The Swami of Scripts : Robert McKee has turned a way with storytelling and some self-promotion into an educational industry

“On the first day of class, they look like stunned mullets. I mean, they don’t know what hit them.

“On the second day, depression sets in--when they realize how hard it is. And then on the third day, I give ‘em a shot in the arm, inspire them, because screenwriting is the most difficult writing form of all--because there is no place to hide.”

And then Robert McKee--businessman, master teacher, the swami of scripts--breaks into a hearty laugh at the strangeness of it all: “All I wanted when I came out here--as if this wasn’t enough--was to write and direct my own screenplays.”

McKee, 47, lives in an art-filled, 24th-floor apartment on the Westside. After welcoming a reporter, the one-time stage actor and director, studio story analyst and TV series writer lights up the first of many cigarettes and explains how he became one of the world’s most successful screenwriting teachers, how he can jet to New York and Chicago, to London and Auckland, to teach a modern world the ancient art of storytelling. It is a seamless narrative; he has told the story often.

This being Hollywood, McKee isn’t shy about self-promotion: “I believe that this course I teach stands head and shoulders above the rest. This course has grown into such a phenomenon worldwide, the kind of quality of people who take the course--Academy Award winners, all kinds of executives as well as writers--has made me feel that what I do is very valuable, that it really makes a difference.”

McKee’s “Story Structure” class does attract a lot of industry attention; more than half the students at his seminars work in television or film. The class brochure is embellished with testimonials from celebrities who have taken it--director Mark Rydell, producer Gene Reynolds, even former Ms. magazine publisher Gloria Steinem. McKee proudly displays a letter from Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, enrolling in a recent seminar.

And, noting others have also “seen the possibilities of this,” McKee asks that he not be “bunched into an article about a survey of screenwriting gurus.”

(McKee has certainly mastered the “possibilities”: He teaches monthly in Los Angeles, four times a year in New York and three times a year in London as well as classes in other major cities around the world. At $300 a pop, McKee expects to teach 2,000 students this year, enough to support three full-time staff members as well as some part-timers, and to maintain offices here and in New York. He also offers personal script consultations for $1,000, as well as consultation to film studios and networks. “My accountant points out that I make a very nice living,” McKee said, “but there’s a lot of overhead too.”)

After earning a master’s in drama at the University of Michigan, McKee--who is the father of two children and is separated from his wife--moved to New York, eventually directing about 60 plays as well as acting in Off-Broadway, repertory and summer stock productions. After seven years of the gypsy theater life, McKee went back to the University of Michigan to get a doctoral degree that “would be something I could take to Hollywood, something that would enhance my work when I got out there.” His thesis became the underpinning of “Story Structure.”

He came west in 1979, first teaching at San Diego State University, then becoming a story analyst at United Artists and NBC, but his ambition was to be a film director. He turned to screenwriting when he couldn’t get anyone to hire him to direct--”I discovered that to make it in Hollywood, you have to write your own screenplay.”

In 1981, McKee sold his first script, to AVCO/Embassy, and has had eight feature film screenplays purchased or optioned since then. Only one, “Madness,” is currently in active development, with a small Italian company, Serio International. He also wrote scripts for TV “cop shows and like that, making a living as a writer, somehow, between the options and the TV. While I was waiting for one of these (feature) screenplays to strike gold--to get to the screen, so I can twist the arms of Hollywood on the second one and get to direct--I was invited to teach at Sherwood Oaks Experimental College.”

It was McKee’s experience as a story analyst that set the subject matter at Sherwood Oaks (no longer in existence). “When I got out here, as a story analyst, I thought, ‘Everyone understands story’--until I started to read. And then I discovered what everyone knows is true, that 99 out of a 100 screenplays are terribly told. And then I found out the reality of Hollywood: Over the past 20 years the whole craft, the fundamental understanding of the craft of storytelling, has rapidly gone downhill.

“I knew this course had to be about story structure, that it would be a waste of time to be talking about the refinements of style, of dialogue, of characterization, the screenplay’s surface.”

McKee--who says that “in the ‘30s and ‘40s, even the worst B movie had a good story”--blames the loss of good storytelling craft on three factors:

-- The end of the studio system, in which writers were handled by “real story editors, most of them anonymous, most of them women, who really knew structure” and who had the time to educate, to apprentice a writer.

-- The shift in emphasis at universities from teaching the “inner life of a story--deep character, the powerful controlling idea--to textural analysis. The deep structures of storytelling became an embarrassment to the scholar; they forgot that structure is more important than anything; it’s the grand form, it contains the deepest, most powerful choices the artist makes, the most powerful expression of their vision.”

-- The time we live in. Because everyone is confused about values, “there’s this tremendous subjectivization, relativization of values . . . consequently there’s a great confusion in the minds of writers about what to write about, what is meaningful . . . a disintegration of understanding about values,” values that are at the heart of storytelling.

McKee, looking very professorial in sweater and slacks, enters Lucas Building Theatre 108 at USC.

Fifty students--pros and amateurs, studio executives and underlings, actors and wanna-be’s--lean forward, seriously checking him out, each wondering if the teacher is as good as advertised, wondering if they should have spent the $300 tuition fee on a weekend in Mazatlan.

McKee wins over the most skeptical. He’s a performer as well as a master teacher who, in 20 hours over three days, will attempt to teach them the complex art of writing a simple story, well-told.

And--no surprise--the Gospel According to McKee starts with story structure.

“I make it real clear in the first hour: This course is not about formula. You cannot take the greatest, most mysterious art form there is and reduce it to a formula--that’s absurd. There is such a thing as form--when that form is present we instinctively react to it. That response can be to ‘Tender Mercies’ or to ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ When you come out, you go, ‘What a good story.’ You react to it. You have been touched by a form, worked through a form, satisfied intellectually and emotionally by the great form of that story.”

