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The Screenwriters Taxonomy
book

The Screenwriters Taxonomy

by Eric R. Williams
September 2017
Intermediate to advanced
196 pages
4h 36m
English
Routledge
Content preview from The Screenwriters Taxonomy

4Genre Case Studies

With what we know of the Screenwriters Taxonomy so far, let’s revisit the call from your agent in Chapter 1. A producer is taking pitches from screenwriters looking to adapt material with a basic premise of: A man, falsely imprisoned, falls victim to the very worst in human behavior before finding his way to freedom and putting his life back together. Using the defining characteristics of super-, macro- and microgenres, let’s examine how this one descriptive sentence can be parsed into three very different films using the first three layers of the Screenwriters Taxonomy.

I would argue that The Shawshank Redemption, Twelve Monkeys and 12 Years a Slave each tell the same general story:

  • A man, falsely imprisoned,
  • falls victim ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781351610667