Dreamworks lecture 2

1. Theme 7. Treatment
2. Paradigm 8. World of Story
3. Premise 9. Genre(s)
4. External Structure 10. Research
5. Internal Structure 11. Image System
6. 5 Character Relationships 12. Story Break down

What’s the story really about?

“…the reality is that the single most
important thing contributed by the
screenwriter is the structure.”
William Goldman

Myth

Inverted Myths
Hero Outlaw

Messiah Avenging Angel Blithe Angel

Fairy Tale Kingdom

Drama

1 2 3

Provincial World Return World

Magical World of Journey

1. His birth is prophesized and highly anticipated.
2. He is an Orphan.
3. His Mother is royalty and a virgin
4. His Father is a king
5. His conception was immaculate or unusual.
6. He is reputed to be the son of a god
7. At birth an attempt is made on his life.
8. He is spirited away at birth and raised by his nemesis or in
order to hide him from his conspirators/assassins.
9. Reared by foster-parents in a far country
10. Sketchy Details of his childhood.

11. On reaching manhood he goes on a quest.
12. He defeats a dragon, ogre or Threshold Guardian.
13. He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor.
14. He enters the Underworld/ defeats the Lord of the Underworld.
15. He returns to the provincial world
16. He prescribes laws and moral dictums
17. He later loses favor with the gods and or his people
18. He is driven from from the throne and the city
19. He meets with a mysterious, gruesome or untimely death
20. Often at the top of a hill. The Hill of his ancestors.
21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless he has one or more
holy sepulchres.
22. His Spirit or ghost returns one day as p.

Six Phases of Character Arc for Mythic
Hero

Orphan Warrior Wizard
Wanderer Innocent Apprentice

Extreme
Inciting Mid Act
Incident Conflict

Richard Cory
By

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good Morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich- yes, richer than a king-
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish we were in his place.

So, on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter
of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to
modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the
tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas)
touch and release the deepest centers of motivation,
moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving
civilizations.

Sex and beauty are as inseparable as life
and consciousness and the intelligence that
arises from sex and beauty, as with life and
consciousness, is intuition.

D.H. Lawrence

Intuition is the very fount of consciousness from
which springs: Science, Physics, Math,
Medicine, Art, Literature, Myth and religion.
Anyone who has ever spent time with a
physicist will be impressed with how much they
rely upon their intuition. The fundamentalist is
just as preoccupied with his intuition and is
obsessed with proven how right he is at every
turn as though his god’s effectiveness depended
on it. Indeed, it does. He will even subvert the
truth in pursuit of his intuitive correctness.

The dark shadow of intuition is the
intuitive opportunism of the sociopath.

James Hillman

The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Perseus Theseus Orpheus
Odysseus, Ulysses Hercules
Achilles Proteus Bellerophon
Jason Moses Virgil
Prometheus Arthur Osiris
Horus Isis Jesus Hathor
Inanna Atlanta Ishtar

The Myth is an enzymatic roadmap from Lower
Consciousness to Higher Consciousness.

It guides us up the Cerebral Cortex through the six
thresholds along the Spinal Column, and the three
evolutionary phases of the brain: The Reptilian, the Limbic
and the Higher Brain (human brain).

The Orphan Hero is the protagonist who leads us there.

5 10 20
Page 1 Page 15 Page 30

Inciting Incident

Act Two Death/Rebirth
Wanderer Warrior Innocence

45 75
35 60 90

Mid-Act Climax

Apprentice Wizard Return

100 105 110 115 120
90

The Keys to the Mythic Journey

The orphan hero possessing only a birth
object talisman sets forth from the
provincial world and is either lured, carried
away, or voluntarily proceeds (inciting
incident) through the threshold of
adventure. He must defeat or satisfy the
threshold guardian before he can enter.

The Hero wanders through the strange world encountering
friends and foes who either severely threaten or aid with
magical assistance.
The inhabitants look to the hero to depose the evil ruler, but
to do so he must first seek out and find the great Wizard.
The Wandering warrior undergoes a series of trials
eventually being stripped bare of pretense and attain an
innocence while preparing to apprentice with the wizard.
Through training he learns the secret of the talisman and
that his whole purpose is to defeat the lord of the
underworld.

The hero is attacked and utterly defeated.
He must enter the land of the dead where
he is challenged utterly to reclaim his new
found powers. He dies symbolically and is
resurrected as a true magician. His destiny
is manifest. He marches into battle.

The hero triumphs over the evil ruler and there in
the dark recesses of the overlord’s castle the hero
reunites with his missing half, either a sister or a
kidnapped princess. He marries her or restores her
to power and is presented with a great boon from
the people he freed.
Though he could live the rest of his life in luxury,
he elects to return home to save, instruct, and lead
his people to greatness.

