WHEN STORY WAS THE SHOW
When The Culture Disappeard
There was a time when people got on airplanes to learn how to write screenplays.
That sounds slightly absurd now, or at least quaint. Today, if you want to know what Robert McKee thinks about character, or John Truby thinks about structure, you can probably find some version of the answer without leaving your couch. You can watch a video, listen to a podcast, buy an online course, search an archive, or ask an artificial intelligence to explain the whole thing to you at two in the morning.
But there was a period—not particularly long ago—when aspiring storytellers waited for seminar schedules to be announced.
I remember the questions whenever Robert McKee's new schedule came out. Is he coming back to Chicago? Is Boston on the schedule this year? What about New York? And if he wasn't coming to your city, you might look at the schedule, figure out which city was closest, buy an airline ticket and go there.
People did this.
And it wasn't just McKee. John Truby was on the road. Michael Hauge was on the road. Syd Field taught. There were seminars and conferences and pitch events throughout the country, and an entire ecosystem had grown up around the idea that learning the craft of screenwriting was something you actively went out into the world to do.
There were magazines devoted to it. Creative Screenwriting and Script weren't obscure academic journals; they were part of the regular diet of people who wanted to write movies. There was The Writers Store in Los Angeles and The Screenwriters Store in London. You could walk into a physical place and find shelves devoted to screenwriting books, software, lectures, DVDs and things you hadn't known existed until you saw them there.
None of these institutions operated in isolation. That may be the part that is hardest to appreciate now. The magazines wrote about the teachers. The stores sold their books. The teachers toured. The conferences brought everybody together. Writers met other writers at one event and heard about another. Someone might discover a teacher in Creative Screenwriting, buy his book, attend his seminar six months later, meet another writer there, and wind up at a completely different conference the following year.
It was a culture.
And for a while, it was a remarkably social one.
People didn't simply attend a class and go home. They hung around. They talked. They went to the bar afterward. They had dinner with people they'd met that afternoon. They sat in hotel lobbies comparing notes about what they'd heard that day, talking about movies, complaining about agents they didn't have and discussing screenplays nobody had bought.
Some of those conversations probably went on far longer than they should have.
That was part of the fun.
But those nights having drinks and dinner with people also taught me this: This culture didn't exist only in Los Angeles, New York and London. There were aspiring screenwriters everywhere.
And God bless Robert McKee. Within months of taking over his seminars, I said, “Bob, let's do Dallas. Miami. Las Vegas.” Bob wasn't sure how big the markets were outside the traditional cities, but he trusted me. And people came. Within a few years, Boston became a regular stop. San Francisco became a regular stop. Las Vegas became a regular stop. People didn't always have to fly to Los Angeles or New York anymore. We could bring McKee to them.
At the same time, completely separate from McKee, I was building my own corner of this world. I brought new teachers into the market. I created and packaged events like the Screenwriters' Summit and TV Writers' Summit, putting combinations of teachers together in ways that hadn't really been done before. I was constantly looking for somebody interesting, some new subject, some different way of assembling all of it.
Eventually, I created Story Expo, which I used to describe as Disneyland for screenwriters. At its largest, there might be sixty to eighty speakers spread across three days, with multiple sessions happening simultaneously. The schedule could be ridiculous in the best possible way. John Truby might be teaching down the hall from a man nobody had heard of who turned out to be one of the most popular teachers of the weekend. A rabbi might be talking about story and religion. Someone else might be teaching writers how to make explainer videos. Then Final Draft would call and ask if I wanted the cast of Black-ish.
Sure.
They were putting the panel together. All I had to do was give them a room and put it on the schedule. I had never seen Black-ish, but I knew it was a big show. That was enough.
