Dr. Robert Gardner is a professor of media writing and the chair of the School of Radio and Television Arts, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto.

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‘Writing a script – even if you’ve done it successfully – is like pole vaulting where the bar has to go higher each time. No, it’s worse than that. The pole vaulter has experience to guide him. Every time out, as a writer, it’s different. To some extent we writers don’t know how we do what we do. So we run down the track with the pole in our hands saying, `How the hell does this work?’ And that’s the condition of the writer.’

I was sitting with Dan Petrie Jr., an Academy Award nominee for his screenplay of Beverly Hills Cop. The man who wrote The Big Easy (starring Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin), Shoot to Kill (Sidney Poitier), Turner and Hooch (Tom Hanks) and Toy Soldiers (Lou Gossett Jr.).

He’s the famous son of equally famous parents. It’s obvious that he reveres his mother and father. Mind you, if he was ever in the shadow of his famous dad (Dan Petrie Sr.), he certainly must have gained his respect. The shadow could have been overpowering. The titles of his father’s successes are legends: A Raisin in the Sun; Fort Apache, The Bronx; Eleanor and Franklin and Sybil. And it doesn’t end there. His mother, Dorothea Petrie, won Emmy awards for producing Caroline? and Love is Never Silent. He comes by his talent honestly.

There he sat in his Riverside Drive office in Los Angeles, a big bear of a man: warm, self-deprecating, witty.

We started in to talk about the feature film. Most popular forms, he said, follow a very definite structure. It’s the ancient three-act structure in its simplest form. He tried to remember a quote (he thought it might be by George S. Kaufman) about dramatic shape: ‘In the first act you get the main character up a tree. In the second act you throw rocks at him. In the third act you get him down.’

He also quoted Aristotle who said (in his Poetics) that a work of dramatic art had to have ‘a beginning, a middle, and an end.’

But, said Dan, the three-act structure can get you into trouble. The first act, where you set up the story and the problem (getting the character up that tree) is usually fairly short. It can be as short as 15 minutes. And the third act (getting the character down the tree) usually moves rapidly.

Often, he said, in an action adventure movie, it can be a ‘single sequence.’ That leaves the writer with a huge difficulty: a long second act (sometimes as long as an hour). Simply building complication upon complication won’t always work. That’s where most scripts founder. There’s something deeper to the structure than that.

Dan, in his work, has partially solved this difficulty by breaking the second act into two parts, with a major complication at the midpoint. He feels that ‘a great many movies, either by accident or design, seem to work this way. There’s a major complication or a shift in the middle of the second act of a movie that creates two distinct halves: one that is characterized by ‘x’ complications, and the second half which is characterized by ‘y’ complications. In a sense, this generates a four-act structure.

He used the example of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. He put it this way: ‘The first act takes place on land where we discover the essential situation of the movie, which is that there is a shark endangering vacationers. The initial part of the second act is where the heroes are hunting the shark. Then there’s a shift (the second part of the second act) where the hunters become the hunted as the Great White Shark steadily demolishes their boat. The final act is where the men retaliate and eventually triumph.’

He said – attributing the quote again to Kaufman – that the end of the second act focuses on ‘the destruction of the protagonist’s plan.’

There is a definite moment, he said, at the end of the second act when the situation is moving towards its ‘worst point.’ The examples he drew upon were fascinating.

In Jaws it’s when the men are helpless, the boat is foundering, and the radio has been demolished. The turning point is when the protagonists summon up the courage to fight back.

In et the destruction of the protagonist’s plan (to get et home) occurs when et is dead. But then the plan has a ‘second chance’ when et comes back to life.

You can recognize the ‘low point’ in any of a thousand movies: it’s when the hero’s hopes are at their lowest ebb. It seems, for that instant, that things could not get worse. And we, the audience, because of empathy and identification, are similarly downcast.

I asked for an example from his scenario for Beverly Hills Cop. Dan said that even though the film is a comedy, it still is a classically structured police story where the hero is investigating the murder of a close friend. He is pursuing this case and finally he has the key piece of evidence and he can expose the ‘bad guys.’

