How Die Hard and Night at the Museum Are the 'Exact Same Movie'

Screenwriters Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant have mastered the art of screenwriting enough to generate twelve figures at the box office (through movies like Night at the Museum, Herbie Fully Loaded and The Pacifier) and in their new book Writing Movies For Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at The Box Office and You Can, Too!, the duo gives aspiring Hollywood scribes tips so that they can do the very same. And it all stems from the simple lesson the duo revealed in a recent NPR interview, during which Garant explained that every movie "is exactly the same" using Die Hard, Night at the Museum, Casablanca and The Matrix as examples.

"What people need to embrace and accept if you're going to be a writer in Hollywood is that every single movie has the exact same structure. Exactly. Whether it's Die Hard or Night at the Museum -- Die Hard, the first ten pages, you're introducing all of the facts. You're meeting the guy, you're getting him to the building, he's getting stuck in the building, he's stuck in the building by terrorists. Night at the Museum, you meet a guy, he's having trouble in his marriage and you get him stuck in a museum by the fact that he can't leave his kid and let his kid down. It's a dinosaur instead of a terrorist but the structure is exactly the same. At the end [Ben Stiller's character] Larry Daley punches Dick Van Dyke off of a stage coach instead of John McClane punching Hans Gruber off the building. They're not similar. They're exactly the same. And if you pick Casablanca or The Matrix and turn to page ten, that's when he gets the letters of transit from Peter Lorre or that's when Trinity tells him, 'There's a matrix and you're inside it. You need to come with us or you're going to die."

There you go. Now go forth and make a billion dollars at the box office! Writing Movies is out now.

· You Too Can Be A Successful Screenwriter [NPR]