BOB NEVER MOVED
The Day a Marine Confronted Robert McKee
“If you want to see true evil,” Robert McKee said calmly from the stage, “look at Oliver North.”
That’s when the Marine stood up.
“FUCK YOU, OLD MAN!” he screamed. “HOW DARE YOU DENIGRATE THE MILITARY!”
The room froze.
This was during one of Bob’s sold-out Story Seminars at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Hundreds of writers sat packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the theatre. One second they were taking notes on morality and storytelling… the next, a giant Marine was standing dead center in the middle aisle screaming at Robert McKee like he wanted to tear him in half.
And Bob?
Bob never moved.
He stood his ground onstage staring directly back at him.
You could feel the oxygen leave the room.
Someone came running to the registration desk to get me.
“You need to come in here!” they yelled. “Someone is going to kill Bob!”
I walked into the theatre and saw this Marine standing there in a full rage, locked into a stare-down with McKee while 300+ people sat in absolute silence.
To this day, I have no idea where my courage came from.
“SIR!” I bellowed.
Nothing.
“SIR! You need to leave. NOW.” I was pointing at the exit.
Still nothing.
This guy could have snapped my neck like a twig. Yet somehow I just kept going.
“SIR! You need to leave NOW!”
I must have shouted it three or four times before he finally broke eye contact with Bob and started walking toward me. I escorted him out of the theatre while my heart was pounding through my chest.
The second we got outside, he exploded again.
“He was denigrating the military!”
I put my arms and hands up as if to say, "I understand. Calm down. Tell me what happened."
I asked him what Bob had actually said.
“It was about Oliver North! About evil!”
Then I realized exactly where the misunderstanding had happened.
Bob used to do a recurring section in the seminar about appearances and the true nature of evil in storytelling. His point was always that evil rarely presents itself as a monster. Sometimes it arrives wrapped in charisma, heroism, medals, prestige, or authority.
And oddly enough, part of that same lecture involved a cat.
One day Bob told me a story about his elderly cat who was dying of cancer. The vet had given the cat maybe a week or two to live. Bob was devastated. He loved that cat.
So he decided to give the cat one final thrill.
He went to the pet store and bought a live mouse.
Bob took the old, shaky cat outside, placed him gently in the grass, then released the mouse nearby.
BAM!
The cat exploded to life.
Bob said the old thing pounced on that mouse with shocking speed and violence. Suddenly the cat wasn’t dying anymore. He was alive. Focused. Electric.
The next day Bob bought another mouse.
Same thing.
BAM!
Another pounce.
Bob said this continued for months. The cat started marching around the backyard every day waiting for that mouse. Looking for the hunt. Anticipating the kill.
The cat the vet said had maybe two weeks left? He lived another eight months, because, as Bob put it:
“He had something to live for.”
I still remember sitting in Bob’s Bel Air dining room when he first told me the story. Before he even finished, I said, “You HAVE to put this in the seminar.”
Bob immediately understood exactly where it belonged.
And he added it! It became one of his regular seminar stories.
Bob would finish it by saying:
“Not everything is as it seems. Even your little Fluffy is a KILLER.”
And the story always killed.
That was Bob’s larger point about human nature, storytelling, morality, and the masks people wear.
But standing outside Loyola Marymount, staring at this furious Marine, I suddenly realized something else entirely was happening.
This wasn’t about Oliver North.
This was something deeper.
In an instant, the Marine’s whole demeanor changed. His anger collapsed. His face crumbled. Then he started crying.
I remember thinking, "Ok, what the fuck is happening here?"
This wasn’t movie crying.
This was grief.
He told me his brother had recently been killed in Iraq.
Now MY heart sank.
Immediately, everything made sense.
I told him Bob wasn’t attacking the military. Quite the opposite. Bob had enormous respect for the military. This was about a specific political scandal involving Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair — nothing more.
Then I said, “Listen… I think this is all a misunderstanding. Go outside for a little while. At lunch, I’ll have you talk to Bob.”
At the break, I explained everything to Bob.
Without hesitation, Bob softened. He said he would never insult the military.
He immediately told me he had family in the military and would never intentionally disrespect service members. He said he was specifically talking about Oliver North lying to Congress and the President during the arms-for-hostages scandal.
Then he looked at me and said, “Of course I’ll meet him.”
At lunch, the whole thing transformed.
The Marine apologized.
Bob apologized.
They hugged.
And within twenty minutes, they were talking like old friends.
The tension was gone. The anger evaporated. What could have become a disaster instead became something strangely beautiful and human.
Which should have been the end of the story.
Except on the final day of the seminar, attendees started approaching me with giant smiles on their faces.
“That confrontation with the Marine was AMAZING,” one woman said.
Another leaned in conspiratorially.
“Do you do that at every seminar?”
They thought Bob and I had staged the entire thing for dramatic effect.
Honestly, after enough seminars, I almost understood why they thought that.
Bob and I used to joke about an article we once read claiming a small percentage of the population was psychologically unstable or potentially dangerous. Before sold-out events, we’d sometimes do the math backstage.
“Three hundred attendees this weekend?” Bob would mutter.
“That means at least six people here are completely out of their minds.”
We laughed.
And after so many seminars, we knew there was truth in it.
But when attendees came up afterward praising “the Marine confrontation,” absolutely convinced we’d staged the whole thing for dramatic effect, I had to confess:
“I wish I was smart enough to think of that.”
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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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