![]() McKee appears now to be just as outmatched-surely a Japanese woman knows her own language. But just when all seems lost, the camera circles him so that we see a gun taped to his back. In Die Hard, for instance, Bruce Willis stands shirtless, facing a row of armed men during a climactic face-off. Every great thriller, McKee teaches, must have this showdown. “It’s hai, and I know because I’m Japanese!” Here we reach the climax of the scene in which the hero faces an adversary who seems to have the upper hand. McKee freezes for a moment, shoots her a look and, like John Wayne in a Western, refuses to back down, repeating his line a third time, as if that gave his assertion more credence. It’s the act that upsets the balance of the life of the protagonist. McKee, a lover of jargon, has coined a name for this moment in a screenplay: the Inciting Incident. A brave woman in the audience dares to challenge the master: “Actually, there is a word for ‘yes,’” she pipes up. But then something unexpected happens, the kind of reversal you need in any effective thriller. He asks the question again, as if it were a hilarious punch line that improves with repetition. McKee takes a sip of coffee, as his cowering, twitchy admirers mull over this provocation. He asks, “Did you know that there is no word in Japanese for ‘yes’?” He rants that his book, Story, has been translated into 20 languages, but not Japanese. As with seemingly everything in his opening act, this exchange leads to more stern words, in this case about the impossibility of doing business with the Japanese. McKee looks surprised, but not too surprised. “Japan!” shouts someone from the front row. ![]() But our hero quickly runs into trouble when he asks the crowd who has traveled the farthest to see him. McKee teaches that a protagonist must be a willful character, and on that count, McKee certainly qualifies. “I learned how to run a seminar from Joseph Stalin,” he says with a deadpan glare. The first cell phone to go off will cost its owner $10. By contrast, his character in Adaptation, who shared his name and theatrical bluster, took Charlie Kaufman (as played by Nicolas Cage) for a drink. No questions designed to impress me, please, and do not engage me in conversation. McKee introduces himself like a tough guy out of a David Mamet play. I entered the course genuinely hoping to learn about screenwriting, but also, as a critic-and a specialist of horror movies-with a professional interest in McKee’s theories about genre and narrative. along with about 100 lumpy, underdressed fellow writers to participate in McKee’s one-day seminar on how to write a thriller. So, a few weeks ago, I file into a room on the 18th floor of a hotel across the street from Madison Square Garden at around eight a.m. That led to an interest in writing my own scary movie. ![]() In the process of working on a book about the history of the modern horror film, adapted from a story I wrote for Vanity Fair last year, I’ve talked to most of the great horror directors of the 60s and 70s. So when he barks out, “You can’t work in this business without reading my book,” his audience has good reason to believe him. He has trained scores of Oscar and Emmy winners his how-to best-seller, Story, is an essential part of most Hollywood bookshelves and he’s perhaps most famous for being portrayed by Brian Cox in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. Just as financiers make pilgrimages to Omaha to hear Warren Buffett and aspiring Jedi knights travel to the ends of the galaxy to hang upside down in front of Yoda, screenwriters, with dreams of summer blockbusters dancing in their heads, periodically make the voyage to the seminars of Robert McKee.
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