I would like to make grateful acknowledgment to my many great teachers, Sister Angelique Dryden and others at St. Dominic High School, and to Dave Johnson, Mel Sloan, Dick Harber, Mort Zarkoff, Drew Casper, Wolfram von Hanwehr, and Irwin Blacker at the USC School of Cinema Arts.

Many thanks to Fritz Springmeyer for his artistic insights and advice.

—— McKENNA ——

I owe an unpayable debt to the many teachers, classmates, colleagues and students who have helped shape me and the contents of this book. Foremost among them is Annette Insdorf who has graciously provided me a professional home as a teacher at Columbia University's School of the Arts. I can't begin to list the theatre artists who have collaborated with and inspired me over the years, but I must note Jaston Williams and Joe Sears who have helped me make a living in the trade. I am deeply grateful to my friend Susan Dansby for her suggestions and editorial input. Finally, I'd like to thank my mother and my sister for their patience and willingness to play.

INTRODUCTION

—— VOGLER ——

The tools and techniques in this volume are the result of many years of spirited debate and collaboration between myself, Chris Vogler, and my friend and colleague David McKenna. Both of us do many jobs, but most of our careers we have been professional story analysts, meaning that we read and evaluate stories, screenplays, and novel manuscripts for the story departments of major movie studios. Between the two of us we estimate we have critiqued over forty thousand stories in one form or another, plus working together on dozens of writing projects.

In order to do this work, we have had to build up an inventory of terms and concepts to describe what we're dealing with: essential elements of stories such as structure, character, and theme. We've asked a lot of questions and made up our own theories and language to manage this unruly subject, but we are just the latest in a long line of questioners stretching all the way back to Aristotle. We are grateful for the work of our predecessors, and want to set down in this book some of the things we learned from them, along with our own insights and interpretations. And then we'll hand it over to you in the hope that you will find the mysteries of story as fascinating as we have, and that you will continue to ask these questions and add to the body of knowledge.

THE TOOL KIT

We think of this book as our mental tool kit, a collection of essential instruments that extend our reach, improve our aim and efficiency, and make our craft much easier. There are many kinds of tools in these pages, tools for defining characters, laying out structures, determining СКАЧАТЬ

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