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  While scholars dispute definitions and systems, the audience is already a genre expert. It enters each film armed with a complex set of anticipations learned through a lifetime of moviegoing. The genre sophistication of filmgoers presents the writer with this critical challenge: He must not only fulfill audience anticipations, or risk their confusion and disappointment, but he must lead their expectations to fresh, unexpected moments, or risk boring them. This two-handed trick is impossible without a knowledge of genre that surpasses the audience’s.

  Below is the genre and subgenre system used by screen-writers—a system that’s evolved from practice, not theory, and that turns on differences of subject, setting, role, event, and values.

  LOVE STORY. Its subgenre, Buddy Salvation, substitutes friendship for romantic love: MEAN STREETS, PASSION FISH, ROMY AND MICHELE’S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION.

  HORROR FILM. This genre divides into three subgenres: the Uncanny, in which the source of horror is astounding but subject to “rational” explanation, such as beings from outer space, science-made monsters, or a maniac; the Supernatural, in which the source of horror is an “irrational” phenomenon from the spirit realm; and the Super-Uncanny, in which the audience is kept guessing between the other two possibilities—THE TENANT, HOUR OF THE WOLF, THE SHINING.

  MODERN EPIC (the individual versus the state): SPAR-TACUS, MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, VIVA ZAPATA!, 1984, THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLINT.

  WESTERN. The evolution of this genre and its subgenres is brilliantly traced in Will Wright’s Six Guns and Society.

  WAR GENRE. Although war is often the setting for another genre, such as the Love Story, the WAR GENRE is specifically about combat. Pro-war versus Antiwar are its primary subgenres. Contemporary films generally oppose war, but for decades the majority covertly glorified it, even in its most grisly form.

  MATURATION PLOT or the coming-of-age story: STAND BY ME, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, RISKY BUSINESS, BIG, BAMBI, MURIEL’S WEDDING.

  REDEMPTION PLOT. Here the film arcs on a moral change within the protagonist from bad to good: THE HUSTLER, LORD JIM, DRUGSTORE COWBOY, SCHINDLER’S LIST, LA PROMESSE.

  PUNITIVE PLOT. In these the good guy turns bad and is punished: GREED, THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, MEPHISTO, WALL STREET, FALLING DOWN.

  TESTING PLOT. Stories of willpower versus temptation to surrender: THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, COOL HAND LUKE, FITZCARRALDO, FORREST GUMP.

  EDUCATION PLOT. This genre arcs on a deep change within the protagonist’s view of life, people, or self from the negative (naive, distrustful, fatalistic, self-hating) to the positive (wise, trusting, optimistic, self-possessed): HAROLD AND MAUDE, TENDER MERCIES, WINTER LIGHT, IL POSTINO, GROSS POINTE BLANK, MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING, SHALL WE DANCE.

  DISILLUSIONMENT PLOT. A deep change of worldview from the positive to the negative: MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE, L’ECLISSE, LE FEU FOLLET, THE GREAT GATSBY, MACBETH.

  Some genres are mega-genres, so large and complex that they’re filled with numerous subgenre variations:

  12. COMEDY. Subgenres range from Parody to Satire to Sitcom to Romantic to Screwball to Farce to Black Comedy, all differing by the focus of comic attack (bureaucratic folly, upper-class manners, teenage courtship, etc.) and the degree of ridicule (gentle, caustic, lethal).

  13. CRIME. Subgenres vary chiefly by the answer to this question: From whose point of view do we regard the crime? Murder Mystery (master detective’s POV); Caper (master criminal’s POV); Detective (cop’s POV); Gangster (crook’s POV); Thriller or Revenge Tale (victim’s POV); Courtroom (lawyer’s POV); Newspaper (reporter’s POV); Espionage (spy’s POV); Prison Drama (inmate’s POV); Film Noir (POV of a protagonist who may be part criminal, part detective, part victim of a femme fatale).

