ABSTRACT
The award-winning screenwriter, novelist, and film professor William Rabkin gives the following definition: plot is what happens; story is what happens and what it means. A cautionary tale: in the early 1980s, the director Anne Bogart staged a student production of the Rogers and Hammerstein (R&H) musical South Pacific at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Actors playing the asylum’s doctors and nurses were nearly always onstage in white coats, monitoring the proceedings, taking notes on clipboards, and occasionally escorting an overwrought sailor or nurse away. The coin of the realm in Hollywood is the logline : a statement that captures the genre, main characters, and essential dramatic elements of the story in one or two sentences. A theme , in its most elemental form and certainly as taught in most high-school English classes, is often boiled down to a single word or two.
