Robert McKee
18 languages
Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the Maryland politician, see Robert A. McKee.
This biography of a living person needs
additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable
sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced
or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and
its talk page, especially if potentially libelous.
Find sources: "Robert
McKee" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2011) (Learn how
and when to remove this template message)
Robert McKee
Robert McKee at the Story Seminar given at the Tel Aviv
Cinematheque, October 2005
Born Robert Mckee
January 30, 1941 (age 82)
Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Michigan
Author
Occupations
lecturer
story consultant
Website mckeestory.com
Robert McKee (born January 30, 1941) is an author, lecturer and story
consultant who is known for his "Story Seminar",[1] which he developed when he
was a professor at the University of Southern California. McKee is the author
of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of
Screenwriting, Dialogue: the Art of Verbal Action for Stage, Page and
Screen, Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in the Post-Advertising
World and Character: The Art of Role and Cast Design for Page, Stage, and
Screen. McKee also has the blog and online writers' resource "Storylogue".
Robert McKee's "Story Seminars" have been held around the globe including
Boston, Moscow, Amsterdam, Beijing, Mumbai, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney
and annually in New York City, Los Angeles, and London. The three-day
seminar teaches writers the principles of storytelling. McKee's one-day "Genre
Seminars" teach writers the conventions of different styles of storytelling
including thriller, comedy, horror, love story, action story, and writing for
television.
Rather than teaching story as a "mechanical" form, McKee gained attention for
teaching story principles, allowing writers for theater, novels, film and television
freedom to apply them as they wish provided the story ultimately "works."
After consulting on business storytelling for multinational companies
including Microsoft, Nike, Hewlett-Packard, Time Warner, and Siemens, in 2013
McKee launched a seminar for the business community in Los Angeles, New
York City, Beijing, and Malta. In 2018, McKee partnered with digital marketer
and Skyword CEO Tom Gerace to write Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in
the Post-Advertising World. Storynomics, and the accompanying seminar,
instructs leaders, managers and marketers how to use story in strategic
management, brand management, and business communications.
Early life in the theater[edit]
Robert McKee began his theater career at the age of nine, playing the title role
in a community theater production of Martin the Shoemaker. He continued
acting as a teenager in theater productions in his hometown of Detroit,
Michigan. Upon receiving the Evans Scholarship, he attended the University of
Michigan and earned a bachelor's degree in English Literature. While an
undergraduate, he acted in and directed over thirty productions. McKee's
creative writing professor was the noted Kenneth Thorpe Rowe.
After completing his Bachelor of Arts degree, McKee toured with the APA
(Association of Producing Artists) Repertory Company, appearing on Broadway
alongside Helen Hayes, Rosemary Harris and Will Geer. He then received the
Professional Theater Fellowship and returned to Ann Arbor, Michigan to earn
his master's degree in Theater Arts.
Upon graduating, McKee directed the Toledo Repertory Company, acted with
the American Drama Festival, and became artistic director of the Aaron Deroy
Theater. From there he traveled to London to accept the position of artist-in-
residence at the National Theatre Company where he studied Shakespearean
production at the Old Vic theatre. He then returned to New York City and spent
the next seven years as an actor/director.
Mid-life in the film industry[edit]
After deciding to move his career to film, McKee attended Cinema School at the
University of Michigan. While there, he directed two short films: A Day Off,
which he also wrote, and Talk To Me Like The Rain, adapted from a one-act
play by Tennessee Williams. These two films won the Cine Eagle Award,
awards at the Brussels and Grenoble Film Festivals, and prizes at the Delta,
Rochester, Chicago and Baltimore Film Festivals.
In 1979, McKee moved to Los Angeles, where he began to write screenplays
and work as a story analyst for United Artists and NBC. He sold his first
screenplay Dead Files to AVCO/Embassy Films, after which he joined the WGA
(Writers Guild of America). His next screenplay, Hard Knocks, won the National
Screenwriting Contest, and since then McKee has had eight feature film
screenplays purchased or optioned, including the feature film
script Trophy for Warner Bros. (Only one of these films, however, was
produced). In addition to his screenplays, McKee has had a number of scripts
produced for television series such as Quincy, M.E. (starring Jack
Klugman), Mrs. Columbo (starring Kate Mulgrew), Spenser: for
Hire and Kojak (starring Telly Savalas). McKee was also an early instructor at
the pioneering Los Angeles film school the Sherwood Oaks Experimental
College.
Starting the STORY seminar[edit]
In 1983, as Fulbright Scholar, McKee joined the faculty of the School of
Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California (USC), where he
began offering his STORY Seminar class. A year later, McKee opened the
course to the public, giving a three-day, 30-hour intensive class to sold-out
audiences around the world.
