real world” – Kaufman asked McKee to meet in person to discuss his failure to write the film adaptation he was working on.

[edit] Anecdotes

  • From the Screenwriting Expo: "Renowned screenwriting instructor Robert McKee spoke at 1 PM. He was pretty informative when his ego wasn't getting in the way. But he earned big points from me for acknowledging the similarities between Bush's administration and "Big Brother" in George Orwell's 1984. During the Q&A, when someone asked him if he thought Orwell should be held responsible for laying out a blueprint for Bush, McKee remarked, "Trust me. George Bush hasn't read 1984."
  • McKee is known to object to the French-originated "auteur theory", which states that the director is the de-facto author of a movie. McKee states otherwise, that the writer/screenwriter is in fact the most important creator of the movie. To demonstrate this, he would tell a screenwriter to go to the director with 120 empty pages (of a two hour movie) and say: "Direct this!"
  • In a Haaretz story [3] (in Hebrew) on November 2, 2006 McKee was quoted as saying in front of a Tel Aviv audience that Israelis have a rough sense of humor, completely different than the known world-wide Jewish one, since Israelis are living in a harsh reality which leads them to lose their sense of humor.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c Michigan Today - June 1995 — interview with Brett Forrest
  2. ^ Arts Editor article
  3. ^ Arts Editor article
  4. ^ http://www.tulane.edu/~english/Courses/CourseDescriptionsSpr2007ver8.pdf
  5. ^ 'Basic Instinct' — New York Times article by Joe Queenan, September 17, 2006
  6. ^ 'BBC.co.uk — Film programme interview, 9 February 2007'

[edit] External links