“I’m not here to teach you how to write a Hollywood movie,” McKee said, the scorn in his voice sending a wave of reassurance through his well-educated audience. But then he drew a triangle on an overhead projector slide: at the top was “Classical Design” (stories with causality, closed endings, linear time, an external conflict, a single, active protagonist); in the other corners he wrote “Minimalism” (open endings, passive protagonists) and “Anti-Structure” (coincidence, nonlinear time). “This course is about the top, about classical design,” he said, pointing at the triangle. “Why? For your careers. As you move down the triangle, your audience shrinks.

The top of the pyramid describes his magnum opus “Story”. For anyone interested in the lower corners I can recommend “Me and You and Memento and Fargo” [1]. This gives an interesting counterpoint to McKee’s shrinking audience hypothesis.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/You-Memento-Fargo-J-J-Murphy/dp/08264...