Unlocking the Genre Codex

Posted on September 14, 2011 in General Screenwriting, Story | No Comments

What constitute a genre? Using a database of 897 scripts, genres are broken down using good old statistics and graphs, which is really the only way to discuss films.

…Thanks to The Internet Movie Script Database, I can start to answer a piece of that question: what words constitute the text of each genre. The database contains 897 scripts over 13 categories, not enough for a comprehensive understanding of film scripts, but more than enough to look at some basic insights. So the first thing I wanted to see was a simple count of word frequencies by genre: how many times the word “love” appeared in Romance compared to how many times the word “money” appeared in Crime. The results are below:

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