McKee gets most passionate when emphasizing the prominence of classic story structure to the class, the need for a powerful “controlling idea”--the “one clear sentence that distills the essence of the film”--to drive the story.

The essence of good story is unchanging and universal: McKee’s students must learn classic story structure because “everything works in the shadow of it. If you want to write minimalistic or anti-structure then you must know the grand form first.” Classic structure “works, this has worked since Homer; these are the functions of story, the particular way you make it work is your problem.

“Structure is not some simplistic form of beginnings, middles and ends. It’s a very clear, deep understanding for the writer of the metaphors for life, an exploration of the craft of writing as it echoes in their life--stories are a metaphor for life.”

He gets in a dig at his teaching rival, Syd Field, saying Field’s book, “Screenplay,” has “done more harm than good. . . . Field’s book says, ‘You too can be a hack.’ ”

(Field, in a phone interview, retorts: “McKee says I teach people to write by the numbers--for me, story structure is flexible, the tree that bends but will not break. When I write that a plot point should occur between page 25 and 27, that depends on the film; it could just as easily come at page 18 or 35.

(“I get a lot of people in my classes who have taken his class and who don’t know how to write a screenplay.”)

McKee plays to the student writers’ egos, telling them that everything starts with the writer, the story: “It’s the most difficult time to be a writer, also the most challenging. A writer, cast on their own, really has to be wise, to come to a deep understanding of their values, to make an original exploration of what life really means. It’s not a given anymore.

“You cannot hide behind language (like in the novel or theater). A screenwriter . . . cannot manipulate perception; screenwriters are hanging bare-naked and the camera sees through every flaw.”

Jeff Kleeman, 24, a junior executive at a major studio who calls himself “an apprentice in the industry,” says that the USC seminar “is a great starting point. McKee is very articulate, charming, he schematized class in a very intelligent if somewhat closed system. My guess is that if he were a studio executive he would never give the green light to a bad script but might pass on a good script that didn’t fit into his format. Part of McKee’s charm is his arrogance, which ruled out most dialogue with the students.”

Another student at the USC seminar, Marsha Bentley Hale, 36, a film archivist “for a major director,” said the seminar “gave me insight into structure and form, things that were helpful to me. Something that he said ‘clicked’ with me, was very helpful to a teleplay (script for a theme park attraction) that I’m working on.”

McKee doesn’t promise a pot of gold waiting at the end of the course, and repeatedly hammers home that it won’t be easy, that the students will have to dig deep within themselves to produce a quality script: “One fine service this course may do is to make it very clear to would-be’s as to what a very difficult tightrope they have stepped upon, that it’s going to take a tremendous amount of skill, craft to get from one end to the other.

“I think I save a lot of people a lot of time--it’ll take you five screenplays to figure out how to write a screenplay.”

While “Story Structure” may pay the bills, McKee keeps pounding away at Hollywood through his production company, Two Arts Productions. He began working with 10 of his students to produce scripts that he could market to Hollywood. “A few years ago, I opened workshops beyond the class. Getting very frustrated that screenplays I sold or had optioned got into pre-production and then didn’t make it to the screen--I decided to use my expertise as a story editor, to take the best author development contracts to the best of these young writers.

“So I gave them contracts, to add to their work a lot of my own creative contributions--wanting nothing in terms of their money--to see if I could get them into production. A horror film is finished, a beautiful piece by Doug Erickson called ‘Mirror, Mirror’ getting very nice coverage around town (Erickson says “Mirror” was not optioned, but purchased outright by McKee’s production company); out of the 10 that I drew, four, maybe five, became viable screenplays and two of them, possibly a third, will get produced.”

The payoff for him? “Hopefully, I’ll direct them.” And, there will be the financial reward for Two Arts when and if the projects are picked up by a film studio.

And if that doesn’t work out, there’s still his writing. “Meanwhile, my screenplays are doing very well. I’ve just finished a project called ‘Madness’ in co-production with Serio International of Rome; I will direct that. That was through my development company with one of my development writers, Mike Gonzalez (Gonzalez and McKee share co-writing credit). And one of my own called ‘Miss Julie’--I have a deal with Zev Braun (Productions) to direct that, I’m polishing that.” (Braun, who took McKee’s seminar--’It’s the real thing, digging into making a complete script, not patching one together’--says ‘Miss Julie’ is in active development.)

“I’m not alone in this experience of continually selling your own screenplays, losing the roll of the dice,” McKee said. “This town is full of people like myself, who sell consistently, but have a hard time getting produced--just bad luck. The studios typically option 95 scripts for every five they produce, so it’s not unusual to find someone in my situation, taking eight years to finally get it to the screen.”

McKee gets a little defensive about his cash flow: “In teaching this class over the years, despite the success and the money making, the truth of the matter is that I could have probably made a lot more money writing television episodes with one-fifth of the work. (McKee has sold seven episodes of one-hour shows, including “Columbo” and “Quincy,” and the short-lived “Double Dare” and “Eye to Eye.”)

“There are all kinds of ways to look at what I do, but the people who have taken the course know that I take that enterprise very seriously, that I am trying to make us all appreciate the great difficulty and great importance of what we do. No matter what it’s done for me personally, I don’t do it for me personally--I already know the stuff. I do it because I love it, it’s great fun for me, the last vestige of an old actor, to hold these people for a weekend.

“I don’t pretend for a moment that this will send a person to the typewriter and tell them how to write a story. What they get out of this course is, inevitably, a list of questions with knowledge behind them. They can sit down with their own material and ask, ‘Why doesn’t this thing work?’ and find the answers to those questions.

“They come out with questions and enough knowledge to be able to find their own solutions.

“And that’s what I do.”