Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

Snyder describes the rules he discovered in the process of viewing movies and writing screenplays. The first, “Save the Cat,” is amended from its description in the Introduction to being an action that gets the “audience ‘in sync’ with the plight of the hero” (121). The author gives the example of Pulp Fiction, where the audience sees the hitmen (anti-heroes) as funny and even somewhat “childlike” (121) before they start killing people. In order to make an anti-hero likeable, Snyder suggests making the villain even worse. Disney’s Aladdin provides an example of a “Save the Cat” scene with an anti-hero when Aladdin, a somewhat unlikeable thief in the original source material, steals food only to end up giving it to some hungry children. Snyder emphasizes that the heroes don’t need to be good people, but the audience needs a reason to care about them in order to care about what happens to them.

“The Pope in the Pool” is named after a scene in a script titled The Plot to Kill the Pope, wherein a meeting takes place in the Vatican pool area while the pontiff swims laps (124). This trick allows the writer to insert