Since 1984, more than 50,000 students have taken McKee's course in cities
around the world: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto,
Boston, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Helsinki, Oslo, Munich, Tel Aviv, Auckland,
Singapore, Barcelona, Stockholm, São Paulo and more. In March 2011 and
again in 2012, he taught a four-day seminar in Bogotá, Colombia. [2] In February
2012, he taught another four-day seminar in the Ramoji film city of Hyderabad
in India. He did the same in Amsterdam, March 2014.
McKee's current lecture series includes the three-day "Story Seminar", one-day
"Genre Seminars" (teaching the conventions of love story, thriller, comedy,
horror, action and writing for television) and the one-day "Storynomics
Seminar", teaching the application of storytelling principles in the business and
marketing world (co-lectured with CEO of Skyword Tom Gerace).
McKee continues to be a project consultant to major film and television
production companies, corporations and governments around the world, as well
major software firms such as Microsoft. In addition, several companies such
as ABC, Disney, Miramax, PBS, Nickelodeon and Paramount regularly send
their creative and writing staffs to his lectures.
Life and awards[edit]
Robert McKee is among the most widely known screenwriting lecturers.
McKee's former students include over 65 Academy Award winners, 200 Emmy
Award winners, 100 WGA (Writers Guild of America) Award winners and 50
DGA (Directors Guild of America) Award winners (all participated in McKee's
course before or after winning their award; not all were awarded for writing), the
British Book of the Year Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Some
recent notable former students to win or be nominated for Oscars include Akiva
Goldsman for his screenplay "A Beautiful Mind," Peter Jackson (writer/director
of "Lord of the Rings I, II and III"), Andrew Stanton ("WALL-E," “Finding Nemo")
and Paul Haggis ("Million Dollar Baby," “Quantum of Solace").
Notable writers and actors such as Geoffrey Rush, Paul Haggis, Akiva
Goldsman, William Goldman, Joan Rivers, David Bowie, Kirk Douglas, John
Cleese, Tony Kaye, Steven Pressfield, among many others have taken his
seminar.[3]
In 1990, Robert McKee was brought to New Zealand by the NZ Film
Commission, and delivered a three-day seminar on screenplay and story
structure in Auckland and Wellington. In the audience were Jane
Campion and Peter Jackson, the latter of which went on to write and
direct Heavenly Creatures, The Lord of the Rings, and King Kong.
In 2000, McKee won the 1999 International Moving Image Book Award for his
book Story (Regan Books/HarperCollins). The book has become required
reading for film and cinema schools
at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, USC and Tulane universities.[2] [3] The book was on
the Los Angeles Times best-seller list for 20 weeks. It is translated into more
than 20 languages.
In 2017, McKee was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the Final Draft Awards,
an honor that recognizes professionals who have had a "profound influence on
the industry"[4] joining peers such as Lawrence Kasdan and Steven Zaillian.
McKee's other credits include writing and presenting the BBC series Filmworks,
the Channel 4 series Reel Secrets, the BAFTA Award-winning J'accuse Citizen
Kane television program which he wrote and presented, and the writing
of Abraham, the four-hour mini-series on Turner Network Television (TNT) that
starred Richard Harris, Barbara Hershey and Maximilian Schell.
Criticism[edit]
McKee has been criticized by writer Joe Eszterhas, for teaching screenwriting
without ever having a script of his made into a film. [5][6] (However, McKee is
credited as writer of the 1994 TV movie Abraham.)[7] McKee has responded to
such criticisms, saying: "The world is full of people who teach things they
themselves cannot do", while admitting that even though he sold all of his
written screenplays, he still lacks their screen credit since they were only
optioned and not ever produced by the studios.[3]
Many of the ideas he discusses have been around since Aristotle and appear in
the work of William Archer.[8] Nevertheless, McKee himself tells his students that
Aristotle is the basis for much of what he teaches, credits much of his writing on
conflict and drama to the teaching of Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, and he often
distributes some of John Howard Lawson's writings at his seminar: he
acknowledges his forebears and never claims that he is inventing a brand new
approach to storytelling.[9] Furthermore, he claims that much of what he teaches
was common knowledge 50 or 60 years ago, but that screenwriters have lost
touch with the fundamentals of storytelling. In a CBC interview he said that to
give his lecture in the 1930s, '40s or '50s "would have been ludicrous". [10] McKee
also appears and is criticized in several works, for example, Missionnaire by
French author Joann Sfar.
In popular culture[edit]
In the Charlie Kaufman-penned film Adaptation., McKee's character was
portrayed by the Emmy Award-winning actor Brian Cox. In the Oscar-winning
movie, the desperate screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage)
reluctantly goes to McKee's course, but then – after being "shaken" by McKee's
tough-style response to his claim that "nothing happens in the real world" –
Kaufman asks McKee to meet in person to discuss his failure to write the film
adaptation he is working on.
