Screenwriting guru Robert McKee’s Story, about the structural principles of the craft, is owned by something like a trillion aspiring TV and movie writers. (McKee was famously portrayed by a ranting Brian Cox in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. A clip of said ranting can be seen here, with language decidedly not safe for work.)

Second Pass contributor Jason Zinoman recently attended one of McKee’s one-day seminars — this one on how to write a thriller — and has now brilliantly recounted the experience for Vanity Fair:

By the end of the day, I had learned some valuable lessons about show business, the art of persuasion, and the tricky relationship between truth and fiction. I’d also learned that Robert McKee often has no idea what he’s talking about. Some people believe that no course can teach you how to write a screenplay, that it just comes out of you, but in my opinion that’s not true. A good teacher can really help writers, and McKee surely has had some success. He’s been criticized for turning the creative process into a series of rules, but this misses the real problem with his course, namely that the rules themselves are often banal and arbitrary.

Zinoman’s piece includes some fine comedy — like McKee oddly insisting that there’s no word for “yes” in Japanese — and you should read the whole thing.