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Save the Cat!
- The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
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Save the Cat!
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Summary
Here's what started the phenomenon: This book has been a best seller for over 15 years and has been used by screenwriters around the world! Blake Snyder tells all in this fast, funny, and candid look inside the movie business. Save the Cat is just one of many ironclad rules for making your ideas more marketable and your script more satisfying. Others include these:
- The four elements of every winning logline
- The seven immutable laws of screenplay physics
- The 10 genres that every movie ever made can be categorized by - and why they're important to your script
- Why your hero must serve your idea
- Mastering the 15 beats
- Creating the perfect beast by using the board to map 40 scenes with conflict and emotional change
- How to get back on track with proven rules for script repair
This ultimate insider's guide reveals the secrets that none dare admit, told by a show biz veteran who's proven that you can sell your script if you can save the cat.
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What listeners say about Save the Cat!
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- clefairy
- 05-09-19
Believe the hype!
I have learned more from this book than I did in 3 years of screenwriting classes.
4 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Julian
- 07-05-19
simplistic
Explain it to me like I'm a 10 year old kind of book, although that might be the point of the whole thing...useful for someone just starting out.
3 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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- bleepbloop
- 10-02-19
Brilliant
A very well-organized book taking you through the writing process from idea to script completion. Blake Snyder gets what it's like to be a writer and has perfect ways of communicating his point to the reader. I'll always come back to this book if I'm stuck on an issue. It also helps that Superman is narrating.
2 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Carrie B
- 06-11-18
Lots of practical advice and industry tips.
Having an audible version made life so much easier as I could listen on the move.
2 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Mr. S. T. Morris
- 28-10-20
Some great stuff and it's worth reading but...
...it is a bit old fashioned and American film culture centric. Good to challenge your ideas against even where you disagree.
1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Alan
- 22-11-19
Loved it!
Full of great tips... I’ve just finished listening, and I’m just about to start again!
1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- TwoStep
- 17-08-19
Inspirational
If you're not moved to start writing something, anything, you need to listen again, immediately!
1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Praise_Gourd
- 20-11-18
Incredibly helpful
Really enjoyable and incredibly helpful would very much recommend to any kind of writer. I'd love to hear more.
1 person found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- XopsX
- 23-07-18
Solid advice but occasionally dated.
structure and breakdown approach is a great way to assess your work and a good lense to view scripts through. However, the modern landscape of movies has changed massively and some of the advice has dated as a result. still a good read and fascinating approach.
1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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- Michael J. McCarthy
- 18-07-18
Love it so much. perfect for screenwriters and learning on the go after reading the actual book
1 person found this helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-02-20
Don't waste your time
The author brags about selling screenplays so I looked up what he wrote. He actually won an award (a Razzie for worst screenplay). Most new screenwriters want to write a good story, not just one that will sell. He completely lost me when he started taking jabs at classic movies.
32 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Utilisateur anonyme
- 25-06-20
Outdated but kind of helpful I guess?
The one word to sum up Blake Snyder’s rules and advice on writing movies is “outdated.” He comes from a time of Hollywood in the 80s and 90s where family comedies were the biggest fad and that’s where he has his experience writing. While some of the references have been updated to as late as 2009 (the year he unfortunately passed away), the films he heralds as great models are generally unimpressive, heartless and forgotten comedies.
The industry has changed so much since this was written, I think there’s more of a focus now on innovative and experimental stories and ways of telling said stories, with filmmakers like Tarantino, Denis Villeneuve, and Christopher Nolan (whose breakout film Memento is detested by Snyder for the absolute dumbest reasons) breaking the mould and ushering in this new mindset of Hollywood.
At the end of the day, Snyder is more concerned with selling a screenplay than telling a good and engaging story. This is evident in his less than impressive resume. Only two of his sold scripts have ever been made, and you’ve never seen or heard of either.
However! He is a veteran of the industry and does have wisdom to share. While I didn’t agree with his ideas or rules, I found ways to adapt his lessons into guidelines that could I could make useful for myself in 2020.
So if you decide to read or listen to the book, I recommend trying to find ways to learn from his ideas rather than taking them at face value.