  14. SOCIAL DRAMA. This genre identifies problems in society—poverty, the education system, communicable diseases, the disadvantaged, antisocial rebellion, and the like—then constructs a story demonstrating a cure. It has a number of sharply focused subgenres: Domestic Drama (problems within the family), the Woman’s Film (dilemmas such as career versus family, lover versus children), Political Drama (corruption in politics), Eco-Drama (battles to save the environment), Medical Drama (struggles with physical illness), and Psycho-Drama (struggles with mental illness).

  15. ACTION/ADVENTURE. This often borrows aspects from other genres such as War or Political Drama to use as motivation for explosive action and derring-do. If ACTION/ADVENTURE incorporates ideas such as destiny, hubris, or the spiritual, it becomes the subgenre High Adventure: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. If Mother Nature is the source of antagonism, it’s a Disaster/Survival Film: ALIVE, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.

  Taking a still wider view, supra-genres are created out of settings, performance styles, or filmmaking techniques that contain a host of autonomous genres. They are like mansions of many rooms where one of the basic genres, subgenres, or any combination might find a home:

  16. HISTORICAL DRAMA. History is an inexhaustible source of story material and embraces every type of story imaginable. The treasure chest of history, however, is sealed with this warning: What is past must be present. A screenwriter isn’t a poet hoping to be discovered after he’s dead. He must find an audience today. Therefore, the best use of history, and the only legitimate excuse to set a film in the past and thereby add untold millions to the budget, is anachronism—to use the past as a clear glass through which you show us the present.

  Many contemporary antagonisms are so distressing or loaded with controversy that it’s difficult to dramatize them in a present-day setting without alienating the audience. Such dilemmas are often best viewed at a safe distance in time. HISTORICAL DRAMA polishes the past into a mirror of the present, making clear and bearable the painful problems of racism in GLORY, religious strife in MICHAEL COLLINS, or violence of all kinds, especially against women, in UNFORGIVEN.

  Christopher Hampton’s DANGEROUS LIAISONS: Setting a down ending, love/hate story in the France of lace cuffs and piquant repartee seemed like protocol for commercial disaster. But the film found a huge audience by turning a scalding light on a mode of modern hostility too politically sensitive to be addressed directly: courtship as combat. Hampton stepped back two centuries to an age in which sexual politics exploded into a war for sexual supremacy, where the ascendant emotion was not love but fear and suspicion of the opposite sex. Despite the antiquated setting, within minutes the audience felt intimately at home with its corrupted aristocrats—they are us.

  17. BIOGRAPHY. This cousin to Historical Drama focuses on a person rather than an era. BIOGRAPHY, however, must never become a simple chronicle. That someone lived, died, and did interesting things in between is of scholarly interest and no more. The biographer must interpret facts as if they were fiction, find the meaning of the subject’s life, and then cast him as the protagonist of his life’s genre: YOUNG MR. LINCOLN defends the innocent in a Courtroom Drama; GANDHI becomes the hero of a Modern Epic; ISADORA succumbs to a Disillusionment Plot; NIXON suffers in a Punitive Plot.

  These caveats apply equally to the subgenre Autobiography. This idiom is popular with filmmakers who feel that they should write a film about a subject they know. And rightly so. But autobiographical films often lack the very virtue they promise: self-knowledge. For while it’s true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s also the case that the unlived life isn’t worth examining. BIG WEDNESDAY, for example.

  18. DOCU-DRAMA. A second cousin to Historical Drama, DOCU-DRAMA centers on recent rather than past events. Once invigorated by cinema verite—BATTLE OF ALGIERS—it’s become a popular TV genre, sometimes powerful, but often with little documentary value.

  19. MOCKUMENTARY. This genre pretends to be rooted in actuality or memory, behaves like documentary or autobiography, but is utter fiction. It subverts fact-based filmmaking to satirize hypocritical institutions: the backstage world of rock ‘n’ roll in THIS IS SPINAL TAP; the Catholic Church in ROMA; middle-class mores in ZELIG; T
V journalism in MAN BITES DOG; politics in BOB ROBERTS; crass American values in TO DIE FOR.

  20. MUSICAL. Descended from opera, this genre presents a “reality” in which characters sing and dance their stories. It’s often a Love Story, but it can be Film Noir: the stage adaptation of SUNSET BOULEVARD; Social Drama: WEST SIDE STORY; Punitive Plot: ALL THAT JAZZ; Biography: EVITA. Indeed, any genre can work in musical form and all can be satirized in Musical Comedy.

