A treatment is a semi-dramatized, present-tense, preliminary structuring of a screenplay; an elaboration of the presentation.
What issue is most important in the treatment? The answer, without question, is unity; the solid development of a single story with a strong central spine. Though side issues and subplots may be introduced, ever and always they remain subordinated to the basic scheme.
This is why clear thinking on premise and starting lineup is so vital. If you’ve done your work on them well, they provide you with a firm foundation on which to build your treatment. In consequence, unless you deviate too wildly, your treatment, too, is likely to prove sound.
The treatment has three functions: to sharpen the proposed script’s focus, to flesh out the story, and to emotionalize the handling.
Fleshing out and sharpening focus go hand in hand. The idea is to block in the story in sufficient detail that its flaws and weaknesses may be uncovered and remedied.
Not that cures are always to be found, you understand. The Hollywood hills are full of stories whose ailments proved so incapacitating that they never got beyond the treatment stage.
The emotionalization angle is a somewhat different matter. Here, the issue is the need for the treatment to create and carry forward an air of excitement such as, hopefully, viewers will experience when they see the finished film. And this, it seems to me, is an aspect oft ignored yet desperately important.
How so? Because, through most of its phases, a script is in essence a blueprint, a set of instructions for cast and crew. Its language and approach are therefore factual. The surge and flow of emotion which are the very heart of the finished film are of necessity left out, save insofar as typed description of action and dialogue reveals them.
The treatment, in contrast, offers an opportunity to write in all such … to capture mood, to experiment with emotional effects, to play with feelings.
Further, it’s essential that mood, emotion, feeling, be communicated—to two people, in particular.
The first of these people is the producer. It’s urgent that he become conscious of the spirit of the property—not just the facts—if he’s to pass intelligent judgment on it.
Even more vital, the writer must acquire that awareness also.
This is not as ridiculous as it sounds. Though the writer may start with a feeling for his material, that doesn’t necessarily mean he knows what said feeling is. Only as he works through the script, both in framing and in writing the treatment, does he discover how best to incorporate and handle emotional content.
FRAMING THE TREATMENT
How do you frame up a treatment?
The answer, of course, is: Any way that works. But for learning’s sake, let’s take a logical, five-step approach:
1. You block in the background of the action.
2. You establish story elements.
3. You focus your opening.
4. You plan your peaks.
5. You resolve your issues.
First step coming up!
1. You block in the background of the action.
Every story, every film, is rooted in the past, if only because the people involved in any event have pasts.
Thus, a knife flashes; a man dies. But in a very real sense, that is the end of the event, not the beginning. Knowledge of why one particular individual wielded the blade on a particular other is vital to any real understanding of the event.
A woman abandons her husband and her children. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Data on the states of affairs and states of mind which led up to it are essential to true insight.
A poverty-stricken black couple take in a crippled white child in the face of neighbors’ resentment. Only awareness of what has gone before can bring any degree of comprehension.
It’s to your advantage as a writer to recognize this fact. Then, whatever your story, sketch in the background of the action. Lay bare its roots. Track down the events that first brought your characters to gether. In your own mind, at least, clarify the basis for their relationships … the reasons they became involved with your topic/premise.
True, most of this will never reach the screen. But without it, you may never have a script to begin with.
Money Truck 456 offers ever so many examples. The first to come to mind is: How did that $60,000 in hot bills get into Florence Tate’s safety deposit box in the first place?
Well, it’s a cinch Florence herself didn’t put it there, soul of rectitude that she is.
Suppose, however, that Florence shared the box with a trashy nephew, now dead. Blind to his faults, she held her box jointly with him … had him run financial errands for her after she became an invalid.
Nephew’s just the type who might have been involved in a bank heist. Nor would he have hesitated to switch the loot for Florence’s savings.
Just to complicate things, though, let’s pretend Nephew isn’t guilty. Rather, our villain is old Quintus James, the minor bank official. Maybe Nephew left his box key with Quintus for safekeeping. Later, when Nephew’s killed, that gives Quintus access to the box—and a chance to switch Florence Tate’s money for that from the robbery.
You can take it from there. Had not Ceil Robinson discovered the switch, she would never have thought of trying to involve Earl Parrish in a robbery. Had not Earl been Miss Tate’s pupil back when he was a boy in West Virginia, he wouldn’t have considered going along with Ceil’s lunatic idea.
All this constitutes background of the action: the roots from which the present story springs.
