Review: Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need by Blake Snyder
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

You hear all the time that "Save the Cat" is a classic. If you wanna write a screenplay, here's where you start. It's the popular quick-start guide, with a classic beat sheet and an emphasis on log-lines, pitching, and selling. You wanna write spec scripts? Start here.

Snyder is up-front about all this. He's a guy who's sold scripts, and that's what he's teaching you to do. How do you write a saleable script? Well, you watch a bunch of movies and emulate their emotional beats on a beatsheet that kinda just tells you what to do. Sure. Fine. I guess. If all you want is a script that looks like it's hitting the right beats on the right pages, then this is a fine place to get that information.

But what about the rest? How do you craft a good story? How do you craft good dialogue? How do you make engaging characters, villains, arcs? How do you build setting? What's the small stuff, the big stuff, the important stuff, the fun stuff? "The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need" says the title, and this is just not true. Save the Cat is a very basic, very quick, introduction to structuring spec screenplays and hitting emotional beats. That's it.

The rest you have to learn the hard way.

So I was disappointed. It wasn't what I'd hoped it would be. It was a quick read, fairly dull, not particularly informative. I'll use the beat-sheet, I'll probably take some of his advice. The rest? I'll just have to look elsewhere.

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