Suddenly, though, the situation reverses and the Eddie Murphy character finds himself facing antagonists in a warehouse. All of a sudden, things couldn’t be much worse. The hero’s girlfriend is taken away to God knows what fate, he is cruelly beaten and is about to be shot. At that low point (what I call the ‘all is lost’), Murphy unexpectedly extricates himself from that situation and goes on the attack.

We take all of this seriously because there is an air of reality to the situation. It is a comedy played against a gritty, believable background.

I could readily understand why Dan is asked to speak on structure at film schools in the States. He has the ability to give an uncannily clear analysis of remarkable films. He eschews theoretical claptrap, and focuses on the essential qualities that help a film to reach its audience. No wonder. The apprenticeship of this particular wunderkinder was long and arduous.

Dan grew up with scripts all over the house, but when it came time to go to university he studied psychology with a minor in creative writing. He ended up in the mail room of a major talent agency, and actually became – in succession – a script ‘reader,’ a secretary, a writers’ agent (a bad one, he recallsalthough, in truth, he launched a number of significant careers) and started to write scripts.

His second spec script was The Big Easy and his third was a major revamping of an existing script title, Beverly Hills Cop. The very first actor who read the Cop script was enthusiastic about the project. But Sylvester Stallone, characteristically, wanted to completely rewrite the scenario. Fortunately, Paramount liked Dan’s script better.

Then the script was offered to Eddie Murphy who was coming off two hits, Trading Places (with Dan Aykroyd) and 48 Hours with Nick Nolte. When Murphy accepted, Dan felt it ‘was the luckiest day in my life.’

He’d hit gold at the age of 29. At the same time, though, the experience was ego bruising because, as Dan says it, writers in l.a. have almost no prestige. Even with two major films to his credit, he really wasn’t welcomed on the set. ‘Some directors don’t want to be reminded that there may have been another significant creative force attached to the project.’ So, as he put it, hubris wasn’t a problem.

To outsiders it may have seemed to have happened quickly, but he’d been developing his craft for years. So when things clicked, he was ready for it. Later he had the opportunity to work with directors (he specifically mentions Roger Spottiswoode) who were sufficiently in control, and sufficiently confident that they ‘could set the writer to tasks’ and could share the creative process.

Of Spottiswoode, he says: ‘We had a tremendous relationship that you have when the writer and the director function as a team.’

It’s obvious from the way he says it that this type of cooperation and mutual respect is unusual.

His experience as a script reader, he recalled, had been invaluable: ‘It made me aware of what a good screenplay looks like, or a bad screenplay looks like; and what good writers do and what bad writers do.

‘Of the screenplays that whirl around l.a., most of them are amateurishly and poorly written and have no chance whatsoever. And I’d have to say that’s 90%. So if a screenplay is well written and has a really solid grasp of storytelling then it rises to the top. Mind you, there’s a further winnowing process because only 1% of those get noticed. But the fact that you can easily leap over 90% to put yourself in that 10% where there’s a chance is very gratifying to know.’

I asked him if he could remember the instant when he realized that his first major film was going to be a success.

‘The moment for me on Beverly Hills Cop was a preview where the film was screened for a test audience. They went wild, and that was our initial indication that we had a potential for success.’

He talked about the tension of waiting for a line that is supposed to cause laughter and sitting there to see what the audience would do. And then when they laugh, as he put it, ‘you worry about the next reaction.’

Suspense, he said, is harder to access. ‘In a way you have to feel the tension in the theater.’ And then there’s that ever present anxiety which creates a type of enforced humility.

‘The fact that you’ve done it once doesn’t make you more confident that you can do it again. It does, however, increase the pressure on you to do it better. So you’re constantly attempting something that you haven’t done before.’

So there he is with some of the biggest successes of the last decade in his back pocket, faced with topping himself. There’s another motivation, too. He wants to direct. I suspect that he may want to do what his father has done

‘When I’m directing and I’m up at 4:30 in the morning, I constantly think how easy I had it as a writer. And when I’m writing a project I complain – just as much – about being isolated and not seeing anyone.’

In the final essence, though, Dan Petrie Jr. is a man in love with his craft. A man who grew up thinking that school essays should be written like a film scenario. If his life could be compared to a film, I’d say he’s at the middle of a great second act. Can’t wait to see how it all ends. On the basis of what I’ve seen to date, I’d predict the ending with one word: ‘Brilliant.’