  21. SCIENCE FICTION. In hypothetical futures that are typically technological dystopias of tyranny and chaos, the SCIENCE FICTION writer often marries the man-against-state Modern Epic with Action/Adventure: the STAR WARS trilogy and TOTAL RECALL. But, like history, the future is a setting in which any genre may play. In SOLARIS, for example, Andrei Tarkovsky used sci-fi to act out the inner conflicts of a Disillusionment Plot.

  22. SPORTS GENRE. Sport is a crucible for character change. This genre is a natural home for the Maturation Plot: NORTH DALLAS FORTY; the Redemption Plot: SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME; the Education Plot: BULL DURHAM; the Punitive Plot: RAGING BULL; the Testing Plot: CHARIOTS OF FIRE; the Disillusionment Plot: THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER; Buddy Salvation: WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP; Social Drama: A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN.

  23. FANTASY. Here the writer plays with time, space, and the physical, bending and mixing the laws of nature and the supernatural. The extra-realities of FANTASY attract the Action genres but also welcome others such as the Love Story: SOMEWHERE IN TIME; Political Drama/Allegory: ANIMAL FARM; Social Drama: IF …; Maturation Plot: ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

  24. ANIMATION. Here the law of universal metamorphism rules: Anything can become something else. Like Fantasy and Science Fiction, ANIMATION leans toward the Action genres of cartoon Farce: BUGS BUNNY; or High Adventure: THE SWORD IN THE STONE, THE YELLOW SUBMARINE; and because the youth audience is its natural market, many Maturation Plots: THE LION KING, THE LITTLE MERMAID; but as the animators of Eastern Europe and Japan have shown, there are no restraints.

  Lastly, for those who believe that genres and their conventions are concerns of “commercial” writers only, and that serious art is nongeneric, let me add one last name to the list:

  25. ART FILM. The avant-garde notion of writing outside the genres is naive. No one writes in a vacuum. After thousands of years of storytelling no story is so different that it has no similarity to anything else ever written. The ART FILM has become a traditional genre, divisible into two subgenres, Minimalism and Antistructure, each with its own complex of formal conventions of structure and cosmology. Like Historical Drama, the ART FILM is a supra-genre that embraces other basic genres: Love Story, Political Drama, and the like.

  Although this slate is reasonably comprehensive, no list can ever be definitive or exhaustive because the lines between genres often overlap as they influence and merge with one another. Genres are not static or rigid, but evolving and flexible, yet firm and stable enough to be identified and worked with, much as a composer plays with the malleable movements of musical genres.

  Each writer’s homework is first to identify his genre, then research its governing practices. And there’s no escaping these tasks. We’re all genre writers.

  THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STRUCTURE AND GENRE

  Each genre imposes conventions on story design: conventional value-charges at climax such as the down-ending of the Disillusionment Plot; conventional settings such as the Western; conventional events such as boy-meets-girl in the Love Story; conventional roles such as the criminal in a Crime Story. The audience knows these conventions and expects to see them fulfilled. Consequently, the choice of genre sharply determines and limits what’s possible within a story, as its design must envision the audience’s knowledge and anticipations.

  GENRE CONVENTIONS are specific settings, roles, events, and values that define individual genres and their subgenres.

  Each genre has unique conventions, but in some these are relatively uncomplicated and pliable. The primary convention of the Disillusionment Plot is a protagonist who opens the story filled with optimism, who holds high ideals or beliefs, whose view of life is positive. Its second convention is a pattern of repeatedly negative story turns that may at first raise his hopes, but ultimately poison his dreams and values, leaving him deeply cynical and disillusioned. The protagonist of THE CONVERSATION, for example, begins with an orderly, secure hold on life and ends in a paranoid nightmare. This simple set of conventions offers uncountable possibilities, for life knows a thousand paths to hopelessness. Among the many memorable films in this genre are THE MISFITS, LA DOLCE VITA, and LENNY.

