THE REAL McKEE.(screenwriting instructor Robert McKee)

Robert McKee, the screenwriting instructor, was having lunch the other day at the back of a dark Irish bar on Lexington Avenue. He had just told two hundred people in a Hunter College lecture hall that there were five elements without which a thriller was probably not a thriller: cheap surprise; a false ending; the protagonist shown to be a victim; a speech made in praise of the villain; and a hero-at-the-mercy-of-the-villain scene. Then, announcing a one-hour break, he had walked out into a light rain, followed by a number of students whose desire for a little extracurricular McKee outstripped their fear that he might somehow humiliate them, as he has been known to do. They waylaid him on the sidewalk, the way Nicolas Cage, playing the troubled screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, waylaid Brian Cox, playing Robert McKee, in Spike Jonze's 2002 film, "Adaptation." (Kaufman introduces himself as "the guy you yelled at this morning." McKee responds, "I need more.")

McKee, who is sixty-two, and likes to wear dark shirts with two buttons undone at the neck, suggesting a career in extortion, lit a cigarette, then walked down the street while listening to an agitated young man say that the last time he had heard McKee speak the effect had been so overwhelming that he had fallen ill. "All the stuff you don't want to face, which is to say emotional truth, the stuff of good storytelling, it was coming out!" the young man said, very fast. "It was coming out in such a way that it caused this pain in my back, because subconscious growth is such a painful process." One by one, the students dropped away, until, by the time McKee reached the bar, a few blocks away, only two were left. He asked them to join him in a booth, where he ordered a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a beer.

His guests were in their thirties. One worked in health insurance, and said that in ten years as "an aspiring screenwriter" he had not managed to finish a single script. He had taken a McKee course three times, and he had read McKee's 1997 book, "Story," many more times. "I'm starting to wonder if I have the patience for the whole process," he said. McKee looked at him. "Well, you might also wonder if you have the talent," he said. McKee, who used to be an actor, rarely speaks a sentence that does not call for a word so stressed that he bares his teeth.

The other student, whose name was Steven List, said he had already sold a script and three pitches but he was struggling with another screenplay, which was based on true events. As List described it, an American mathematician had disappeared while on vacation in Chile in the nineteen-eighties. The State Department had told his family that he had drowned while hiking, but his sister did not believe it. She flew to Chile, where she learned that her brother may have been abducted and held in a remote religious colony led by a charismatic neo-Nazi who worked for the Chilean secret police as a subcontractor in torture and assassination--an arrangement supposedly well known to Washington. List had optioned this story from the sister. McKee usually has a rule against discussing a student's work in progress, but he allowed List to continue.

"I could do it from the brother's point of view, but he ends up dead, " List said. "I've got a villain. I know there's a story."

"You don't have a story," McKee said in a smoker's growl. "You have a subject matter: this bizarre post-Nazi cult world. But who cares?"

"Well, the facts . . ."