Customer Reviews

Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: The Screenwriter's Guide to Every Story Ever Told

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If Save The Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need is your main weapon in testing concept, building your screenplay, or pitching, then this book is your sidearm. I take both books with me everywhere I go.

Like his original book, this is a very fast, entertaining, and insightful read. Most importantly, it is inspiring because it reveals that anyone can apply this technique very easily to their projects or other's. There are many A HA moments in this book.

If you were unclear about the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet (BSBS), Blake shows you how he analyzes many classic, popular, and intriguing films within his genre/structural framework. Blake defines genre as a grouping of stories that share similar patterns and characters. By the time you finish both these books, you will be surprised how easily his method works with almost any film. Instead of merely saying, these are horror movies, he says they are Monster In The House movies, and then goes on to give you some baseline criteria to figure out if you are writing one. You think you're just writing a romantic comedy, but according to Blake you're actually writing a Buddy Love or Golden Fleece. He continues this method of analysis across 10 of his own genre definitions and 50 movies.

Finally, his website www.blakesnyder.com is a wealth of free information, resources, and links to other helpful websites. I also highly suggest taking one of his courses, or seeing him speak. Not only is Blake a kind, generous, and thoughtful teacher, but his energy and enthusiasm is downright infectious. He's also really tall.

Blake's 15 Beats: Opening Image, Theme Stated, Set-Up, Catalyst, Debate, Break into 2, Fun and Games, B-Story, Midpoint, Bad Guys Close In, All Is Lost, Dark Night of the Soul, Break into 3, Finale, Closing Image

Blake's 10 Genres: Monster in the House, Golden Fleece, Out of the Bottle, Dude with a Problem, Rites of Passage, Buddy Love, Whydunit, Fool Triumphant, Institutionalized, Superhero

50 films broken down beat-for-beat: Alien, Fatal Attraction, Scream, The Ring, Saw, The Bad News Bears, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Saving Private Ryan, Ocean's 11, Maria Full of Grace, Freaky Friday, Cocoon, The Nutty Professor, What Women Want, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 3 Days of the Condor, Die Hard, Sleeping With The Enemy, Deep Impact, Open Water, 10, Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People, 28 Days, Napoleon Dynamite, The Black Stallion, Lethal Weapon, When Harry Met Sally..., Titanic, Brokeback Mountain, All The President's Men, Blade Runner, Fargo, Mystic River, Brick, Being There, Tootsie, Forrest Gump, Legally Blonde, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, M.A.S.H., Do The Right Thing, Office Space, Training Day, Crash, Raging Bull, The Lion King, The Matrix, Gladiator, Spider Man 2

I still stand by what I said in my review of Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

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It is indeed the LAST book you will need (and you do need it) to create saleable screenplays.

That means it isn't the first one. STC! summarizes and organizes, rearranges emphasis, and illuminates all the myriad other techniques taught in other books.
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STCGoes To The Movies is actually more a prequel to STC!, or maybe a Teacher's Handbook or as another review states a "Companion Book." Other reviews have described the contents of this book, but perhaps not explained the unique lessons to be learned by writers.

STCGTTM does the homework assignments of STC! for you. Blake walks you through the "Beats" from his beat sheet, or paradigm, for "The Great Classic Film" by breaking down dozens of famous movies and naming many others where you'll find the same form.

You'd think that doing the homework for you would be cheating, but it's more like the answers in the back of your math textbook -- it shows you when you've made a mistake but lets you correct that mistake yourself and thus become strong in problem solving.

Snyder uses movies you're familiar with -- but the beginning writer, and even many experienced published writers, would be tongue tied at trying to describe them. Even using Snyder's Beat Sheet (a list of points in a film script), a writer would make errors in identifying the beats from only viewing a film.

Do a couple yourself. Watch a DVD of an award winning blockbuster. Write down the content of the 14 pivotal moments in the film. Compare what you "see" with what Snyder sees when watching that film. Try comparing "Alien" and "Jaws" -- then read this book.

Snyder shows (without telling) what the producer's eye sees when reading a script. For a screenwriter, the producer is the "market."

The writer has to convince the producer that THIS story told THIS way will reach an audience big enough to cover the cost of making the film, and then some.

