![]() ![]() This is less about distracting people from the exposition and more about being efficient with the audience’s time. Instead of just delivering exposition, you can deliver exposition and be funny, * or deliver exposition and set the scene for a movie about the Vatican. If we charitably decide that Snyder is being hyperbolic, he’s close to describing what we call “ multitasking,” which is making a story do more than one thing at the same time. ![]() And if the exposition is important, as Snyder seems to think it is, then everyone will be confused later because they were too busy laughing at pee pee jokes. At one point, he claims that such scenes should be so distracting that “We, the audience, aren’t even listening.” So… no one will remember the exposition? If that’s okay, why are we bothering with the exposition at all? Just skip the scene and go to something more interesting. If we continue taking Snyder at his word, this advice is terrible. Snyder assures us that this is very funny, and I suppose we have no choice but to take his word for it. In a second example, Snyder describes a comedy scene where the resident crime boss tries to explain the specifics of a job while the two main characters desperately have to pee. Supposedly, the pope swimming in a special Vatican pool is so unusual that it’ll distract the audience from all the information being dumped on them. As Snyder explains, a friend of his once tried to make some exposition more interesting by having Vatican officials deliver it while the pope goes for a swim. If someone had told me six months ago that “Pope in the Pool” was the name of a rule for keeping exposition interesting, I would not have believed them. To my surprise, we’re starting off on a high note!Ĭonclusion: Useful, if not entirely complete. Nor does Snyder talk about how jarring it’ll be if you make an asshole character and have them perform a selfless act that clashes with their established motivation.Įven so, this is still better than most explanations of likability, as it gives you a lesson in spotting good examples. For example, there’s no exploration of how an overbearing boss gives the characters problems that aren’t their fault, which makes the audience feel like the character deserves a break. The biggest issue with this expanded rule is that while Snyder can spot likability working in the wild, he can’t explain why it works. Granted, he still opens the book with that simplistic example, but this is one of the only times where he admits to changing his ideas based on outside feedback. Snyder even admits that his original example is too simplistic and that other writers convinced him to add more context. This is a key aspect of selflessness: it has to actually cost the character something or it provides no benefit. Snyder also adds Aladdin to his selflessness example, describing how the kind street rat gives his hard-won bread to some even less fortunate kids. Snyder describes the way Pulp Fiction makes its hit man protagonists likable by giving them funny dialogue and an overbearing boss, which is basically what Mythcreants would call giving them novelty and sympathy, respectively. He also doesn’t say anything about how to make selflessness matter or how to craft a character who would believably do something selfless.įortunately, chapter six expands the rule into something a bit more functional. Snyder is describing selflessness here, which is just one aspect of likability. Likability is controversial at the best of times, and the lack of context only makes it worse. He first introduces it at the start of the book in incredibly simplistic terms: To make your hero likable, start the film with them doing something nice, like saving a cat from a tree! Oh boy. This is Snyder’s best known and most controversial rule, and it’s not difficult to see why. But personally, I think that’s part of the fun! 1. That’s sometimes difficult, as Snyder rarely prioritizes clarity in his advice. Including the entire explanation would make this article unreadable, so I’ve given a summary instead. Instead, he starts with a weird name and gives a long account of what it means, usually involving an anecdote to explain where the name comes from. Unlike previous entries in this series, Snyder doesn’t write his rules out in a couple neat lines. Much of the book is just Snyder talking about movies he likes and vaguely suggesting we should be more like them, somehow.īut believe it or not, there are actual storytelling rules buried in this book, and they start in Chapter Six: The Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics. ![]() The fake genres and arbitrary plot points mean that it can’t teach us storytelling, and in many places, it isn’t even trying to. We already know that Save the Cat! isn’t the complete manual on screenwriting that Blake Snyder claims. ![]()
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