
My first day of Screenwriting 101 at Tisch, my teacher stood before us, a motley collection of wannabes, wearing mostly black. He gave us his non-negotiable screenwriting rules:
- Courier 12 point.
- Always have an active protagonist.
- No Deus Ex Machina. A Deus Ex Machina literally means “God from the Machine” or rather “a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new character, ability, or object.” (Thanks Wikipedia!)
- There are only two types of stories and they’ve already been written: “I’m going on a journey” and some version of “boy meets girl.” Every story falls into one of those two categories, metaphorically they can fall into both; it’s the details that will set your story apart.
- Know your three-act structure, so you can most succinctly and satisfyingly tell a story.
And for whatever reason, those five tips resonated with me. To my credit, I’ve never pulled a Deus Ex Machina because I knew it was a cheap punch, lazy writing. When you use one, you’re, in essence, screwing your audience out of seeing the protagonist have to struggle; which is really the best part. You throw a life raft to help your character, and then he doesn’t have to try and swim. He’s succeeded simply because you, an unseen “hand of god,” helped him. It’s one of those cop outs that always makes me angry.
Rising from the footlights of the ancient Greek stage, Dues Ex Machnia was never acceptable or enjoyed even during its inception. It was so maligned, in fact, as a storytelling device, even on opening night in ancient Greece, literary critics complained about its use, saying that it ruined the story for them.
For example: your protagonist is about to drown, he’s in a small box that’s quickly filling with water. He is going to die. That is, until a tsunami comes from out of nowhere, breaking open the container and freeing our hero into a sun-shiny tomorrow. He didn’t have to try to get out of the box. The box opened on its own, due to circumstances outside of his control. To borrow a phrase from the Bluth family, “That’s a freebie.”
I mostly never think about Dues Ex Machina as a device because I refuse to acknowledge it as a screenwriting tool. That was until yesterday when I re-watched the 1981 “Clash of the Titans.” For some reason, I saw this beloved movie in a new light.

The perfectly cheesy Perseus, played by Harry Hamlin, is LITERALLY moved around throughout the story by ACTUAL GODS. In this instance, Deus Ex Machina wasn’t a lazy go-to, it was an integral and literal story point. So, it got me thinking, in a world where there are few absolutes, is a Deus Ex Machina device always a bad thing?
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