Member-only story
The WGA Strike Was Caused by Joseph Campbell
A pet theory.
Joseph Campbell was a guy who wrote a book called The Hero With a Thousand Faces, where he argued that all the myths, legends, folk and fairy tales of the world followed a similar pattern. He dubbed the pattern, “the monomyth” and in it, delineated a cast of recurring archetypes. He borrowed the archetypes from psychiatrist Karl Jung (who stole the idea from Sabina Spielrein — justice for Spielrein!), and then he did what all scholars do: he lapsed into irrelevance, and his book languished on the shelf.
Then a guy named George Lucas plucked it off the shelf, used the monomyth as an outline, changed a couple of names, and called his new thing, Star Wars.
Suddenly, Campbell-style story analysis was a cottage industry in Hollywood. Turns out you can sell Hollywood executives anything if you wear a tweed jacket — and if your expertise will make them money. Over the next ten years, almost all the screenplays you’ve heard of got winnowed through the model we now call the Hero’s Journey. What a delicious temptation, to think of storytelling as a science! A glut of screenwriting books followed, promising filmmaking mega-success to any hack within spitting distance of a Barnes and Noble. By the time America rolled into the 21st century, executives could pick up a screenplay off the pile, flip to page 15…
