Film Courage: We’re going to test the story that you’re coming up with from the Story Engine with the 36 dramatic situations and Enneagram and various things. I’m wondering should we name this protagonist?
Jeff Kitchen, Dramatist / Author / Founder / Consultant: For me that would be premature because it’s so explosively open-ended at this point. One of my favorite points in the development of a story is the point where the sky’s the limit. Like this story, there’s dozens of possible stories in this and I want to play on the lava like Superman playing in lava, just revel in the open-ended possibilities rather than starting to consolidate. The name from one point of view is like a detail but I don’t want to restrict any of the apertures in this at this point because the automaton could be male, it could be female, it could be a deity of a sort that lives inside a machine and presents as one robot but it really isn’t just that there’s so many wildly open-ended possibilities that I would prefer to arrive at that detail a little bit later.
Film Courage: Fair enough, so we have your book here.
Jeff: This is just the list of the 36 dramatic situations. It was created in the 1700’s by an Italian playwright named Carlo Gozzi, it was endorsed by Goethe and Schiller and on the strength of those endorsements hung around for 150 years or something until Georges Polti turned it into a book [Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations] in 1916. It says that basically you can describe any story quite completely with these 36 dramatic situations like pursuit, disaster, falling prey to cruelty or misfortune, revolt, daring enterprise. They are elements and you can describe any story quite completely from one point of view with the 36 dramatic situations in the same way that I can describe this table quite completely from one point of view with the periodic table of elements. This table is carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, magnesium. From one point of view you can describe it quite completely…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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