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.
Other McElhinney observations hewed closer to basic psychoanalysis. "He is very angry and it's hard to understand why," she wrote. "He is making a fortune, is, according to himself, blissfully and happily married and when he actually breaks off from his juvenile Bush bashing, he is very good at what he does. One gets the feeling that for all the money and fame as a teacher this is not what he'd like to be famous for. Instead, he'd like to be a talented screenwriter and he is not."
As you might imagine, McKee has heard that one before.
"They often take [my tone] as angry," he said. "But it's more frustrated than angry. They presume my tone, as strong as it is, says that I'm a disappointed screenwriter, and that what I really want is success as a screenwriter, and instead I have this -- though richly rewarded -- success as a teacher, and that I live in some kind of profound disappointment, and that's because of my anger. And what they're doing, of course, is they're projecting themselves on me. They want to be screenwriters. I do not wish to be a screenwriter. I was a screenwriter. I had some success, indeed, on television 20, 30 years ago, and I gave it up willingly and happily to do what I really love, which is to lecture and write about writing. Because in that, I'm the best. I know where my talents lie, and I'm a fine teacher and writer of writing. I'm happy and thrilled to be that, rather than a struggling screenwriter. With or without success, I love what I do. But they presume that I don't, and that what I really want to do is something else."
OK -- then what is upsetting McKee? "The source of my anger," he replied, "if I'm angry, is the incredibly disappointing films and plays and novels that I read month after month, year after year, when I would hope the quality would go back to what it once was. I just want to see more good writing in the world." A little more optimistically, McKee later added that TV is the superior narrative medium of our day, claiming "many, many dozens" of his alums had fled screenwriting for work on series like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, In Treatment and Damages.
McElhinney acknowledged talking to seminar veterans who said McKee's attitude had in fact improved in recent years. McKee agreed, attributing this in part to his marriage in 2007 and also the shock of seeing himself depicted in all his bellicose glory in Adaptation.
"I was sitting at a screening of Adaptation with my son," McKee explained. "We came out, and I was saying, 'Geez,' Because my empathy was with Nicolas Cage, you know? And when the McKee character went down his throat, it hit me in the chest, you know? So I turned to my son and I said, 'Is that what it's really like to be on the receiving end of me?' And my son said, 'Yes.' So I thought, Maybe I should tone it down."
But one thing he refuses to tone down is his profanity. McElhinney wrote she was taken aback by McKee's early pronouncement that "he likes to curse and if you didn't like it, you could 'f*ck off.'" McKee was unsympathetic.
"They just can't cope with that," he said. "I [use profanity] for a lot of reasons; one is that it's a lot of fun. And two, it sort of clears the air so that the students understand that this is not a class at a university, and I'm not going to talk to them professor-to-student. I'm going to talk to them professional-to-professional as writers. The tone is going to be very frank, sort of as if we were having a beer together.
"What this person doesn't mention is how funny the class is," McKee continued. "People laugh continuously for four days; [the author] said [she] was there for three, but the story seminar -- the one I presume [she's] talking about -- is four days. And at the end, a couple of hundred or more people will get to their feet and give me a standing ovation. Everywhere in the world! People enjoy themselves. They laugh, they learn a lot, and at the end of it, they're very appreciative."
Ultimately, McKee suggested, the fundamental question for anyone concerned whether or not his seminar is right for them shouldn't come down to politics, ideology and money. It's about facing the challenge and the inspiration "to think in terms of content."
"You've got to take your mind beyond what you read and see in the papers and on TV to connect with what is really going on underneath," McKee said. "And so part of what I do is to demonstrate, indeed, how the world can be looked at as a writer: to see through the surface of things. [...] She said early in her essay that she was glad I set rules so that people will behave like civilized individuals in this social setting. The rest of it that followed apparently shocked this person.
"And... good! Maybe that'll get her to think and reexamine her positions in life. Because I don't care where somebody comes down politically or in any other way, so long as it isn't just a recitation of the same old shit."
[Top photo of Robert McKee: AFP/Getty Images]