I had Oscar winners, Emmy winners, Golden Globe winners and Pulitzer Prize winners. I had famous television casts and controversial writers like Joe Eszterhas and Lee Aronsohn. But what amused me was that once they were there, I didn't treat the Oscar winners, Emmy winners, or famous TV casts as more important than anybody else. They went onto the schedule with everyone. John Truby. Larry Karaszewski & Scott Alexander. Peter Russell. The Rabbi. The woman teaching explainer videos. Peter Mehlman. Arnold Shapiro. The cast of Black-ish. The organizing principle wasn't fame. It was whether I believed there was a reason for somebody to occupy ninety minutes of an attendee's weekend.
My North Star: I never programmed shit. I never programmed filler.
Curating Story Expo was something I took seriously, because eventually people began trusting the schedule in a way that surprised and excited me. I heard versions of the same comment many times: “I don't know who this person is, but if they're at Story Expo, they must be good.”
That was gold.
It meant an unknown teacher could walk into a room and find forty or fifty people waiting for them simply because the topic sounded interesting and the audience trusted that we hadn't put some hack on the schedule.
One of those people was Peter Russell.
Peter, who has since sadly passed away, was not a famous screenwriting guru. He was simply a ball of energy who had a solid resume and knew his stuff. He had great topics, he loved teaching, and audiences loved him. Once I realized that, I gave him as much room as I could. Peter might teach six or seven sessions during a three-day Story Expo, not because I was doing him a favor, or owed him six sessions, but because people kept showing up for them. And Peter gave 110% each class. At the end of each day he'd come over to me and I'd ask, "How'd the day go?" He was exhausted, but so enthusiastic, not just for how the day went, but because he was going to do it again tomorrow.
After one Story Expo, Peter told me that he'd booked roughly $40,000 in private consultations from people he'd met during the weekend.
He asked if I wanted a percentage.
I told him no. That was his money. All I wanted was for him to keep doing exactly what he was doing.
It was an extraordinarily simple relationship. Peter needed a platform and an audience. I needed someone who would walk into a room and give that audience everything he had. The attendees got a teacher they might never otherwise have discovered. Peter got clients. Story Expo got better because Peter was there. There was no reason for me to extract another dollar from the arrangement.
Peter loved Story Expo, and Story Expo loved Peter.
One of my favorite examples was a woman named Traci Shoblom, who emailed me out of the blue and said she wanted to teach a session on “explainer videos.” I had no idea who Traci was. I didn’t even know what an explainer video was. I wrote back and asked her to send me a short bio and a description of what she wanted to teach.
She did, and I remember reading it and thinking, Wow. That’s actually kind of cool.
So I started thinking about where it might fit into Story Expo. I let it stew for a day or two, then finally told her, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
And the class was a hit. Forty or forty-five people showed up to learn about explainer videos.
Traci didn’t have a famous name I could splash across an ad. She didn’t have an Oscar or a studio franchise on her résumé. But she knew her subject, she was charismatic, and she had something genuinely useful to teach.
And frankly, any class called “Explainer Videos” was a winner in my book. You almost had to click on it just to find out what the hell an explainer video was.
That was part of the fun of programming Story Expo. McKee, Truby, Vogler and the other marquee names might help sell the ticket, but once you were inside, discovery was part of the experience. You could walk into a room because you recognized the speaker’s name—or because you had absolutely no idea what you were about to hear—and ninety minutes later come out excited about something you hadn’t even known existed.
I remember being pleased by Traci's number because it represented something I loved about the whole experience. Nobody needed an Academy Award to fill every room. Sometimes forty-five people simply wanted to know how to make an explainer video - because it was a career opportunity they didn't even know existed before.
This was all possible because there was a culture out there pining to be brought together. The culture arrived with the attendees. They were thirsty to learn. I just gave them a place to congregate.
At the first Story Expo in 2013, more than a thousand people came. Eight hundred, nine hundred, a thousand people at these events was not an unimaginable number. They wanted to spend entire days immersed in all things story. And when the sessions ended, many of them still weren't finished.
This is where the glamour of a venue can be surprisingly irrelevant.
