Bordwell's book is a logical outgrowth out of the decades of film scholarship that he has done at the university, which since the 1970s has been known for analyzing the business of filmmaking in tandem with the art. Perhaps that's why Bordwell has been getting so much acclaim from people in the industry, as he articulates the framework that filmmakers operate within, perhaps unaware that there is a framework.

"What we try and do, Kristin and I and a few other scholars, is to try to make explicit these implicit rules that people have been working with all these years," Bordwell says. "What I sometimes say is that I want to know their secrets. Even the secrets that they don't know they know."