The truism in Hollywood is that you can’t make a great movie from a bad screenplay. But you can’t have a good screenplay without certain narrative fundamentals and emotional building blocks that, when expertly deployed, add up to a good story well told, with none of the strut work showing. “It all starts with Aristotle,” says screenwriter Lew Hunter, who teaches the craft at his Screenwriting Colony in Superior, Neb. “You’ve got to have a beginning, middle and end.”

Along the way, the hero or heroine will undergo a profound change of character. The cynic finds his idealism. The coward finds his courage. The scullery maid finds her inner princess.

And with any luck, transcendent theme emerges: what the movie’s about.

Screenwriting gurus from Robert McKee to Syd Field have fine-tuned their own versions of the formula, but most hew to the principles that we list here.

THE gaze beneath Robert McKee’s snowy brow is intense, almost unnerving. Meeting the famed Hollywood script doctor, it’s hard to forget the ferocious depiction of him, as played by Brian Cox, in the movie Adaptation.

In the comic drama, a blocked writer, played by Nicolas Cage, attends McKee’s three-day story seminar and is pummelled with black-and-white principles, such as never using voiceover and ensuring a protagonist has “desire”.

These principles, from McKee’s book Story: Substance, Structure, Style And The Principles Of Screenwriting, were not written as a cheat sheet for aspiring screenwriters. It was always about excellence, he insists, and there is no short cut for that.

FOR about 25 years the respected American screenwriting lecturer Robert McKee has preached his mantra. Write the truth, he says with passion, as during three days he lectures on why it is imperative to reunite the great modern art form of cinema with the ancient craft of storytelling, how to go about that, and why Casablanca is the greatest screenplay of them all.

In the pursuit of knowledge, excellence — and that alluring but elusive dream of a lucrative career — more than 50,000 screenwriters, novelists, playwrights, film industry executives, directors, actors and producers and wannabes across the world have attended his courses.

Between them, graduates of his seminars have won 27 Academy Awards (as well as 100 nominations) and 141 Emmys. A comprehensive list on his website includes William Goldman, Peter Jackson, John Cleese and the crew behind Sex and the City. Ray Lawrence (Lantana), Rob Sitch (The Castle), Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall*E), Leigh Whannell (Saw) and Adam Elliot (Harvey Krumpet, Mary and Max) have all taken his seminar.