McKee examines story-telling like a biologist dissecting a rat. But after taking it apart, he explains how to build a story yourself using rules that wouldn’t look out of place in a computer programming text book.
[. . .]
Using McKee’s rules they compare the script of the film Casablanca, a classic pre-McKee movie, with scripts of six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), a classic post-Mckee production, and find numerous similarities.That’s hardly surprising since McKee learnt his trade analysing films such as Casablanca, so anything written using his rules should have these similarities.
I also note that one of the producers for CSI has a PhD in applied physics. Chicken? Egg? Common cause?
(Not to name drop, but I went to high school with this person, and actually helped, in some small way, with the first script he wrote)