Memo from the Story Department - Christopher Vogler

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one of the peak years of the baby boom, 1949, both growing up in sprawling middle-class families with a certain amount of ethical orientation drummed into us by the Catholic church. We shared an appreciation for Western movies and an interest in history and the supernatural. But most of all, over time, we seem to share most the love of story in all its forms. We learned that we had some facility at it, a natural sense of structure, and a vast array of examples in our mental inventory.

      We became friends and worked together on several stage shows in San Antonio when the theatre scene in that town was remarkably vibrant and creative. It was a magical time when it seemed we could do anything. Like all such times it had to come to an end and the creative spirits who had gathered briefly there dispersed to the four winds. The end of the magic coincided with the end of my tour of duty in the Air Force. Both David and I sensed that we needed to know more about the crafts we wanted to pursue, and so we split up to go to graduate schools on opposite sides of the country, though we promised to keep the creative spark alive by staying in touch.

      David headed East to Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh to hone his skills as a theatre director, while I returned to Los Angeles to gain more skills in writing and directing for film, going to the USC Cinema School on the G.I. Bill.

      I was looking for something in those days, an organizing principle or general theory to make sense of the seemingly chaotic world of story. Looking back, I see that David may have already found his version of a Unified Field Theory for storytelling, in the approach to directing he had learned in his undergraduate training at the University of Texas at Austin, from Professor Hodge. I found mine a little later, at USC, when a professor introduced me to the world of Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey concept, a life-changing experience that led to the writing of The Writer's Journey and formed the foundation of my career.

      Through those years and beyond, David and I did keep in touch. In fact we worked at it quite seriously. In long letters we compared notes on the training we were getting and the new movies that were coming out. After graduate school, David started directing theatre and coaching actors while I got my first jobs as a story analyst in Hollywood. We still managed to get together for a few days every year for intense sessions of analyzing movies and discussing the stories we encountered in our work. But there was something deeper going on, a search for the hidden structure of it all.

      I was finding steady work in Hollywood as a story analyst, reading scripts and stories and writing reports on them called “coverage.” I was good at it and earned a reputation for being good with structure, in part because of the tools that the Hero's Journey put in my hands. One year when David was visiting me in Los Angeles I introduced him to the story editor at 20th Century-Fox where I was working. He said there might be work for David in the New York office of the Fox story department and encouraged him to prepare some samples of coverage to display his story analysis skills.

      Then, as David remembers it, I put him through a hellish course of training, making him rewrite his sample coverage countless times before it was ready. But apparently it was worth the effort, for he got the job and has been in demand as a skilled story analyst ever since.

      After a couple of years I left the Fox story department for a new job at Disney, which had just gone through a drastic change of management and corporate culture and was newly energized. I got a little deeper into the mysteries of the movie development process, doing historical research, writing reports on various aspects of popular culture, and composing detailed notes on screenplays being prepared for production.

      I never lost sight of my interest in the deep storytelling principles, in the unwritten rules of story logic, especially the patterns of structure and character I'd found in Campbell's Hero's Journey model. The urge built inside me to put down my thoughts about the model's huge potential as a guide to movie storytelling. I wanted to write it up into a short, useful statement of the basic principles in the form of a studio memo, the kind that Disney production chief Jeffrey Katzenberg had famously used to spell out marching orders for the new Hollywood.

      I decided to take time off from work to focus on the project and flew to New York to bounce my ideas off David. We worked together intensely for over a week, discussing and testing every aspect of the pattern, tugging and adjusting the language here and there. David was extremely helpful with thinking of classic movie examples to illustrate the thousand possible variations on the Twelve Stages.

      When we had worn out his VCR looking at old movies, I went back to L.A. to write up the memo that I called “A Practical Guide to the Hero with a Thousand Faces,” the famous or infamous seven-page structure guide that soon began infiltrating Hollywood story culture. (You'll find it reproduced in Chapter 6.)

      I sent the first copy to McKenna, and then started handing it out to my story analyst friends and to key Disney executives. “Interesting,” was all that most people said, at first. But I knew, I sensed somehow, that I was on to something. I had the vision that copies of The Memo were like little robots, moving out from the studio and into the jet stream of Hollywood thinking, all on their own. Fax machines had just been invented and I envisioned copies of The Memo flying all over town, and that's exactly what happened.

      Feedback suggested I had hit a nerve. I heard young executives buzzing about it, telling their friends about it. It became the “I have to have it” document of the season at talent agencies and in studio executive suites like that of Dawn Steel at Paramount. In the sincerest form of compliment, it was plagiarized, with more than one ambitious young executive putting his name on the cover sheet and claiming it as his work. You really know you're onto something when somebody thinks it's worth stealing.

      Here's one of those places where the Hero's Journey and the archetypes come in handy in real life. I recognized that those plagiarizers were just Threshold Guardians, like the “false claimants” who pop up in the fairy tales to say that they, not the hero, slew the dragon. The hero must pass another test to claim his reward. And so I did a daring thing, writing a letter to Jeffrey Katzenberg who had praised The Memo at a staff meeting. I claimed to be the true author of the document and requested a boon—greater involvement in story department decision-making.

      He granted my wish, sending me to work with Disney Feature Animation, which was just getting back on its feet after a long period of decline since Walt Disney's death. When I arrived I found The Memo had preceded me, and the animators were already outlining their story boards with Hero's Journey stages.

      The Memo served as a handout when I began teaching story analysis at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. It grew to twelve or fourteen pages, as I developed the ideas more fully and added more examples. Eventually I included material about the archetypes and soon there was enough material to contemplate a book, and thus The Writer's Journey was born from a humble seven-page acorn.

      Meanwhile, David and I continue to meet up once a year or so to watch old movies and share what we've learned from our story department work and our personal reading interests. We collaborate on writing projects and never seem to lose interest in all the amazing things there are to learn about stories. He's turned out to be a terrific teacher as I always suspected he would be, and he keeps surprising me with his insights about movies, stories, and life.

      One day we realized we had been talking and thinking about stories for so long that it made sense to write this book, and so it came to pass. Now let's open up the tool kit and see what's inside.

      CHAPTER ONE

      YOU GOTTA HAVE A THEME

      —— VOGLER ——

      When you are developing a story, one of the most important and fundamental questions you have to ask yourself is “What is my theme?” Theme is a tool that can help you focus your work, making it a coherent design organized around a single idea or human quality that is explored in every scene.

      What is your story about, really? Not in the sense that Macbeth is about a Scottish lord who kills a lot of people to become king, but in the sense of a single word that defines the emotional arena of the story. According to playwright Lajos Egri, who wrote about it in The Art of Dramatic Writing, the theme of Macbeth

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