Measured against the guidelines for creating good drama as articulated by Aristotle in his Poetics a few millennia ago – the earliest surviving treatise on literary theory — many of the big-budget studio releases of the last 20-30 years stand pretty feebly. While some might understandably wonder whether anything anybody wrote about good stage drama nearly 2400 years ago has any relevancy to movies today, Michael Tierno, a one-time story analyst for Miramax Pictures, says – firmly — yes. Taking it a step further, Tierno maintains the Greek philosopher’s tenets of dramaturgy have held first playwrights, then screen scenarists and TV writers, in good stead for centuries. He set that credo down in his book, Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization (Hyperion, 2002), applying the ancient Greek’s primordial how-to concepts to such contemporary fare as The Godfather (1972), Rocky (1976), and even the hyperkinetic, chronological juggling act of...
- 12/9/2010
- by Ricky
- SoundOnSight
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