What is the most important lesson a screenwriter can learn? Build your story on the shoulder of Giants

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What is the most important lesson a screenwriter can learn? 

Build your story on the shoulder of Giants

by Rob Edwards

The Beatles played blues classics all night, every night for months before they started to record their own music. Michelangelo and Picasso were so good at painting other people's paintings that they were considered magnificent forgers before they painted the masterpieces they're now known for. In fact, if you go to a museum, you practically stumble over artists repainting the canvases of the great masters. So why oh why do writers sit down and try to learn structure, artistry and innovation at the same time? Why do we often find ourselves reinventing the wheel when we try to break our stories? 

When people ask me what the most important thing I've ever learned after 30 years of writing, that's my answer. Build your cathedral on the shoulders of giants. Find a "STRUCTURAL COUSIN" to your story and then do the work to take it the next step. 

What's a "STRUCTURAL COUSIN", you ask? It's the classic blockbuster movie that is the closest structural match to your movie. It will serve as the scaffolding for your story.

It's better if I show you by example. The movie THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN is about a crew of broken down former gunslingers who train a village to defend themselves against a group of bandits. While training the farmers of the village, the gunslingers fall in love with the town and become better people in the process. Together they defeat the bandits and, as they celebrate, the men reflect on the fact that the farmers are the true winners in this situation. Whatever, dude. It's just an old movie. Until you consider that that exact plot was used in THE THREE AMIGOS, GALAZY QUEST, A BUGS LIFE and a ton of other movies that used it as their STRUCTURAL COUSIN. If that doesn't get your attention, you should know that THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) was based on Akira Kurosawa's classic film SEVEN SAMURAI.

You can point to most successful Hollywood blockbusters and find the classic films they were based on after a little digging. Watch THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS and POINT BREAK side by side. You'll be shocked at the similarities.

AVATAR owes a lot to DANCES WITH WOLVES.

KUNG FU PANDA has more than a few structural tentpoles in common with THE MATRIX.

You could consider DOC HOLLYWOOD to be a Structural Cousin for CARS. The writers of TOY STORY 3 and CHICKEN RUN probably took long looks at THE GREAT ESCAPE.

And don't get me started on the scores of movies that owe STAR WARS, TOP GUN and TOOTSIE tremendous debts of gratitude.

I know what you're thinking. You're an artist. You don't care what other writers have done since the dawn of history. You're going to go your own way. You've got an idea for a round thing that can make cars and wagons move faster and you don't care if somebody's already invented the wheel. To you I say, let the wind be at your back. I hope you come up with something great. 

The rest of you can keep reading.

In television it's the first thing you learn. Every show has a bible and a template. The template gives you the basic shape of the show and the bible tells you what shows have already been done. Shows like LAW AND ORDER (every version), CSI (every version), basically every "procedural" show, every sitcom and most of the dramedies all establish a structural rhythm early on in their runs and then stick to them no matter how long the show is on. This doesn't mean the content of the shows is the same, it just means that the shows follow similar structural tentpoles. 

The thing is, we as audiences have come to expect it. We've seen all of the best movies in our favorite genre. We've been writing a movie in our head ever since we saw the poster. By the time we've seen the trailer we've got a list in our head of sequences we'll be disappointed if we don't see. When we see them, and they're better than we thought they'd be (which was my experience watching THE INCREDIBLES), we're happy to have bought the ticket and given up a Saturday night. We can't wait to tell our friends about it... maybe even see it again. When we don't get what we want... there is no not getting what we want. Those movies don't get made. 

Now, of course, we've all driven through neighborhoods and seen the same exact house over and over. We know how dismal the world is where architects use the same floor plan and just paint houses different colors. That creative graveyard is not what we're talking about here. That's, in fact, the danger. That's like remaking a movie like, say, PSYCHO without putting any new thought into it. The death of the writer. Instead, consider what we did on THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG...

FROG used several movies as STRUCTURAL COUSINS, the most notable was IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934). Of course, nobody turns into a frog or breaks into song in IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT but the Frank Capra / Robert Riskin classic does feature a rugged journalist (played by Clark Gable) who escorts a dilettante (Claudette Colbert) across town to marry a guy Grant believes is wrong for her. Along the way, they fall in love. It was perfect for us. All we had to do was make Tiana the Cary Grant and Prince Naveen, Claudette Colbert. They meet and immediately make wrong assessments of each other. There are events that highlight their differences. At the MIDPOINT we know they've fallen in love but can't admit it. We used our STRUCTURAL COUSIN until it no longer applied and then created new magic of our own.

So, when you get stuck trying to break your story (as all writers eventually do) look for a STRUCTURAL COUSIN for your solution. Study the film. Tear it apart like an old radio and see what makes it work. Then use the pieces you need to build a solid foundation for your movie. Build your stories with time tested bricks and take your genre to the next level with the innovations you'll use to improve upon it. Secure each brick with insights from your life that will give it heart and resonance. Most of all, be like the Beatles, Michelangelo and Picasso and build your cathedrals on the shoulders of giants and, together, we'll eradicate bad screenwriting forever. Class dismissed!

Rob Edwards wrote his first professional teleplay before his 21st birthday. Since then he’s written for such TV shows as “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”, “Full House”, “In Living Color” and “Studio 60” and such feature films as Disney's Treasure Planet and The Princess and the Frog (both films were nominated for Academy Awards).

Be sure to check out his website (and informative blog) at www.robedwards.net