20 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Erik Larson
- 29-06-18
little full of himslef but is very helpful.
Has helpful tips if you cant figure out why somthing isnt working or dialog is lacking he gives you some nice tools to use. overall its a good one to read!
13 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Kevin Potter
- 03-06-19
Enlightening and, frankly, disheartening
There's definitely a lot of great info here, and I would absolutely call it an invaluable resource for any aspiring screen writer.
I don't have a lot to say about the narrator. In this kind of non-fiction, the only real requirements are a reasonably pleasant voice and clear, understandable speech. Which George Newbern manages perfectly.
There are honestly a lot of great storytelling precepts herein, but there are almost as many things that I disagree with on a visceral level.
I also highly disagree with the author about his opinion of... Well... Pretty much every movie he analyzes.
I can accept, however, that the author's idea of the "perfect" movie is just about the complete opposite of mine.
I have to admit that 99% of my disappointment with this book was not the material (the value here was great), but rather with the picture he paints of the state of Hollywood and film making in general.
In short, anyone who is the least bit curious about screenwriting or script analysis could definitely benefit from reading this book.
10 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- Gerard Ruybal
- 07-09-18
overall really good advice
I had heard about this book from many people with stealer reviews and it lives up to the expectation. The writer gives solid advice to build a screenwriting foundation off of but there are a lot of rules I think could be more flexible that the writer insist are concrete. Overall would 100% recommend to aspiring screenwriters.
9 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- MovieGuy
- 28-04-19
My Favorite Screenwriting Book
I've read and listened to a large number of books on screenwriting/writing. Although many of them I found helpful, this is by far my favorite. Why? It's very close to 100% usable, practical, actionable advise that makes sense and I believe works. Not only that but it's presented in a very congenial, conversational way (unlike, for example McKee's And Field's books which are so stuffy and academic it makes their books far less accessible, and difficult to even concentrate on when listening to them read).
The criticism that I often hear about this (and his other) books is that they are "cookie cutter", meaning that it's kind of a one-size-fits-all sort of approach. That is true imo, and I don't agree with all Synder's advice (he's pretty much a one-genre guy (Romantic Comedy), and it isn't the genre that I write, so some of the things he says, imo, are not that applicable to some other genres (like Sci Fi and Horror, which are mine), but still most of his stuff is applicable across the board, and it's certainly helped my writing, and will help yours too.
7 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Tomi Miettinen
- 27-11-18
Nothing special
Honestly, i think the book is quite mediocre. I didn't find it particularly useful nor did i learn very much from it. Great narration, though.
7 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- James M. Patton
- 07-08-18
Best book I have read on writing screenplays.
I have read a lot of books about screenwriting, movie making, etc, and the Save The Cat series is the first that have gone beyond telling me I need pen and paper and software and selling skills and actually taught me things that have convinced me to change things in my scripts.
I thought I had my stories pretty well "fleshed out", but this book teaches you that at a certain number of minutes into a film, you should have specific things established. And at other points, you should pivot your story to another point.
Like all common sense, this may sound like a "well duh" statement once said, but that's the thing about common sense: Everyone thinks they knew it before it was said, but how many applied it? This book teaches you how your script needs to be broken down, how you may need to add plot points to have the pivots needed, etc.
This isn't just how to arrange and how to find an agent, it is literally at what minute in a 90 minute film you should be making this story point and that story pivot.
This original in the series is better in my opinion than the Strikes Back follow up, but both are good and make good companion pieces.
7 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Angel Sturgill
- 13-11-20
Amazing information, but I lost engagement
The information is GOLD! But as far as structure, it wasn’t as engaging. The first few chapters about structure were good. The bits of nuggets scattered throughout make it totally worth it. But it’s not fun listening to lists, or shotgun bullet points. The later half of the book is a list of his advice.
6 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Adam
- 05-07-19
Great how to book on writing
I read Save the Cat about 5 years ago and loved it. This is a great book for writers and especially for screenwriters. The narrator George Newbern did a great job with Blake Snyder's POV.
4 people found this helpful