oh, you're in England! (or Australia)I should have been clued in by your 'bollocks' usage.

Actually I don't think he follows the rules, per se. He didn't at all in Synecdoche. That's his point.
I didn't watch it past 30 minutes. It was too much of a one-beat. He needs to bring his audience in with emotional changes and he used the dark, claustrophobic motif too often. Also, a film needs to have a point, otherwise it will just be a collection of situations.

I read the thread and laughed when I saw that the original poster bailed from the conversation.

I just wanted to say that American episodic tv has a six act structure.  It's a completely different style of writing than in a feature.  A script is usually around 60 pages and every ten pages you have to have an act break that will bring someone with a remote control back after the commercial break.  Characters are different too.  Your guest star patient, suspect, victim, etc. only exists through the filter of how your recurring characters see him.  He will never be a stand alone creation and doesn't need the same definition that the feature antagonist would need.

As far as features, in the last five years the way certain genre films are structured has really changed and the traditional three act structure has been tweaked.  People who go to see action (and the horror and scifi variants) are people who play video games.  Their demands are different and the studio knows they're going to account for 90% of ticket sales on those titles.  The audience testing done by the studios over the years has changed what they buy.  Every three to five pages you have to have some sort of pop to keep the gamers engaged. But you also have to do it so the script reads like a story and not like a series of jabs to the kidney.

My comments on this topic weren't any kind of rules adherence. I generally ignore the rules and just try to write a good story. The incident that kick starts the story is a feeling I get when I read it. I generally get the idea when reading something that "something should have happened by now." Why? Because the story gets boring. When the story starts dragging, you've got to do something to kick it into motion.

Now, the original question was more rule-based, I'll grant, and my answer is more of a general one based on what I've read and the well over 1,000 movies I've watched. 45 pages is typically 45 minutes, and while I'll grant that the act could be very interesting, the implication is that you're not kicking your protagonist in the balls until 45 minutes in. What in the world is he doing for all that time? Drinking tea?

I'm not telling where to place this incident. All I can tell you is that it probably needs to go a bit sooner than page 45.