Blake Snyder: Screenwriter

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As a brand new freshman at the (then) Cate School for Boys in Carpinteria, I found myself walking a few yards behind two sophomores one evening, heading toward the dining room. I couldn’t help but eavesdrop: These guys were beyond funny. They were hilarious. Like two brilliant jazz musicians locked in an improvisational duel, they cracked jokes, did impressions, and shot punch lines at each other in an escalating comedic riff. I had never experienced anything like it. These weren’t teenagers like me, these were adults.

I remember thinking, “I have got to meet these guys!” And so I did. One of them, Lex Passaris, would go on to direct television comedies; the other was Blake Snyder. Blake and I became the best of friends, comedy co-conspirators, and, later, screenwriters. He went on to become a best-selling author and teacher of screenwriting. Our friendship spanned decades.

Blake Snyder

Blake Snyder died—far too young—on August 4 of a pulmonary embolism at age 52, leaving a bit of emptiness in the universe. Although he lived in Los Angeles for 25 years, whenever anyone asked him where he was from, he would automatically say, “Santa Barbara.”

His is more than simply a local-boy-does-good story. Blake went into the belly of the beast—Hollywood—but remained as he had been born, a kind and gentle soul. Anyone who met him will tell you the same.

We spent countless hours studying and discussing movies to find out what made them tick; what makes human beings respond to them on such a primal level. We picked apart Carl Jung’s archetypes and Joseph Campbell’s histories of mythology. Years later, Blake would codify and simplify many of these discussions we had into a best-selling book, Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. It launched him into a new career as a teacher, taking him across the country and around the world, from Beijing to Barcelona. If you go to his Web site, you will see an outpouring of affection from his students, because he cared so deeply for them.

Like all of us, he had many sides. He could at turns be gregarious, then secretive; side-splittingly funny, then consumed with a silent nervousness. He was wonderfully idiosyncratic.

In 1992, he approached me with an idea for a script he had been trying, without success, to write. He had a few characters and a basic premise but couldn’t find the story, and so we went to work in my corner office of the Fithian Building. We hammered out the story and I began writing. Brow furrowed, Blake paced a lot (he was a big pacer). Every 15 or so minutes, he would ask me what time it was (he didn’t believe in watches). It drove me crazy. “I’ll make you a deal,” I finally said. “When we sell the script, we’re going out and you will buy yourself a very expensive watch!”

“If we sell the script,” he said. “Don’t jinx it. Please.” (Did I mention superstitious?)

“Fine. If we sell the script.”

“Okay. It’s a deal.”

We went on to sell Nuclear Family, after a bidding war, to Steven Spielberg. I marched Blake across the street to Nordstrom, where he happily plunked down a thousand bucks for a new Patek Philippe watch.

Artists create because of forces within them, forces maybe even they don’t understand. Real life, alas, is not like the movies; real life is messy and chaotic. A screenplay, on the other hand, is nothing but structure. It is a rigid blueprint for lives and worlds imagined. I think real life made Blake slightly nervous, even uncomfortable, but in screenplays he found the control and structure that real life lacks. As with the ancient Greek dramatic device of the deus ex machina, the writer becomes a god who controls the characters in his or her fictional universe. It is perhaps because of his idiosyncrasies that Blake strove to unlock the rhythms of screenwriting. He wanted to build worlds that were structured.

Blake Snyder was a man who truly loved movies, but more importantly, he loved to share his enthusiasm for them. To a new generation of screenwriters he leaves behind the tools needed to reach their creative potential. He will be deeply missed.

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