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Updated Aug 30, 2010

 


Screenwriting Help E-Mail (Aug 30, 2010)

Updated Monday, one selected e-mail will be posted and answered here each week. With many years of experience in the film and television business, I look forward to providing answers to your questions (often with a humorous eye) about screenwriting or the entertainment industry in general.  Please send your e-mailed questions to: Script Advisor.  You may also wish to visit our Screenwriting Help E-Mails - The Archives.

This week's question: 

I find writing treatments really boring.  How do you get through them?

Jude


This week's answer: 

How to Treat a Treatment

Hey, Jude, I think my best advice to you is to take a sad song and make it better.  (Sorry, I couldn't help myself.)

And now to the business at hand.  Treatments, like them or not, are here to stay in the film industry (at least for the time being until we screenwriters can teleport our images reading our treatments to producers' halo decks.)  They're the industry's way of not having to read scripts -- which most industry people don't like to do.  (I know:  go figure.)  When the industry shifted to seeking shorter screenplays (from 120 pages to 110 and, sometimes, even 100 now), it wasn't just about economy of word, conciseness, taut plots, shorter scenes, supporting the general trend of viewers having shorter and shorter attention spans, etc., it was also about the fact that the top people making decisions were getting younger and younger and wanted to read less and less.  

In fact, usually a producer will ask for a synopsis instead of a more detailed treatment.  When I was working at Hearst, they stopped wanting to see three-page synopses and started asking for one page.  One page.  Eventually, treatments, synopses, outlines will all disappear and all that will be left is the infamous logline.  But, then, the logline will get longer and longer until they become so heavy with commas and semicolons that producers will have to ask for outlines, then synopses, then, eventually, treatments again.  And, then when the horror is too great and the producers can't take it any more, they'll have to return to actually...

READING SCRIPTS

Only God Can Help Them Now

(that's a pretty good tagline, I'd say.)

So, how do you slog your way through a multi-paged treatment? Detachment. I'll say it (write it) again:

Detachment

Assuming that you're most likely writing a treatment of a script you wrote, and, most likely, the script has changed to some extent in regards to its original outline, you're most likely (when you write "most likely" three times in a sentence, I think you get some sort of prize) not all that excited about writing down the dry skeleton of what you've already put down in your creative, dramatic, compelling screenplay.

Let's face it:  that's a drag.  You start there:  you don't pretend that you really want to do it.  In fact, admit to yourself and your dog and maybe a stranger on the street that writing a treatment of your screenplay is the last thing you want to do!

Okay, now that you've got that off your chest... detach.  Take at least a week off from looking at the thing (your screenplay, that is.  See how detached you can get?) and then write out a treatment of the story of that screenplay as though you didn't write it.  That's right; I said it.  Forget that you wrote the script.

In fact, as you're writing the treatment of this whatever screenplay, you can let out all your envy and jealousy and hatred of other screenwriters and dump all of that on the writer of the screenplay you're doing the treatment for.  Curse that writer; give him both barrels.  Since it's you, the screenwriter, you're putting down, no karma is produced (and maybe not even the script, too); but nobody gets hurt.  Isn't detachment wonderful?  And, Jude, then you can start...

... to make it better (naaaah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-naaaah....)

DcH 

 

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