I wrote this in 1999 for Attaché, now called U.S. Airways Magazine, back when it was the best in the business. The piece was about Hollywood, where everything and nothing changes, right? So here it is again, shortened with a few updates.

Hollywood is awash in movies no one will ever see. For every one of the 400 or so feature films that will actually get produced this year by the American film industry, there are hundreds of finished scripts in the hands of producers, directors, actors and agents waiting for a green light. The Writers Guild of America formally registers more than 35,000 newly finished screenplays [now “over 70,000 pieces of material”] every year and there are, depending on who you talk to, perhaps 20,000 scripts stacked in studio offices and at weekend poolsides, actively in play to one extent or another. According to Robert McKee, the current-reigning screenplay guru whose three-day, $475 [now four-day, $865] seminars have now been attended by 25,000 [now 100,000] people, Hollywood spends a half-billion dollars a year on story development, three-quarters of it on scripts that will never get produced [I don’t know what anyone’s best guess is today. But it’ll be a guess. And it’ll be a lot.] .

So how come the movies aren’t better? In fact, how come they aren’t great? With that kind of money flowing, why do we end up with Home Alone [Meet the Fockers] and Batman [Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen] instead of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet? What would Shakespeare have done with a three-picture development deal with Miramax [Warner]? Or would they even know he was in town?

With so much creative product available, how do they pick and choose? And with all those stories from which to select, how come so many of the movies that arrive at our local cineplexes seem so much the same? Can’t they find something different for us to see?

The answer to that last question is yes, they certainly can. And the answer to the one before it is even simpler: They don’t want something different. It isn’t that many of the movies we see are similar — it’s that they all are.

Virtually every movie produced these days tells its story in the same way, following a rigid structure that, like the hidden image in a Magic Eye poster, becomes obvious only when you change your focus and look past the surface complexity to take in the larger whole. In an (only slightly) abbreviated form, here is the standard outline:

The lights dim, the titles roll and within the first ten minutes of the film we will meet the main character. The main character will immediately show a bit of human weakness that makes us like him. (Or her, but most movie heroes are male.) We will spend a few minutes getting to know the hero’s situation before it is radically changed by something unexpected; this will usually happen between 25 and 35 minutes into the movie. As a result of this inciting moment, the hero will now be forced to embark on a quest for something (or someone) that will last for one hour, facing progressively more serious complications until at very close to 85 minutes into the movie, the hero will hit rock bottom, unable to continue without risking absolutely everything in one final gamble to gain his objective. Within the next ten minutes he will lock into combat with the force that has been blocking him, winning at last, victorious and changed forever and for the better, even if he sacrifices his life to gain his goal. Fade out. Roll credits.

That’s the format, and every professional in Hollywood knows it intimately in its current detail. It works for action flicks, love stories and comedies; westerns, period pieces and science fiction; Oscar-contenders and straight-to-video flops. Every movie made is written, produced and directed by people whose every creative choice is guided by it, either in order to follow the format carefully or to deviate from it — even more carefully. For as time-tested entertainment principles go, this one, the three-act play (setup, confrontation and resolution), is the granddaddy. Aristotle analyzed its structure 2,350 years ago and no one has substantively improved on it since.

Each movie studio release is an individual startup business, an entrepreneurial, multi-million-dollar new venture complete with office space, hundreds of employees, product design, marketing, manufacturing, brand identification, cross-licensing arrangements, and a management team with incentive employment agreements that stand to make them millions if they succeed. Or a lot of unemployed time to think about it if they fail. Who says these people should take artistic risks? If you were responsible for 50 or 100 million dollars of invested capital, how far from a 2,500-year-old, endlessly successful paradigm would you shift?

Right. Welcome to Robert McKee’s screenplay seminar. Or Syd Field’s [Sadly, Syd died in November 2013. But it’s Hollywood: His webinars live on.]. Or Michael Hauge’s. Or maybe you should start with a book — they’ve each got one available, along with several dozen written by others, all of which, like the movies they try to show you how to write, tell the same story in varying detail. If you want to write a screenplay, or if you’re looking for a job anywhere near the creative side of the movie business, you have to read one of the books, or go to one of the seminars, or both, or — because in Hollywood anything worth doing requires overdoing — all of the above. You have to do this because everyone you’ll be dealing with has already been there and read that. And believes in it. They believe in it because it works.

Which brings us to the bottom line, to the purpose of every movie: It’s to make money. It’s a business enterprise, not an attempt at art. And Hollywood understands that the most dependable way to do business is not necessarily to engage your intellect, but to safely and pleasurably exercise your emotions. The ancient Greeks learned two and a half millenia ago that the emotions to exercise for best dramatic effect were pity, fear and the cathartic joy that comes from their release. They then gradually learned how to do this through public performance of a certain type of story that seemed to have universal appeal. That story is the quest, and its purest dramatic form, Aristotle and his followers concluded, was the three-act play: Engage your pity, arouse your fear, then release them both. One, two, three.

Hollywood producers have learned to agree. In order to attract the numbers of viewers each movie requires just to break even, they don’t need a unique story that might appeal to a few thousand, they need a dependable archetype that will move millions. They need the three-act story structure in the same way that basic housing needs four walls and a roof  — you can experiment with the details just as long as the purpose remains well served: The customers have to be warm and dry in the house you built for them, and they have to get from your movie the emotional lift they came into the theater expecting.  Both require structure, and nothing modern has improved upon the soundness of an ancient design.

For Hollywood it’s a design that isn’t going to change soon:

Mel Gibson will still appear in the first ten minutes. When we meet Bruce Willis, he’ll be so down and out he’ll be living in his car, the butt of children’s taunts. About a half hour into the picture, Jack Nicholson will be forced to take care of his gay neighbor’s dog. For the next hour Helen Hunt will face progressively bigger and nastier tornadoes and Patrick Swayze will race against mounting obstacles to make ghostly contact with Demi Moore. And finally, when we’ve been lured all the way to the edge of our seats, at about an hour and a half into the story, Harrison Ford will come face to face with Tommy Lee Jones just before Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis launch themselves sublimely into the void, fully liberated, free at last, masters of the world that tried to defeat them.

I scratched out the 1999 references. You can replace them easily, right? Use the comments section. I’d love to see your selections.

And that’s Hollywood’s story. Can you think of a better one? If you can, then write it down and send it in. Otherwise just sit back and enjoy the movies. All one of them.