Robert Mc Kee - Criticism

Criticism

McKee has been criticized by Joe Eszterhas, for being someone who teaches screenwriting without ever having a script of his made into a film, though McKee is credited as writer of the 1994 TV movie Abraham. McKee has responded to such criticisms, saying, "The world is full of people who teach things they themselves cannot do", while admitting that even though he sold all of his written screenplays, he still lacks their screen credit since they were only optioned and not produced by the studios.

While McKee's work might appear to be a fresh approach to story structure, many of the ideas he discusses have been around since Aristotle and notably appear in the work of William Archer, John Howard Lawson and Alexander Mackendrick. Nevertheless, McKee himself tells his students that Aristotle is the basis for much of what he teaches and he often distributes some of John Howard Lawson's writings at his seminar: he acknowledges his forbears and never claims that he is inventing a brand new approach to story telling. Furthermore he claims that much of what he teaches was common knowledge 50 or 60 years ago, but that screenwriters have lost touch with the fundamentals of storytelling. In a CBC interview he said that to give his lecture in the 1930s, -40s or 50s "would have been ludicrous".

McKee also appears and is criticized in several works, for example, Missionnaire by French author Joann Sfar.