One of the most amazing images of love that I know is
Persian – a mystical Persian representation as Satan as the
most loyal lover of God. You will have heard the old legend of
how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to
pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he
commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of
his works, and Lucifer refused – because, we are told, of his
pride. However, according to this Moslem reading of his case,
it was rather because he loved and adored God so deeply and
intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before
anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell,
condemned to exist there forever, apart from his love.

The Fall of
Lucifer, The Light
Bearer, lux, lucis,
"light", and ferre, bearer
bring. "to bear, bring

Whenever a myth has been taken literally
its sense has been perverted, but also
reciprocally, that whenever it has been
dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign
of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped
out the door.
Asobase-Kotaba: Japanese play form

But that, precisely, is the great mystery pageant
only waiting to be noticed as it lies before us, so to
say, in sections, in the halls and museums of the
various sciences, yet already living, too, in the
works of our greatest men of art. To make it serve
the present hour, we have only to assemble- or
reassemble- it in its full dimension scientifically,
and then bring it to life as our own, in the way of
art: the way of wonder- sympathetic, instructive
delight; not judging morally, but participating with
our own awakened humanity in the festival of the
passing forms.

Every study undertaken by Man was the genuine
outcome of curiosity, a kind of game. All the
data of natural science, which are responsible
for Man’s domination of the world, originated in
activities that were indulged in exclusively for
the sake of amusement.

Konrad Lorenz

“The Play’s the thing…”
Da Bard

There are three pathways to
Genius:

Music, Math and Myth

James Hillman

The myth is the foundation of life,
the timeless schema, the pious
formula into which life flows
when it reproduces its traits out of
the unconscious.

Thomas Mann

Inanna abandoned her realm of heaven and earth, to descend
into the "great below". "With the me in her possession, she
prepared herself: placing her crown upon her head, beads of
lapis lazuli around her neck, sparkling stones fastened to her
breast, a gold ring around her wrist, and a royal robe upon her
body. She bound a breastplate about her chest and took a
lapis measuring rod and line in her hand.

Then she set out for the kur, the netherworld, with her faithful
servant, Ninshubur.

All mythology and the corresponding symbols
that derive from them originate from specific
regions of the human body.

7. God/Genius/Wizard/Imagination
Paradise/Myth/Epiphany/Enlightenment

6. Pineal Gland/ Intuition/ Soul
Omniscience/Wisdom
5.Throat/Communication/Magick
Harmony, Law, Education, Art

4. Heart/Love/Romance//Life/Death

3. Stomach/Religion/
Sacrifice/Labyrinth/ Eternal
life/After life/Power
2.Genitals/Desire/Gods/Wealth/Heaven/
Couplings.
1. Anus/Hell/Misogyny/Evil/Oppression,
Dragons, Jerks, Orphans, homophobia

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the
lie-- deliberate, contrived and dishonest-- but the
myth-- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our
forbearers. We subject all facts to a
prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy
the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of
thought.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"He who joyfully marches to music in
rank and file has already earned my
contempt. He has been given a large
brain by mistake, since for him the
spinal cord would suffice.”

Albert Einstein

Where do Myths come from?

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Spirituality
God = Imagination
Soul

For the great enemy of truth is very often not
the lie-- deliberate, contrived and dishonest--
but the myth-- persistent, persuasive, and
unrealistic.

Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our
forbearers. We subject all facts to a prefabricated
set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of
opinion without the discomfort of thought.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Where Eastern Mysticism and Western
Psychology meet:

1. All the gods and demons are within the human
brain

2. A man’s fate is his character

3. A man’s character and fate can be altered through
Brain Change

Human history becomes more
and more a race between
education and catastrophe.

H.G. Wells, The Outline of History

We shall require a substantially new manner of
thinking if mankind is to survive.

~Albert Einstein

Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not
call it bottomless? The deeper we sound, the
further down into the lower world of the past we
probe and press, the more do we find that the
earliest foundations of humanity, its history and
culture, reveal themselves unfathomably.

Thomas Mann

Tetrologu Joseph and His Brothers

The modern hero, the modern individual
who dares to heed the call and seek the
mansion of that presence with whom it is our
whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed,
must not wait for his community to cast off
its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice
and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live”,
Nietzsche says, as though the day were here.
It is not society that is to guide the creative
hero, but precisely the reverse.

All modern religions derive from three
primitive obsessions
Cannibalism
Human Sacrifice
Animal Sacrifice

Interceding Images from the Right Brain

Bodhisattva

Gate, Gate, Paragate Parasam Gati
Bodhi svaha

Chance favors the prepared mind.

