1. Robert McKee was born on January 30,1941 and is an author, lecturer and story consultant who is known for his "Story Seminar", which he developed when he was a professor at the University of Southern California.
15 Facts About Robert McKee
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Robert McKee began his theater career at the age of nine, playing the title role in a community theater production of Martin the Shoemaker.
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Robert McKee continued acting as a teenager in theater productions in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan.
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Robert McKee then received the Professional Theater Fellowship and returned to Ann Arbor, Michigan to earn his master's degree in Theater Arts.
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In 1979, Robert McKee moved to Los Angeles, where he began to write screenplays and work as a story analyst for United Artists and NBC.
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Robert McKee was an early instructor at the pioneering Los Angeles film school the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College.
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In 1983, as Fulbright Scholar, Robert McKee joined the faculty of the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, where he began offering his STORY Seminar class.
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Robert McKee continues to be a project consultant to major film and television production companies, corporations and governments around the world, as well major software firms such as Microsoft.
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In 2000, Robert McKee won the 1999 International Moving Image Book Award for his book Story.
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In 2017, Robert McKee was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the Final Draft Awards, an honor that recognizes professionals who have had a "profound influence on the industry" joining peers such as Lawrence Kasdan and Steven Zaillian.
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Robert McKee has been criticized by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas for teaching screenwriting without ever having had one of his scripts made into a film.
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Robert McKee has responded to such criticisms, noting that "the world is full of people who teach things they themselves cannot do" while admitting that even though he has sold all of his screenplays, he still lacks screen credits for them since they were never produced by the studios that bought them, only optioned.
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Robert McKee does have at least one known credit: as writer of the 1994 TV movie Abraham and the 2001 animated cartoon, 'Barbie and the Nutcracker.
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Nevertheless, Robert McKee himself tells his students that Aristotle is the basis for much of what he teaches, credits much of his writing on conflict and drama to the teaching of Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, and he often distributes some of John Howard Lawson's writings at his seminar: he acknowledges his forebears and never claims that he is inventing a brand new approach to storytelling.
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Robert McKee appears and is criticized in several works, for example, Missionnaire by French author Joann Sfar.