The Westin LAX wasn't the Writers Guild Theatre or the Directors Guild Theatre. Nobody arrived at the Westin LAX and took a reverential photograph of the building. It was an airport hotel.
It was also perfect.
When the last sessions ended, there was no moment when everybody was suddenly expelled from the experience. There was a bar. There was a restaurant. There were couches and tables and a lobby. There were attendees from around the world. People were staying upstairs. Attendees would get drinks, someone they knew would walk past, chairs would get pulled over, and before long six or eight people who hadn't known one another that morning were sitting together.
Others would go to the restaurant for dinner.
The event kept happening without me.
I've produced plenty of events at prestigious theaters, and those venues have obvious advantages. But they can also have a strange disadvantage for an event supposedly built around community. The program ends, everyone walks out the front door, and suddenly someone has to answer the question: Where do we go now? Someone's car is in the garage. Someone's Uber has arrived. Someone lives on the other side of town. Within ten minutes the crowd has evaporated.
An airport hotel isn't sexy, but nobody has to organize the accidental drink at the hotel bar.
That matters more than I understood at the time.
Eventually, the world around all of this began to change. I could see it in attendance, but I could also see it everywhere else. The audience wasn't behaving the same way anymore, and I knew Story Expo couldn't simply continue doing what it had always done because I happened to love doing it.
So I changed it.
For the final couple of Story Expos, the enormous schedule essentially disappeared. Instead of sixty to eighty speakers, I brought in four to six of the biggest marquee teachers. Instead of shorter sessions and endless choices, they taught longer master classes. The ticket price went from roughly $249 to $499.
It was a drastic change because I thought a drastic change was necessary. There were fewer people in the market, so I needed a smaller, more premium event with different economics.
But after two years of that format change, I realized the culture was so small and fractured that it was time to call it a day.
Did I miss the giant schedule? Absolutely. I loved that huge schedule.
It was my palette.
I loved curating it. I loved trying to figure out how all those pieces fit together. I was excited when I added teachers I thought were great.
Most of all, I loved releasing it and imagining people scrolling through the thing thinking, How the hell am I supposed to choose?
Believe me, if I thought I could do that version of Story Expo successfully again tomorrow, I would do it in a heartbeat.
But I don't believe it's possible.
The reason isn't simply that conferences aren't as popular as they used to be. It's that the culture around them has largely disappeared.
Creative Screenwriting is gone. Script is gone. The Writers Store in LA is gone. The Screenwriters Store in London is gone. The Biz Books store in downtown Vancouver is gone. The regular touring circuit of the great screenwriting teachers is gone. Nobody is sitting around waiting to find out whether McKee is coming to Chicago this year, then considering flying to Boston because Chicago isn't on the schedule.
More importantly, the people who once did those things have changed.
Someone who was thirty years old at Story Expo twelve or thirteen years ago is in their forties now. They may have children. They may have a mortgage. They almost certainly have more responsibilities. Many of them have careers that have nothing to do with the screenplay they were working on when I met them.
And, yes, many of them probably gave up on the dream.
There's nothing cruel about saying that. Dreams change. Sometimes dreams die. Life intervenes. Bills have to be paid. People discover other things they want.
Life goes on.
The problem, from the perspective of someone trying to gather hundreds of screenwriters in a hotel, is that an equally large new generation didn't arrive to replace them with the same habits.
A twenty-eight-year-old aspiring screenwriter today has access to something the twenty-eight-year-old screenwriter of fifteen years ago couldn't have imagined. There is an almost limitless amount of instruction available instantly and often for free. YouTube, podcasts, online courses, digital communities and now artificial intelligence have removed much of the scarcity that once made an in-person seminar feel necessary.
The social behavior changed as well. People found communities online. Then the pandemic accelerated habits that were already developing. The idea that you might fly across the country, spend three days in a hotel ballroom watching John Truby with strangers, and then sit in a bar with those strangers until midnight talking about screenplay structure no longer feels like an obvious part of becoming a writer.
