John Trubyâ??s Great Screenwriting Class on DVD - Review Two

Reviewer : Mike Riddell

Americans are pragmatists. They’re interested in how things work, and how to make them work. John Truby prepared himself for teaching screenwriting by spending a few years watching two movies a day and taking notes. And damned if he didn’t learn a few things along the way about how a story works. Even more galling, damned if I didn’t have to admit that he was onto something.

I’m his most difficult audience. I came to the eight hours (!) of DVD instruction with cynical disdain. McKee, Trottier, Cleary; I’ve done them all. I’m from the school of preferring to make love than reading a manual about the physiology of sex. Okay, sure there’s mechanics involved, but who wants to be taking notes and calculating angles? I’ve given up trying to find the G spot in a script. I’m not American.

But even old dogs and old farts respond to a little tickling of the tummy. I confess to rolling over when John Truby began by saying that writing is the most difficult human endeavour of all. Only writers know that. I gave a sympathetic whimper, undermining the aggressive baring of teeth with which I’d come to the exercise. By the end of the session, I was sitting attentively like a hungry Labrador, hoping for another tasty morsel.

The course consists of four major components, each with a two-hour DVD. These cover Structure, Character, Building Blocks and Dialogue. Truby, with a kind of John Kennedy sincerity, speaks to us from his desk. The talking head nature of the presentations is broken up with liberal use of illustration from classic films. Extras include writing exercises designed to enhance the learning experience.

Truby has two major contributions to make. The first is that stories which fail are usually deficient in structure. Not exactly rocket science, but the attention which he devotes to structure is enlightening. You thought you had the three-act circus under your belt? Truby dismisses it as a gross simplification, and offers in its place twenty-two building blocks for constructing the skeleton of a screenplay.

His second and more controversial insight is that a good story is inevitably moral. By this he is not advocating the American Way where the goodies triumph over the baddies, but insisting that good drama inevitably suggests the proper way for a person to act in the world. He’s a believer in the contribution of art to the ethical functioning of a society, and talks of the vocation of the writer.

The value of this approach is the seriousness he devotes to the development of character, and the moral as well as psychological choices which accompany this. In fact Truby locates the starting point of any script in the moment of self-realisation which the main character experiences toward the end of the story, and which occasions a new perspective and a new way of living. Only when this is understood can we begin to shape the events which lead to that point.

Truby argues for the unity of plot and character, and it was his focus on that interaction which helped me most. Once again, he insists that the main character must have a moral as well as a psychological need. The process of the drama serves to strip away defences until the hero can no longer avoid the necessity of change or doom. This is the experience which audiences know intimately, and produces satisfaction for them.

The twenty-two building blocks provide a sort of rough check-list for guiding the construction of a screenplay. Anyone who followed them slavishly would end up with a paint-by-numbers sort of script, but that’s not the intention. Rather they represent a means of understanding the structural development of drama, and the sort of twists and turns which might normally take place.

Story and its construction are at the core of the course, and there’s no doubt that Truby has a good feel for what works and doesn’t work in narrative. The value of coming at things from this angle is that his insights are applicable to a wide range of disciplines: writing for screen and television as well as novels and stage drama. As he continually reminds, storytelling is the basic craft which all writers must master.

I found myself wondering how more complex screenplays such as Memento or Magnolia or 21 Grams might have been written using the Truby method, but then decided that wasn’t a fair question. Eric Clapton transcends the three-chord structure for guitar playing, but only because it lies buried somewhere in his DNA. Virtuoso performances generally come from those who have learned and subsequently forgotten the rules, not from those who imagine the rules don’t apply to them.

I might have wished for higher quality – the original video tapes have simply been dumped to DVD without chapters or remastering. And the movies used for illustration, while ‘classics’, are also so old that they’re difficult to watch. Pygmalion and The Jungle Book don’t quite do it for me. Credit then to Truby for holding attention and delivering useful insights despite these disincentives.

He’s taught more than 20,000 writers – some of them big hitters who have produced the goods. Whether you’re an old hack like me with bad habits, or a fresh-faced screenwriter with your cherry still intact, this course will call you back to the basics of what makes us all keep on in this perverse activity. Truby understands the magic and power of story to change things.

His best line? “Write something that will change your life. That way even if it doesn’t get made, you’ll be a better person.” Only an American could find an upside in that.