  Other genres are relatively inflexible and filled with a complex of rigid conventions. In the Crime Genre there must be a crime; it must happen early in the telling. There must be a detective character, professional or amateur, who discovers clues and suspects. In the Thriller the criminal must “make it personal.” Although the story may start with a cop who works for a paycheck, to deepen the drama, at some point, the criminal goes over the line. Clichés grow like fungus around this convention: The criminal menaces the family of the cop or turns the cop himself into a suspect; or, cliché of clichés with roots back to THE MALTESE FALCON, he kills the detective’s partner. Ultimately, the cop must identify, apprehend, and punish the criminal.

  Comedy contains myriad subgenres as well, each with its own conventions, but one overriding convention unites this mega-genre and distinguishes it from drama: Nobody gets hurt. In Comedy, the audience must feel that no matter how characters bounce off walls, no matter how they scream and writhe under the whips of life, it doesn’t really hurt. Buildings may fall on Laurel and Hardy, but they get up out of the rubble, dust themselves off, mutter, “Now, what a fine mess …” and on they go.

  In A FISH CALLED WANDA Ken (Michael Palin), a character with an obsessive love of animals, tries to kill an old lady but accidentally kills her pet terriers instead. The last dog dies under a massive construction block with his little paw left sticking out. Charles Crichton, the director, shot two versions of this moment: one showing only the paw, but for the second he sent to a butcher’s shop for a bag of entrails and added a trail of gore draining away from the squashed terrier. When this gory image flashed in front of preview audiences, the theatre fell dead quiet. The blood and guts said: “It hurt.” For general release Crichton switched to the sanitized shot and got his laugh. By genre convention, the comedy writer walks the line between putting characters through the torments of hell while safely reassuring the audience that the flames don’t really burn.

  Across that line waits the subgenre of Black Comedy. Here the writer bends comic convention and allows his audience to feel sharp, but not unbearable, pain: THE LOVED ONE, THE WAR OF THE ROSES, PRIZZI’S HONOR—films in which laughter often chokes us.

  Art Films are conventionalized by a number of external practices such as the absence of stars (or stars’ salaries), production outside the Hollywood system, generally in a language other than English—all of which become sales points as the marketing team encourages critics to champion the film as an underdog. Its primary internal conventions are, first, a celebration of the cerebral. The Art Film favors the intellect by smothering strong emotion under a blanket of mood, while through enigma, symbolism, or unresolved tensions it invites interpretation and analysis in the postfilm ritual of cafe criticism. Secondly and essentially, the story design of an Art Film depends on one grand convention: unconventionality. Minimalist and/or Antistructure unconventionality is the Art Film’s distinguishing convention.

  Success in the Art Film genre usually results in instant, though often temporary, recognition as an artist. On the other hand, the durable Alfred Hitchcock worked solely within the Archplot and genre convention, always aimed for a mass audience, and habitually found it. Yet today he stands atop the pantheon of filmmakers, worshipped worldwide as one of the century’s major artists, a film poet whose works resonate with sublime images of sexuality, religiosity, and subtleties of point of view
. Hitchcock knew that there is no necessary contradiction between art and popular success, nor a necessary connection between art and Art Film.

  MASTERY OF GENRE

  Each of us owes an enormous debt to the great story traditions. You must not only respect but master your genre and its conventions. Never assume that because you’ve seen films in your genre you know it. This is like assuming you could compose a symphony because you have heard all nine of Beethoven’s. You must study the form. Books of genre criticism may help, but few are current and none is complete. Read everything, nonetheless, for we need all possible help from wherever we can get it. The most valuable insights, however, come from self-discovery; nothing ignites the imagination like the unearthing of buried treasure.

  Genre study is best done in this fashion: First, list all those works you feel are like yours, both successes and failures. (The study of failures is illuminating … and humbling.) Next, rent the films on video and purchase the screenplays if possible. Then study the films stop and go, turning pages with the screen, breaking each film down into elements of setting, role, event, and value. Lastly, stack, so to speak, these analyses one atop the other and look down through them all asking: What do the stories in my genre always do? What are its conventions of time, place, character, and action? Until you discover answers, the audience will always be ahead of you.

  To anticipate the anticipations of the audience you must master your genre and its conventions.