The information still exists. The teachers still exist. The writers still exist.
The culture that brought us into those rooms together is what largely disappeared.
I still talk regularly with Robert McKee, John Truby, Dov Simens, Dara Marks, Chris Vogler...all of the "gurus" that defined a golden era of educating about story. Their passion for story and educating writers is as intense as it was ten, twenty, thirty years ago. That passion never dies. It just finds new avenues to express it.
I've considered doing one final event. A gathering of the great screenwriting teachers who defined that era: Robert McKee, John Truby, Christopher Vogler, Michael Hauge, Dara Marks, Mark Travis, Dov Simens and others. A celebration of the people who taught an entire generation how to think about story, including tributes to some of the people we've lost like Syd Field, Linda Seger and Blake Snyder.
I've even discussed the possibility with a sponsor who offered to provide $40,000 to make the event happen.
Forty thousand dollars changes the financial calculation considerably. It could cover much of the expense and remove a great deal of the risk. From a producer's standpoint, it's the sort of offer that should make the decision easy.
It doesn't.
Because a sponsor can underwrite the event. A sponsor cannot underwrite the audience.
I can look at a lineup containing McKee, Truby, Vogler and Hauge and think, Are you fucking kidding me? This should pack the house.
Fifteen years ago, I believe it would have.
Today, I don't know.
And I don't particularly want to gather those people for an event intended to celebrate an extraordinary period in screenwriting education and look out at 150 people scattered through a room. There is absolutely nothing wrong with an audience of 150. I've produced amazing events for audiences that size.
But that isn't the event I see in my head.
I see 400 people. I hear the room before it begins. It rumbles. It bustles. It crackles. I see old friends finding one another. I see people who took McKee twenty years ago remembering me from bringing Bob to Boston 20 years ago. I feel the energy that comes from a genuinely full house knowing that it may be experiencing something together for the last time.
Forty thousand dollars can rent the room.
It can't create that feeling.
And, even more importantly, I don't know if it can recreate the community, even for two more days.
And that, more than anything, has forced me to recognize the difference between recreating an event and recreating the world that once made the event possible.
Someone could hand me $100,000 tomorrow and tell me to recreate the old Story Expo exactly as I wanted it. I could find the speakers. I could rent the Westin LAX. I could build the schedule. I could put Peter Russell's spiritual successor in six rooms. I could find another unknown woman with a terrific class about something nobody knew they needed to learn. Maybe Final Draft would call with the cast of whatever television show everybody is watching now.
I could rebuild the machinery. And you know what? It would be an amazing program.
What I couldn't do is recreate the culture that once supplied the people, that created the community.
For a period of time, thousands of aspiring writers believed that becoming better at screenwriting meant going somewhere. They went to bookstores. They went to seminars. They went to conferences. They got on airplanes. They sat next to strangers. They argued about movies. They bought each other drinks. They formed friendships and partnerships and probably some terrible writing groups. They spent money they didn't necessarily have because they believed that somewhere in one of those rooms they might hear the thing that unlocked their screenplay.
I happened to be standing in the middle of that world for a long time, and eventually I built one of the places where everybody gathered.
At the time, it didn't feel historical.
Hauge was teaching down the hall. Vogler was in another ballroom. Truby was commanding an SRO room. Forty-five people were learning about Story in Spirituality from a Catholic Priest. Somebody was looking for the bar. Final Draft had brought the cast of a television show. A thousand people were wandering around wearing badges and trying to decide what to see next.
It was simply the world we were in.
And that world crackled with excitement as soon as you stepped into it.
Only after a culture disappears do you realize that what seemed permanent was actually just a moment.
And for one strange, wonderful moment, thousands of people would get on airplanes, check into airport hotels, and spend entire weekends together for no reason more complicated than this:
Story was the show.
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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.
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(C) Derek Christopher - All Rights Reserved. Please contact for permission to reprint.
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