Late one night in Las Vegas, I found myself driving Faye Dunaway back to her hotel.

A few minutes earlier, she had pulled me aside in pure Hollywood fashion.

“Derek, darling,” she said, “did you drive here today?”

I told her I had.

“Would you mind terribly giving me a ride back to my hotel?”

She had spent the entire day sitting in a 150-seat theater at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, listening to a seminar on story. Not a premiere. Not a screening. A seminar.

Now she was in the passenger seat, relaxed, talking the way people do when they assume you understand the world they come from.

“I was at Warren’s the other week,” she said casually. “And Jack came by…”

By Warren, she meant Warren Beatty.

By Jack, she meant Jack Nicholson.

I remember thinking, this is completely surreal.

A few hours earlier, during a break, she had been standing just outside the theater with Robert McKee, the two of them holding court as they dissected a scene from Chinatown. Writers gathered in a tight circle, three or four deep, listening in silence, as if they had stumbled into something they weren’t supposed to see.

No one was pitching anything. No one was networking.

They were just listening.

And, almost reflexively, I found myself thinking: You could build an entire event around this. Screen the film, then have McKee and Dunaway break it down live. That’s how I always thought—build the event around a moment that can sustain an audience, that can carry the room.

That was the thing about those rooms.

For a stretch of about twenty years—from the late 1990s through 2020—hundreds of writers would gather in spaces like this across the United States—Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Boston and even Las Vegas. They paid hundreds of dollars, flew across the country, and sat for hours at a time, all to hear people talk about story.

Not how to sell it.

Not how to pitch it.

Just… how it worked.

For a while, that was enough.


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I’m currently working on a long-form piece about the golden age of story seminars (roughly 1999–2020)—a time when hundreds of writers would gather simply to learn how story works.

(C) Derek Christopher - All Rights Reserved. Please contact for permission to reprint.


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