Louis Pasteur

THEME
Every screenplay is the living proof of an idea or
theme.

Love/ Hate
Truth/Falsity
Slavery/Freedom
Ignorance
Greed/Bounty
Deception
Manipulation Wrath
Violence

External Story Structures
Structural Archetypes

MYTH

HERO Outlaw

Three Tiers of Political Power

1. Prevailing Elite

2. Marginal Bureaucrats

3. Dissident Rebel/Revolutionaries

Inciting Incident
Return Betrayal Trial

World of Story Martyrdom
Reversal
Page 60
30 Ghost
Miracles and Wonders

The Messiah Story

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Cool Hand Luke
Jesus of Montreal
Dead Poets Society
Jean De Florette
Spartacus

Always do what you’re afraid
to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since the beginning of civilization
mankind has had but one choice; to
conform or not to conform.
Should he choose to conform,
that individual is a dead man for every
life decision he will make has already
been determined for him by society at
large.

Should he choose to conform,
that individual is a dead man for
every life decision he will make
has already been determined for
him by society at large.

Should he choose not to conform
he buys himself one more choice-

To become outlaw or hero.

Sigmund Freud

The modern hero, the modern individual
who dares to heed the call and seek the
mansion of that presence with whom it is
our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot,
indeed, must not, wait for his community to
cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized
avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding.
“Live”, Nietzsche says, ‘ as though the day
were here.’ It is not society that is to guide
the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.”
Hero with a Thousand Faces

"Indeed, the great Leonardo remained like a child for the
whole of his life in more than one way; It is said that all
great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as
an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason
why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to
his contemporaries.

Sigmund Freud, 1910

Everywhere I go I find that artists and
poets have been there before me.

Sigmund Freud

“A belief is not an idea the mind possesses, it
is an idea that possesses the mind.”

Robert Oxton Bolt

“History is a nightmare from which I’m
trying to Awake.”

James Joyce

1. The Shadow 7. The Objective
2. The Inner Flaw 8. The Antagonist/Adversary

3. The Moral Consequence 9. The Conflict

4. The Immediate Desire 10. The Epiphany

5. The Inciting Incident 11. Desire Achieved or not

6. The Over Arching Desire 12. Impact on World of Story

13
Thirteen

Moons MONTHS Days Years

Menstrual/Lunar Cycle

13 Disciples= Judas and Mathias 12 Tribes of Israel

12 Olympians
Bar Mitzvah
13 Signs in the Zodiac Egyptian 12 Stairs Life and Death

Including Ophiuchus 12 Jurors/1 judge
Circumcision/Initiation/Catechism
Buildings/Stories/Floors
Fairy Tale Year and a 13 X 28 = 364 plus 1=365
Day

Witches Coven 13 Norse Gods ( Loki)

•13 original colonies The Flag: 13 Stars 13 Stripes
The Great Seal: 13 levels of the truncated
pyramid,•13 letters in "E Pluribus Unum
13 letters in the phrase "Annuit Coeptis", which
appears over the pyramid on the left side of the bill's
reverse.•
13 stars above the Eagle
13 leaves on the olive branch
13 olives on the olive branch
13 arrows held by the Eagle
13 bars on the shield.

"Myths are made for the imagination to
breathe life into them...." - Albert Camus
Virgil’s The Aenid Demeter and Persephone

The Eleusinian Mysteries Eros and Psyche

Orpheus and Eurydice Inanna and The Seven Veils

Gilgamesh Scheherazade and Farlimas

The Harrowing of Hell
The Imramha of Brain

Mythology and the
Lineaments of a New Science
Sign Stimulus DNA Imprinting
Asobase-Kotoba Culture Area Theory
Innate Releasing Mechanisms or IRM’S

Faculty X Parallel Development

Archetypal Icons Diffusion Theory

Pseudo Historic Metamorphosis

I’ve always disliked words like
‘inspiration’. Writing is probably like
a scientist thinking about some
scientific problem, or an engineer
thinking about an engineering
problem.

Doris Lessing

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the
not worth knowing.
..the great artists of the world are never Puritans,
and seldom respectable. No virtuous man--that is,
virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a
picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth
hearing, or a book worth reading...

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the
occurrence of the improbable.
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had)
the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere
ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.
H.L. Mencken

The Orphan Hero
Fire Theft Virgin Birth
Deluge/Flood Sacrificial King The
Dying god
The World Tree
The Resurrected Hero/God
The World as Dream
The Land of the Dead/Underworld

The Mound of the Ancestors

Dreamworks lecture 2

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to Dreamworks lecture 2 (20)

Dreamworks lecture 2