David Mckenna

I was nervous about this class having read some of the reviews here, but this is easily the most fun class I've taken at Columbia. McKenna's strength is not the information he presents (Vogler's 12 Steps are pretty basic and you could teach yourself by reading the book), but damn, is he entertaining. McKenna is funny and lively, and provides a refreshing break from other classes in the department taught by professors who tend to take themselves too seriously. Yes, he is crazy and often offensive, but if you can laugh it off and appreciate his twisted sense of humor, you will find that there is also a lot to be gained from this class. Most of what I learned in Script Analysis came from the work we were asked to do. It's surprising how much you learn from doing coverage once a week. The scripts chosen were fun (Erin Brockovich, Unforgiven, The Bourne Identity, etc.) and as usual in film classes, the TAs are awesome and an invaluable resource. Someone on here said that participation is vital to receiving a good grade, and while McKenna loves hearing students talk whether he agrees with them or not, I don't think participating is the only way to succeed in this class. I got an A and never spoke in lecture and not often in discussion. Yes, the class is a major requirement, but it is a fun one.

McKenna is a terrible self-absorbed professor whose old school ideas won't help you learn anything applicable towards today's topic in horror. His big lead-up ending for us was Frailty, which was supposed to cap an entire survey of horror films. His grading is arbitrary, more than any other professor at Columbia, and he's very limited in what he knows. Many times, a student would bring up references to Milton or Nietzsche and he was lost. He's too focused pushing his own theories rather than applying real film theory to his lectures. He gives a 90 minute history lesson before every film, which I would rather the 4 hours being a little more reined in to give more clips and then put them in context. He's not an easy grader, and participation won't matter except that you have to arrive for roll. Careful of his homophobic, racist, misogynistic rants.

Unfortunately, McKenna has no interest in hearing your ideas. Do yourself a favor and take a Screenwriting class at the New York Film Academy or another institution. Although at root a very good guy, he is extremely self-absorbed. He spent 90% of our class time talking about himself, what his favorite movies are, and doing impressions of his favorite actors (which include, by the way, Sylvester Stallone in Rocky.) No one in my class thought they got anything useful out of it. A real waste of time- the only thing I got from it was the feedback of the few people in my class, whose comments he stifled to interject his own. Awful.

If you are a film major, you -have- to take David McKenna's Script Analysis class. Fortunately for you, it is one of the best courses in film major requirements. Previous reviews are more/less correct regarding the style of the course, insofar as McKenna basically spends the entire semester on one twelve-step process. The process is so intricate, though, that it actually does seem to warrant the amount of time he spends on it. McKenna is extremely engaging and tries to bring out the best in his students. He is loud, inappropriate, and occasionally misanthropic/racist/misogynistic (which, personally, I found to be totally awesome, but it's admittedly not everybody's style). A typical lecture goes like this: - Outline of the day's "12 Step" element - Rocky/Romancing the Stone/Henry V relationship to this element. - Clips demonstrating the step - Cigarette Break - Loglines of previous week's screenplay - Discussion of previous week's screenplay The course is three hours long, and you will not watch full length movies -- which ostensibly means three hours of lecturing. This would be tedious were McKenna not such a wonderful lecturer and performer/entertainer. I challenge you to fall asleep in his class; I don't think it's possible. A word on grading: It's pretty mystical. You will get "check plus," "check," and "check minus" grades as opposed to conventional letter grades. Attenda…

It's true, Dave is totally vulgar and will try his best to insult you. So don't take the class if you are sensitive. But Dave is a brilliant story teller and he can teach you the secrets to successful storytelling. Even if you only take the class for his second lecture on story structure, it would be totally worth it. I actually clapped after the three hour lecture, it was that good. I thoroughly enjoyed this class. You will too if you are serious about learning how to write a successful screenplay.

In my opinion, David McKenna really doesn't care about you. He will talk about your screenplay in class, but don't count on any interest beyond that. He prides himself on being anti-academic, and seems to think he is incredibly profound, but mostly he's just lewd and inappropriate.

This class was so disappointing. For the entire semester, McKenna did nothing but outline and explain Vogler's 12-act structure for writing. Though this structure is interesting for as long as it takes to read the book we had to buy, McKenna stretched this out over months of class time by talking about the most random things, or by recounting the opening to Rocky in a rich, totally unnecessarily theatrical way, or by just cursing a lot. Sure, he is enthusiastic, but I literally learned almost nothing from his lectures. He kept repeating that though this method of writing wasn't the only effective way to write a screenplay, we should value it as a tool that we could play around with later. True as that may be, it certainly didn't take a semester to understand it. Fortunately, the TAs were much better, and discussion sections were filled with a variety of different exercises that, unlike the lectures, genuinely helped me improve my analysis of scripts. Thankfully, McKenna would occasionally allow one of the TAs to give a short guest lecture on a topic unrelated to the 12-act structure. The assignments were all pretty interesting, too, since they mostly consisted of reading a script and then addressing a specific scene or character.

On Day 1, McKenna makes it clear that only a corpse will not, at some point in the semester, be completely offended by something he says at some time. And then he proceeds to deliver. It's part of his method: uncensoring himself, he's aiming to uncensor the class at large. And it works in some percentage of the students, and it doesn't work in some percentage of his students. You need a certain strength of character to dive into that process and make something of it. You need a certain self-possession to decide what is nonsense and what you're going to chew on for a long time after the class is over. There are diamonds in the roughage. They can cut you in interesting ways. As far as the structure of the class, you'll get out of it what you put in. It's a writing class. If you want to come out a better writer, you should try to be harder on yourself than McKenna will be. He'll tend to be pretty kind, though fanatically provocative. You need to listen to the remarks on everyone else's material as carefully as you listen to the remarks on your own stuff. Finally, for a good grade, it's obvious that you need to do the writing work, but what's NOT obvious is that you need to comment on your fellow students' work. Because of the seminar format, McKenna is looking to provoke what he calls a lively room. It sometimes seems that he could talk for three hours straight without interrupti…

McKenna is a macho man to the bones and a frustrated actor as well. His recent reincarnation is a cross between Crocodile Dundee and Clint Eastwood. He red lines on swagger, a phony cowboy accent, profanity, and pure bologna. He uses an excellent book that charts the course of a screenplay and uses examples from films to back up the course book, and that can be illuminating -- at times. But unfortunately he is a teacher that confuses taste with style and erudition with high octane delivery. Watch out for his little black cigar. He likes to hang it in his lip like Clint and opine like Dirty Harry, which he ain't.

On the last day of this class, our TA asked the discussion section what we thought were the best and worst parts of the class. We proceeded to spend the next hour listing all the problems we had with McKenna and the structure of the class. It simply was not a good course. Of course, it's a requirement for the major, so it will continue to fill up no matter what, but if you're not a film major and therefore don't need this class, it's sort of a waste of time. Just look up Vogler's "12 Steps" and read some screenplays on your own time, and you've basically taken the class. The entire course is spent learning an extremely simple concept that McKenna somehow manages to stretch over 12 weeks, 3 hours a week. There was no reason for this. Sure, it was somewhat interesting, but it could easily have been taught within the first couple of weeks of the class, and then we could have gone on to learn more interesting methods of script analysis. The one nice thing about the course were the TAs. First of all, they definitely realized how crazy McKenna was, so they took that into consideration when assigning and grading work. They also gave little mini-lectures throughout the semester, in which they taught about specific aspects of script analysis or screenwriting. It was a nice break from McKenna, and we actually learned more from these than we did from him. All in all, the workload is pret…