Workshops like those offered by Robert McKee, taken by thousands of wannabe scriptwriters, break down the screenplay into bite-sized formulae. Manuals like Syd Field’s Screenplay dispense wisdom such as “The days of ambiguous endings are over,” and where the first major “plot point” should occur. Tom Laughlin, of Billy Jack fame, offers a newsletter subscription guaranteeing you mastery over the nine plot points which will make a successful movie. Actually much of what Syd Field and others like him say makes sense. The problems occur when their prescriptions are applied too literally: the movie develops a homogenized, mechanical, predictable pace. Too many studio executives in Hollywood take Field’s or McKee’s ideas religiously: we were better off when the world was wired to Harry Cohn’s ass. The prevailing mantra in film schools is that movies are above all are a visual medium; therefore dialogue must be kept to a minimum, or you risk sounding “literary”; a voiceover is a “literary device” and a form of “cheating”; “literary” is bad. Translation: words and ideas are bad. The result is a fearfulness that creeps into the screenwriter’s intestines whenever his characters start to speak up for more than two sentences. One important result is that the scenes are getting shorter. Sometimes very short indeed: in action movies, one character may say “Shit!” and another say “Duck!” and that is all she wrote. The shorter the scene, the less chance there is for that tension between characters to reach danger point where true communication can break out between them. As scenes grow shorter, too much pressure is put on the wisecrack, inserted between expletives and hot pursuit, to carry the load of character shading. The art of writing movie dialogue has become less a matter of constructing scenes than of coining one-liners that can be quoted as marketing slogans in trailers and advertising campaigns. Dirty Harry’s pioneering “Make my day” has become “Schwarzenegger’s “Hasta la vista” and on down to “That guy can make a bomb out of Bisquik.”