Status Quo

[Unknown Screenwriter]

Every once in a while, I get asked what the hell a story is...

Wow. Great question. I've been thinking about this quite a bit. I've even looked it up in a few screenwriting books that I have and even though the likes of Michael Hauge, Chris Vogler, McKee, et al all have a rather complicated definition of STORY, I think a story isn't that complicated at all when you break it down...

To me, a STORY is simply the disruption of the STAUS QUO. Something happens to interrupt the balance of the status quo. This imbalance continues to escalate until the status quo is once again put back into balance but NOT as it was before.

In other words, a NEW STATUS QUO is reached.

Simple but very powerful when you think about it.

filmy

 

[Adamo C.]

Perhaps that's why so many movies stink. They are simply a depiction of the status quo rather than anything that disrupts or supercedes it.

How many times can you call the ending of a film half way through? Status Quo...

 

[clive]

I heard another version of this which is:

"Take the protagonist through the defining event of their life and leave them changed at the end"

but I think yours is better because sometimes the protagonist's arrival is the thing that changes the status quo and it's the defining moment for the environment they arrive in, not for the protagonist. I'm thinking of films like "Bad day In Black Rock", "The Man who Fell to Earth" "For a Few Dollars More."

I think goes back to the idea that there are only two stories

1) Someone goes on a journey
and
2) A stranger comes to town

 

[T Shipley]

I agree, distrupting the status quo is probably the most used vehicle for stories, especially screenplays, but then you look at films like citizen kane, world according to garp, terms of endearment, etc... films that span long periods of time so that it's more character studies than anything.

Though, i guess with all three of those films, the crux of the story begins with distruption of status quo... Kane leaving his mother, Garp leaving the boarding school, debra winger getting married.

Guess all three of those would classify as "someone goes on a journey."