This isn't a book about the inventive, cutting edge of what's possible with the film medium. This is a book about how to reach BIG audiences with your favorite story.

But how can you learn to do that from reading beat-by-beat breakdowns of movies you've seen a dozen times?

Have you read the book Writing the Killer Treatment: Selling Your Story Without a Script? That will convince you that you must master the art of the Treatment to make a living at scriptwriting.

Any number of textbooks and courses insist that you must start writing your script by creating an original High Concept, a short sentence that gives the reader a vision of the whole movie as something familiar.

Those same courses insist that you start with an outline evolved out of a 1 paragraph description, expanded to 1 page, and then to perhaps 5 pages, maybe 10 as a Treatment. The Treatment is the key to the writing of the successful script.

Those 1 sentence, paragraph and page descriptions are to become your sales materials for the script -- that's what agents and production companies want to see in a query. They have to be polished, perfect and what they promise must be fulfilled in the script.

I have read a number of textbooks that say you must do the Concept, Logline, and Treatment, before writing the script.

I've seen formulas for what to include, how to structure the sentences, and how to choose what to highlight.

But never before Save The Cat Goes To The Movies have I found a book that actually explains HOW to use your writer-type brain and imagination to construct a High Concept or HOW to take a story idea and state it as a High Concept from which a Producer would visualize a complete movie that would be profitable to make.

Blake Snyder is a writer. He thinks like a professional writer. And he conveys that style of thinking in this book.

Snyder has constructed a writer's manual for creating the marketing materials (concept, logline, paragraph, and Treatment) that will sell your project. But very few readers will understand it that way.

This book looks like homework assignments. But actually it's mental training -- brain spraining mental training -- for hurling your ideas into "Theaters Everywhere!"

For each of the "Genres" of story Snyder has identified, he gives you the key variables, the moving parts of the Concept and Logline statements. Not the statements themselves, the ones that sold these film scripts -- but the mechanism for generating those statements.

Then he articulates the emotional payload the Genre delivers (which defines for a Producer what audience the film will draw in.)

Find the story inside you that fits one of these 10 paradigms and you will have an "Opens Everywhere" film.

But while you are writing your script, keep STC! at your elbow as a reference book. STC! is the roadmap through writing your script, and is indeed the LAST book you need. Before that, you need STCGoes To The Movies to construct the Concept, Logline, and precise beats before you start to write.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Proof, it's a beautiful thing.

Many reviewers of the original Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need pilloried Snyder for advocating formulaic movies with his Beat Sheet (BS2). With this new book, he seems to have shown that formulaic screenwriting does not exactly result from using his "system".

With such a diverse group of movies as contained in this book, I hope those critics will finally understand that any particular screenplay structure system is not the important thing. What is important is to have a logical structure, and Snyder's just as good as any other, regardless of the hype.

Good on you, Blake!

My screenwriter friend and mentor, Blake Snyder, has become The Man in some circles on the basis of his first book, "Save the Cat." And whether you love or hate him for "Blank Check" and the rest of his films, the industry has taken his templates to heart. And many studios actually weigh your submissions against it now. That's just the truth, not me bragging on his behalf.

This format wasn't easy for me to follow. In fact, I was in near tears every week while he tried to walk me through a script now making the rounds in Hollywood to some serious acclaim. I'm a non-linear thinker who HATES formulas and plot-driven, "high concept" movies, and Blake is the master of both. But what I learned from him throughout that ordeal has gotten me closer to sales than I ever dreamt I'd be. I now have a couple of producers who are hip pocketing my stuff, determined to get me up on that screen. Blake is why.

So, imagine my delight when I read his second book and realized that HE had been learning from ME, too. All the "gaps" in his format that made my head ache and my eyes tear up as I struggled are addressed in this book. Here's what I wrote to him (and apparently he teared up, too, when he read it):

"Okay...this book answers all those questions swirling around in my head when I'd go dead silent on the phone back when! Seeing your beat sheet of Napoleon Dynamite, for instance, has just solved the problems I was having with no less than THREE "Rites of Passage" scripts I've begun and had to set aside. Those are the types of scripts I love best, but I could never figure out what the "theme" or real journey of discovery really was, because all the other books out there couldn't SHOW me this in a way I could internalize. But by choosing films I know and love and doing beat sheets of them so that I can "hear" how that works...wow!

