SUCCESS! Your Checklist is Coming.

We just sent “THE ARCHITECTURE OF GREAT STORIES” (your 15-Point Checklist) to your inbox.

Please allow up to 1 minute for the email to arrive. If you don’t see it, check your spam/promotions folder.

While you wait, check out our latest structural analyses:

No Country for Old Men: Cormac McCarthy's Novel vs. the Coen Brothers' Film

No Country for Old Men book vs movie: Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) crouched in the West Texas grassland, the landscape the film opens on instead of the screenplay's snow

The Coens said adapting McCarthy was “just compression.” The screenplay says otherwise: no coin in Carla Jean’s bedroom, a dream the script planned to show, a revolver Bell was never meant to draw. Novel, script, film — what changed, and where.

Nightcrawler Analysis: The Cost of Doing Business

Lou Bloom aims a camcorder light at firefighters working a nighttime scene in Nightcrawler.

Strip Nightcrawler to its dialogue and nothing is a crime — everything is a transaction. Five negotiations, one draft-vs-screen comparison, and the four words Gilroy added at 102m that turned a death into a line item.

Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men: Competence Is Not a Plan

Llewelyn Moss crouched over the open satchel of money at the desert drug-deal scene in No Country for Old Men

Llewelyn Moss is the man the audience follows, roots for, and expects to survive. He reads a landscape better than anyone in the film, finds the transponder hidden in the money, fights Anton Chigurh to a draw at Eagle Pass, and talks his way back across the border in a hospital gown. Then he dies…

Crimson Tide (1995): Two Right Men — Story and Character Analysis

Gene Hackman as Captain Ramsey in a red cap shouts at Denzel Washington as Lieutenant Commander Hunter in the submarine control room in Crimson Tide (1995).

Crimson Tide has no villain — it has two officers holding valid readings of the same rulebook. This analysis works from the film’s dialogue as primary text: how one unreadable message builds two mutinies, why the two-man rule replays at every rank from the captain’s key down to a petty officer’s radio, and how the…

Beverly Hills Cop Beat Sheet: Banana in the Tailpipe

Axel Foley aims a pistol with a two-handed grip in a plant-lined corridor of Maitland's estate in Beverly Hills Cop.

Every beat of Beverly Hills Cop, mapped to the Save the Cat! framework with minute markers verified against the film. From the Catalyst that pushes Axel out of Detroit to the Finale that settles three stakes inside Maitland’s estate, this beat sheet shows how the comedy does the structural work.

Get Out Analysis: The Ending Peele Rewrote

A bloodied Chris Washington grips a bocce ball in the games room in Get Out

Deep SHT · Screenplay vs. Film · Universal · February 2017 Get Out Analysis: The Ending Peele Rewrote The draft, the film, and the ending most people never saw Every Get Out analysis gets to the ending eventually. This one starts there instead, with the ending most people never saw. The Get Out screenplay that…