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Why Genre?

Scriptwriting as a pedagogy has been dominated for the past three decades by an obsession with three-act structure. A parallel perception that actually seeks a deeper structure, the journey of the hero, sources from the writings of Joseph Campbell. Before the dominance of these two approaches, Aristotle and his theatrical descendants focused upon the rising action of conflict organized into a narrative. The primary struggle of the protagonist and antagonist was the baseline of every story.

In the midst of all these activities applied to the understanding of screen-writing, genre was either a reference to style such as the visual stylization of a film noir or a particular narrative story form such as the gangster film that lent itself ...

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