So your sequel fills in the "gaps" you discovered, I'm sure, by working with crazy people like me, and feeling our pain. I could not love you more for it! I've got some really wonderful scripts that will now be finished in the near future because I can visualize and better yet, "feel," where they should go in that deep, instinctive way I need to feel the story before I can really get into writing it.

So...congrats and THANK YOU, yet again, for your brilliant mind. You deserve every bit of the success you're having and most of all...you rock even harder than ever now! This one makes you THE guru!"

Go get it, all you budding screenwriters! This is the one we've been waiting for!

There is one constant issue I have with most books on screenwriting: Not enough examples! So often I will read a book on certain concepts or certain themes or approaches and then there will be the vast emptiness when it comes to examples. Or, worse, the examples will be from some obscure film that neither I, or anyone else for that matter, will have seen.

"Save the Cat! Goes To The Movies" changes all that. In fact, I would almost have to say, Blake Snyder gives TOO many examples.

This book, a companion to the book "Save the Cat!" takes the concepts that Blake discussed in that book and expands those concepts out to film after film after film. 50 films in all. And then, not only does he show you step-by-step how the concepts are played out - he suggests even MORE films to watch to prove the concept. Using ten differing genres that he has created and titled, he breaks down the films into core elements. He uses popular films like "Spider-Man 2" (in the chapter on the SUPERHERO genre) or more obscure films like "Brick" (in the chapter on the WHYDUNIT genre).

Basically, Blake and his buddies sat around and watched hundreds of films and figured out that they all contained, roughly, the same elements. Elements that most screenwriters are familiar with ("break into act 2") but then they found other elements maybe not so familiar ("fun and games" and "dark night of the soul") and then, breaking the book into different themed genres - though not what you might expect - they explore the similarities in thorough detail.

If someone said: "Did you know that "Open Water" and "Die Hard" contain basically the same elements in the DUDE WITH A PROBLEM genre? Or that both "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Kramer vs. Kramer" both contain similarities in the RITES OF PASSAGE genre? You might look at them confused. But Blake does a masterful job of explaining how it all works.

You might be hard-pressed to find the three-act structure in a film like "Crash." But Blake finds it. You might not see similarities between "Being There" and "The Forty Year-old Virgin" - but Blake sees the similarities and then explains them all to you.

Proper structure is a constant in Hollywood and Blake takes that structure and applies a layer to it, exploring it, opening it up. Making you a better writer in the process.

If I have any issue with this book - it is that it almost contains TOO many examples. I often found myself thinking: "Okay, the script I'm writing, is it an OUT OF THE BOTTLE or is it a DUDE WITH A PROBLEM?" You could, at times, get easily confused in amongst the examples - but the one constant that you have to remember is that these examples contain the basic elements described in the introduction and are part of the "Blake Snyder Beat Sheet."

Still Blake Snyder does it again! His enthusiasm for film and screenwriting shines through every page of this amazing book. Fantastic!

Blake Snyder's sequel to his intriguing essay on script-writing "Save the Cat!", is entitled (logically enough) "Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: The Screenwriter's Guide to Every Story Ever Told".
Snyder's new book enlarges on his basic premise that it's not so much the story that makes a successful movie, it's the way you tell it - and he then proceeds to illustrate his theory with many examples of movies that, while they may use the same basic ten stories, present them in new, different, yet creative ways. It is quite a revelation to read Snyder's analysis of the story similarities shared by, say, "Titanic" and "When Harry met Sally".
Snyder goes on to outline the basic structure of successful story-telling, even to the point of allocating the number of plot stages a successful script should have, and how many pages of script should be devoted to each beat of the story. Many may decry the idea of writing to a formula, but the fact remains that audiences subconsciously respond better to a logically constructed and (more importantly) well-paced movie than to one that is just a loosely connected string of events.
It's sort of analogous to building a house; the design of a solid basic framework uses fairly similar standard techniques; it is only when you begin to build the house around it that you can make the finished building uniquely different and (hopefully) better than that of your neighbours. And that's where the skill lies.
Any aspiring scriptwriter should read and re-read these two books, apply the principles that they propose - and then use their story-telling skills to hide the fact that they have done so! Go ahead - entertain us!

