Hollywood is notoriously resistant to change. You can blame at least some of that on the fact that every movie written for the last 20 years or so has followed the guidelines set forth in a single book.

Amazon.com

The official Bible of every waiter in Los Angeles.

It's called Save the Cat, and if you've never read it, the general premise is that you're stupid if you don't give away the entire ending to your film in the first 10 minutes. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes Hollywood the bland (albeit explosion-riddled), formulaic mess that it mostly is today. If something worked in the past, they'll just keep doing it, no matter how injurious it may be to the overall quality of the project (or your willingness to ever stop shopping exclusively on The Pirate Bay).

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It's so cheap, though!

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Hollywood is a land of rules and traditions, and most of them -- at present, anyway -- can be traced back to that one book.

You should actually take some comfort in that, though, because if you know where a problem starts, knowing how to fix it becomes significantly easier. Granted, Hollywood is never going to fix anything about anything and you should stop dreaming if you believe otherwise, but still, at least it could happen in theory.

Unfortunately, not every worst practice movie makers employ can be explained so easily. Some just seem to be universal laws that were handed down from some higher cinematic power that people who simply watch movies are not worthy of meeting.

For example, can anyone point to the screenplay writing manual that says ...