Daily warm-up (written on board): Based on this five-minute clip, what type of movie do you think this will be? (Be as specific as you can.) What do you predict will happen in this movie? How do you think it will end?

Show the scene from What's Up Doc? in which Judy Maxwell and Howard Banister meet in the hotel drugstore until the point where Judy meets Eunice.

The purpose of this warm-up is to activate students' "intuitive" generic expectations and their prior knowledge about screwball comedy conventions. Discuss student responses to the warm-up. Most of them will be able to predict exactly what kind of a movie it is just from that five minutes and can even outline the basic plot without having seen the rest of the film. Discuss with the students how they knew what the plot would be (generic expectations). Talk about how we come to develop these expectations. You could talk about how genres create a standardized product (like Henry Ford's assembly model) in reference to the previous day's instruction. You could also possibly branch off into a discussion about why American society is so pre-occupied with seeing the same types of stories again and again, what needs these genres fulfill.

Give the "Defining Genre" handout to the students. Read through the definition of genre together and explain what artistic style, narrative form, and thematic content means. Have students generate and write down examples of each as you read them. For example, take the Western. In this genre, the artistic style is that it is always set in the desert landscape of the old West, generally in the thirty year time period following the Civil War. The narrative form is that a heroic cowboy (who is typically an outsider or a loner of some sort) must battle against an evil individual or group of men who are usurping power or control of the community in some way. The conflict is always resolved through violence, typically a shootout or showdown with guns in the end. The thematic content is, on the most basic level, good vs. evil. The Western deals with wilderness (freedom, lawlessness) vs. civilization. It also explores masculine identity and male strength. (You can add your own insights here.)

Divide the class into groups. Read through the directions on the "Defining Genres in Music" portion of the handout. You will be playing two songs from two different genres and having students write down the answers to the questions on the handout. For the first song, answer the questions as a whole class. For the first, pick a genre that you know a little bit about. Since I enjoy classical music, I play Chopin's "Minute Waltz." As we listen to it, I map out the melodic form on the board (it's ABA) when the melody shifts. I look for student feedback and ideas while answering the questions, but here's my thoughts on it: This piece uses the piano–but classical music typically uses the piano, violins, and the full symphony orchestra. It characteristically sounds very proper, dignified, intellectual. Thematically, classical music celebrates the nobler, grander side of human existence. It is about hope, perfection, intellectualism, elitism. (Your own insights are welcome here.)

For the second song, choose a popular rock song of some sort. Have students answer the questions for this song in their groups and share their responses in class. When discussing the theme of the song, I often bring up how rock songs deal with things that mostly teenagers are concerned with: falling in love, teen angst, etc. I sometimes talk about how genres are often tailored for a specific audience, just like rock music is.

Now, assign each group one of the following film genres: horror, fantasy, musical, war, science-fiction, action. (You could also do a few subgenres such as kung fu, James Bond movies, whatever is the flavor of the moment.) Have them answer the questions about their genre on their handout and share their answers with the class.

For the remainder of the class period, students will learn about a specific genre: the screwball comedy of the thirties and forties. Hand out the questions for the American Cinema: Romantic Comedies. Students write down the answers to the questions as they watch this documentary. (I usually only show the first half hour of the documentary; I run it from the beginning until it jumps into the era of the fifties.)

None.

As I write this lesson, I'm thinking it might not be such a bad idea to expand this lesson into three days, spending one day on each of the three aspect of genre: artistic style (by focusing a bit on production design and lighting), narrative structure, and thematic content. All three of these aspects are taught implicitly in the rest of this unit, but it might not be a bad idea to focus on them a bit more. At the very least, a possible thing to do would be, instead of spending the last half hour of the class watching the documentary about screwball comedies, push that off until the next day's lesson and spend some time talking about production design. (Lighting will be covered a bit more in the film noir section of unit.)