You won't find the traditional genres "action-adventure" or "romantic comedy" here. Synder swaps those for genre-predicaments like "Monster in the House" and "Dude with a Problem." He identifies ten of them as the engines of all hits. He then decomposes the plots of several blockbusters in each genre to show how that engine operates. His insights are fascinating because, without the distinction of genre as he defines it, you might assume that "Three Days of the Condor" and "Sleeping with the Enemy" are fundamentally different. By traditional definitions, one is a spy thriller and the other is a woman-jeopardy thriller. But in the gospel according to Blake, those two movies are twins. Knowing why will not only make you a better screenwriter but will also give you a better appreciation of the high art of crafting the blockbusters that almost never win the snob awards.

Do get this book if you are writing spec scripts. But if you are writing indies, proceed with caution--with any book of rules. Certainly the gurus will preach that the rules of structure can strengthen any story and that, at the very least, you should master the rules before you break them. True enough.

But you don't want to get so locked into the box of rules that you can't think outside of it. The goal in indies, in my humble opinion, should not be to make blockbusters on the cheap but to take risks and evolve the cinematic form in ways the studios won't.

Gerald Everett Jones is the author of My Inflatable Friend: The Confessions of Rollo Hemphill and several books on digital filmmaking, including 24P: Make Your Digital Movies Look Like Hollywood

I am a HUGE fan of the other Save the Cat book---Blake's beat sheets are perfect for writing good movies--this edition of save the cat is just examples of how a bunch of popular movies fit the beat sheet. If you understood the beats needed as described in the first book, this one won't do much for you---if you didn't quite understand what Blake meant by different parts of the beat sheet, the examples in this book should clear everything up.

In STC2, Blake Snyder puts into practice his theory that there are ten timeless story templates. He takes fifty diverse, well-known movies (from "The Lion King" to "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") and filters them through these story templates to show that all of these movies, whether commercial blockbuster or art house, hit similar marks structurally. And that those marks are important to a successful telling of the story. I wish I'd read this book earlier in my career. It would've saved me countless hours agonizing over structure.

I am a fan of both Blake Snyder books. They're not only an excellent synthesis of ideas in other screenwriting books, but he implements several fresh theories that he's formulated during his writing career. His unique gift is the ability to make subtle, even complex insights into the craft simple to understand. Like the original "Save The Cat", this book is an easy read without being shallow. And Blake's enthusiasm for his subject is contagious. I highly recommend it.

Mark Hentemann
Writer/Producer, "Family Guy"

This book is awesome!

If you want to write a spec script that will get sold then READ THIS BOOK and it's companion (the original Save the Cat book). This book literally blows the roof off the "secrets" behind successful screenwriting.

My collection of screenwriting books is ridiculous. The problem with ALL of those other books (with the exception of those by Cynthia Whitcomb) is that they are by people who have NEVER SOLD A SCRIPT. If you are serious about becoming a SUCCESSFUL screenwriter then you MUST limit ALL of your study to that material by successful screenwriters ONLY. Seems logical and yet there are hundreds of people like Robert McKee who prey upon the hopes and dreams of aspiring screenwriters while sucking their wallets bone dry.

My only issue with the Save the Cat series (actually two issues) is that Blake spilled the beans on the secrets so now everyone will know how to write a successful spec script -- so will there be less of an advantage? (Doubtful because most people are lazy and never write anything...but if everyone used this powerful information then it would flood the Hollywood market with wonderful scripts, thus making it harder for someone to break into the industry.)

My second issue is that in both the Save the Cat books Blake doesn't cover anything about the business. I understand that this book isn't about that. The first book could have included information about breaking in or getting a break.

So...Blake Snyder, if you're reading this: PLEASE MAKE YOUR NEXT BOOK ABOUT HOW TO BREAK INTO THE BUSINESS! PLEASE! You're the only guy who writes USEABLE books on screenwriting that are HONEST and tell the REAL DEAL about how things work. So, if you write another book, please use that same honesty to (1) talk about how Hollywood really works, and (2) how to realistically break into the industry.