Though the story depicts McKee as little more than an amalgam of hack clichés
on the subject of screen writing, Charlie's slacker brother Donald (also played
by Cage) uses the knowledge obtained attending the seminar to write a spec
script he then sells for a large amount of money through his brother's agent.
The film then concludes with the very ending which McKee had ridiculed (Deus
ex machina), as well as a voice-over epilogue in which – by means of voice-
over narration – Cage's Kaufman character admonishes himself for disobeying
a cardinal rule of McKee's to avoid voice-over narration.
McKee appeared on the Simpsons episode "Caper Chase" as himself.[11]
Anecdotes[edit]
McKee claims in his seminars that he does not say not to use voice-over
narration. There is some truth to the scene in Adaptation however, as he
vehemently teaches that using voice-over to substitute for telling the story
via action and dialogue is weak,[12] whereas he teaches that voice-over used
to counterpoint and enrich the story can be wonderful. [13]
McKee is known to object to the French-originated "auteur theory", which
states that the director is the de facto author of a movie. McKee states
otherwise, that the writer/screenwriter is in fact the most important creator of
the movie.
In a Haaretz article,[14] McKee was quoted as saying in front of a Tel Aviv
audience that Israelis have a rough sense of humor, completely different
from the known worldwide Jewish one, since Israelis are living in a harsh
reality which leads them to lose their sense of humor.
Books[edit]
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of
Screenwriting (1997)
Dialogue: the Art of Verbal Action for Stage, Page and Screen (2016)
Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in the Post-Advertising World (2018)
with Thomas Gerace
Character: The Art of Role and Cast Design for Page, Stage, and
Screen (2021)
Action: The Art of Excitement for Screen, Page, and Game (2022) with
Bassem El-Wakil
References[edit]
1. ^ "Story Seminar". YouTube.
2. ^ "Seminar in Bogotá". YouTube.
3. ^ Jump up to:a b Michigan Today – June 1995 — interview with Brett Forrest
4. ^ "Hall of Fame Awards | Final Draft". Final Draft. Retrieved June 19, 2018.
5. ^ 'Basic Instinct' — New York Times article by Joe Queenan, September 17, 2006
6. ^ "— Film programme interview, 9 February 2007'". Bbc.co.uk. Retrieved December
27, 2013.
7. ^ Robert McKee at IMDb
8. ^ William Archer (1912). Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship. Small, Maynard.
Retrieved March 31, 2013.
9. ^ Ian Parker (January 27, 2004). "Robert McKee – Lessons of a screenwriting
guru". Jewish Theatre. Archived from the original on February 6, 2013. Retrieved March
31, 2013.
10. ^ "Robert McKee on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos". YouTube. July 11, 2008.
Retrieved March 31, 2013.
11. ^ Perkins, Dennis (April 2, 2017). "The Yale-Harvard war bogs down in an overstuffed
Simpsons". The A.V. Club. Retrieved December 28, 2021.
12. ^ Robert McKee (August 10, 2013). "Q&A: What did you think of the voice-over in
GOODFELLAS?". Retrieved September 5, 2013.
13. ^ Robert McKee (August 13, 2012). "A Study in Voice Over Narration from two recent films,
SAVAGES and BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD" (PDF). Retrieved September
5, 2013.
14. ^ " ( וודי אלן לא עשה עלייהin Hebrew, rough translation "Woody Allen did increase")" .
November 2, 2006. Archived from the original on June 5, 2011. Retrieved March 31, 2013.
External links[edit]
Robert McKee's Story Seminar — Official Web site
Robert McKee at IMDb
Interview with Robert McKee by The New Yorker
Advice for the aspiring CNN
A writing guru's very own 'Story' CNN
McKee's visit to Israel — Video article by Ynet News — in this words
association-style interview, McKee relates to the following terms in the
following order (in the video, the words are composed in Hebrew letter
cubes): 1) Blank page, 2) Art of storytelling, 3) Inspiration, 4)
Disappointment, 5) Thrill, 6) Mind control, 7) America, 8) Time.
Screenwriting Guru — by Brett Forest
Alice Cinema — French article
BBC World Service — How to Write (interactive guide)
http://www.writersinstitute.eu/business-story-seminar [TRUE TALK: STORY-
in-BUSINESS Seminar – Malta]
A short summary on the Screenwriters Federation Website
What people are saying about the McKee course — an open forum
http://www.magallanica.com Robert Mckee in Latin America 2009–2011
(Mario Velasco and Patricio Lynch).
http://www.writersinstitute.eu [International Writers Institute under the
patronage of Robert McKee]
