Classic Movie Structure: ‘Legally Blonde’

The Journey of Elle Woods, through the lens of Blake Snyder’s ‘Save the Cat’

Photo by JESHOOTS.com from Pexels

‘Save the Cat’, by Blake Snyder breaks down movie structure in a very basic, yet effective way. I wanted to break down ‘Legally Blonde’ because it has a structure that is near perfection.

There are other amazing structures you can use, and I’ve had friends (who are award-winning/big name screenwriters) swear by the ‘Mini-Movie Method’ by Chris Soth and ‘The Nutshell Technique’ by Jill Chamberlain.

However, they’re all kind of the same thing: they take you along the dramatic tension, on a journey through a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Here’s a general summary of the script’s TENT-POLE MOMENTS. You can go through the script or the movie (usually about 1 minute per page), and see how beautifully these moments fit into the structure, and how seamlessly they work together to create a compelling narrative story.

LUCY DURACK as Elle Woods, the Musical. Eva Rinaldi, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Opening image (p.1)

Something that POPS that sets the tone and shows us how things are now (so we can compare how they’ll…