Just as financiers make pilgrimages to Omaha to hear Warren Buffett and aspiring Jedi knights travel to the ends of the galaxy to hang upside down in front of Yoda, screenwriters, with dreams of summer blockbusters dancing in their heads, periodically make the voyage to the seminars of Robert McKee. He has trained scores of Oscar and Emmy winners; his how-to best-seller, Story, is an essential part of most Hollywood bookshelves; and he’s perhaps most famous for being portrayed by Brian Cox in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. So when he barks out, “You can’t work in this business without reading my book,” his audience has good reason to believe him.

This year I am among them. In the process of working on a book about the history of the modern horror film, adapted from a story I wrote for Vanity Fair last year, I’ve talked to most of the great horror directors of the 60s and 70s. That led to an interest in writing my own scary movie. So, a few weeks ago, I file into a room on the 18th floor of a hotel across the street from Madison Square Garden at around eight a.m. along with about 100 lumpy, underdressed fellow writers to participate in McKee’s one-day seminar on how to write a thriller.

I entered the course genuinely hoping to learn about screenwriting, but also, as a critic—and a specialist of horror movies—with a professional interest in McKee’s theories about genre and narrative.

By the end of the day, I had learned some valuable lessons about show business, the art of persuasion, and the tricky relationship between truth and fiction. I’d also learned that Robert McKee often has no idea what he’s talking about. Some people believe that no course can teach you how to write a screenplay, that it just comes out of you, but in my opinion that’s not true. A good teacher can really help writers, and McKee surely has had some success. He’s been criticized for turning the creative process into a series of rules, but this misses the real problem with his course, namely that the rules themselves are often banal and arbitrary. The emperor here is not naked, but he is showing some skin through his loosely tied robe, and when the subject turns to horror, the silky-smooth garment collapses around his ankles.

McKee introduces himself like a tough guy out of a David Mamet play. No questions designed to impress me, please, and do not engage me in conversation. By contrast, his character in Adaptation, who shared his name and theatrical bluster, took Charlie Kaufman (as played by Nicolas Cage) for a drink. But this is the real world, folks. Deal with it. Then he lays down the law. The first cell phone to go off will cost its owner $10. If it rings again, you are gone. “I learned how to run a seminar from Joseph Stalin,” he says with a deadpan glare.

McKee teaches that a protagonist must be a willful character, and on that count, McKee certainly qualifies. But our hero quickly runs into trouble when he asks the crowd who has traveled the farthest to see him. “Japan!” shouts someone from the front row. McKee looks surprised, but not too surprised. As with seemingly everything in his opening act, this exchange leads to more stern words, in this case about the impossibility of doing business with the Japanese. He rants that his book, Story, has been translated into 20 languages, but not Japanese. He asks, “Did you know that there is no word in Japanese for ‘yes’?”