Golden Fleece

An awful nights sleep (due to late night peanut eating and general wimpering) led me to be reading the second Save the Cat book, which looks at movie genres and offers break-downs of a wide variety of films for each. The author, Blake Synder (a very nice bloke who amazingly, responded to my email about his workshops...and from his Apple iphone, so clearly a man of good taste and high thinking), has come up with more memorable, descriptive terms for genre's, rather than the established genre types, such as 'Dude with a problem, Monster in the House and Golden Fleece.

I watched the film, Air Force One last night, which falls into the category, 'Dude with a problem' - its a pretty by-the-numbers film, and a carbon copy of much superior film, Die Hard. I just checked and it made $172 million box office dollars (and cost $85 million to make). There is some spectacularly bad acting going on in places, though Harrison Ford does his thing well. I wonder if Obama would be all guns blazing this quickly?

Lack of asleep aside, I did discover that my story, my film story that is, is a 'Golden Fleece' story, which then falls into sub category of 'Caper Fleece', as its essentially a heist movie in old genre speak. The Golden Fleece is of course a reference to Jason and the Argonauts, where the story is really about the journey, not the prize of the golden fleece at the end of it.

UCLA screenwriter course starts this week...wonder if they've heard of this Golden Fleece theory?