Famous Screenwriting Teacher Robert McKee Responds to Big Hollywood: 'These Kinds of People Always Make Me Nervous'

***UPDATE: closing paragraph added below.

Today, over at the hard-left film site Movieline (a site that eagerly participated in the grossly dishonest character assassination and attempted blacklisting of conservative musician Jonathan Kahn), famed screenwriting teacher Robert McKee responds to Big Hollywood’s Ann McElhinney. For those of you who might have missed her terrific piece, I personally read it as a warning to anyone not a wild-eyed, narcissistic, America-bashing, religious bigot, that for the price (you pay) of $745, Mr. McKee believes he’s earned the right to prove he is one throughout a very expensive screenwriting course.

Anyway, brought to you by one of left-wing Hollywood’s chief Palace Guards and water carriers, S.T. VanAirsdale, here’s the unsurprising response from McKee, someone with a seemingly bottomless well of ego (we’re groupies?) and insecurities (really, we’re groupies?) who insults his students with unadvertised (at least until now) political sucker punches and then literally tells them to “fuck off” if they don’t like it:

Movieline:

Earlier this week, a contributor to the right-wing film and culture Web site Big Hollywood offered up the delightfully titled tale, “For $745 You Too Can Be Insulted By Famed Hollywood Screenwriting Teacher Robert McKee.” Author Ann McElhinney proceeded to recount her time in McKee’s celebrated (and, indeed, expensive) story seminar last October, time reportedly spent chafing under the instructor’s prodigious use of profanity, social criticism, “Bush bashing” and other liberal bloviation. A torrent of conservative bile followed in the site’s comments. Of course, anyone who’s seen Adaptation, featuring Brian Cox as the legendary — and legendarily irascible — writing mentor, could have warned McElhinney of at least some pedagogical turbulence ahead. So Movieline asked McKee on Wednesday: What, if anything, went wrong here?

In a nutshell: Nothing.

“These kinds of people always make me nervous, because they’re right on the edge of being a groupie,” McKee said. “Their fascination with me, my personality, my life, my feelings, my ambitions and whatnot really is misplaced. What they really should be there for is to take notes on their own writing. And instead they do some sort of biographical study of me, and I’m wondering, ‘Why were they there?’ If I’m the most fascinating thing they encountered, and not the ideas in the lecture, then maybe their heart’s not in the right place to begin with.”

McElhinney did find plenty to note in McKee’s lecture, cataloging a succession of claims like “1/3 of all women will suffer sexual abuse in their lives” (“Yeah, that’s research,” McKee told me. “That’s a fact.”), “Everybody hates everybody in the US” (“Yeah. They do”), and “Columbus killed 5 million Indians, it was genocide, chopped up Indians to feed to their dogs, we killed them because we were Christians and they were heathen.” (“I didn’t pull that out of the air,” he elaborated. “When I say it’s a fact, it’s something that I’ve read in my research of other projects. I came across the Haitian genocide by Columbus and his crew.”) McKee cited, then laughed off, his attributed “Conservatives have famously thin skins” claim from memory.