Needless to say, this kind of backtracking can go on endlessly. Also, it can be run into the ground. But without at least a little of it, plot pits will open in your script before you like crevasses in a glacier.
It’s a chance you can’t afford to take. Not when you almost always can solve your problems so easily with just a little cogitation.
Oh, yes. There’s a point that fits in nicely here which you should by all means remember: Frequently, when you start developing the background of a story’s action, you’ll discover there’s simply no substitute for coincidence and happenstance. Life just works out that way sometimes, that’s all.
Which is perfectly all right, so long as you bear in mind that audiences will forgive you for breaks that get your hero into trouble; never for those that get him out. It’s like the old business of always including bad luck in a picture’s budget, but never good.
2. You establish story elements.
To establish, cinematically, is to make some element or aspect of the film in some way recognizable and identifiable in the audience’s eyes. Thus, you have an establishing or reestablishing shot, which relates people or objects to a background or to each other or both.
In the story treatment, the issues are somewhat different. Here, the question is, where and how do you bring in various story elements— characters, situations, settings, and so on.
a. Characters.
We’ve already belabored this subject in the last chapter. We’ll say nothing more about it at this point save than to reiterate that you establish not only the characters themselves—their physical beings—but also their characteristics, their relationships and reactions to each other, and the impressions you want them to make on viewers.
b. Situations.
Situations are the states of affairs in which your characters find themselves in relationship to your topic premise. Sometimes these states of affairs constitute predicaments—situations which arouse unpleasant emotions in certain characters. On other occasions, they don’t. But whatever the situation at a given time or place, it’s essential that you establish it—that is, that you let readers know about it—sharply and clearly in your story treatment, so that it will both carry full impact and avoid confusion.
c. Settings.
Obviously enough, every story is acted out against one or more settings. What writers sometimes overlook, however, is that settings have personalities just as much as do characters.
That personality should be pinned down on paper, in your treatment, in appropriate description. Keep it brief, of course; but at the same time try to capture the essence of the milieu, whether it be bar or brownstone, barn or bungalow.
d. Moods.
Moods vary from film to film—not to mention from segment to segment within a given picture. A story treatment that doesn’t zero in on this vital element isn’t fulfilling its function.
Nor are mere labels enough. It’s one thing to say “It’s a sad day for Susy;” another to flesh such out with “Everywhere, it seems, she meets with scowls. Wind whips rain down in gusting sheets. Even the cars that pass seem bent on splashing her.”
Does this mean all such will be used when it’s time to shoot the film? It’s unlikely. But in the meanwhile, right now, a picture has been drawn, a feeling created, to help bring your story alive in the minds of those who read your treatment. And that can make the difference between a go-ahead and a cutoff.
Getting a film off to a good start involves two things: a hook, and a commitment. Both are ever so important.
a. The hook.
A story’s one thing; the way it’s presented in a script or to an audience quite possibly another.
Why? Because you start any film with an attempt to capture viewer interest. You do this by fading in on some incident or action which—you hope—will arouse sufficient curiosity or other feeling in the audience to lure them into involvement with your story as it develops.
This hook—in TV, it’s called a teaser—may feature anything from a bomb burst to raindrops running down a windowpane; a car crash to a baby’s gurgle. Quite often, it will run before or during the picture’s titles. All that really matters is that whatever happens must appear to hold potentially disastrous or otherwise intriguing consequences for someone, on some level or other, so that the audience, anticipating dramatic developments to come, will sit enthralled.
This being the case, it’s worth your while to devote a fair number of hours, a good deal of floor-pacing, to devising the most captivating hook you can.
One warning: Don’t overkill.
That is, don’t build a hook so strong, so hard-hitting, so attention-compelling and emotion-evoking that the rest of your story can’t live up to it and so comes as anticlimax. And yes, this can and does happen upon occasion, and you can’t afford it. So … hook your viewers—but do it with at least a little sense of proportion!
Chance are your best results will come if, while hooking, you also work on
b. The commitment.
As pointed out earlier, the central character in any story should have a story goal, a purpose he seeks to accomplish within the framework of the topic/premise. Indeed, on a practical level, story very well may be defined as the record of a quest: a striving and its outcome.
Your story begins—really begins, that is—when Character commits himself to attaining his goal, for it is only then that you establish the tale’s unifying “story question”: Will Character succeed in his efforts to accomplish his purpose, or won’t he? Will boy get girl—or won’t he? Will woman get job—or won’t she? Will convict get freedom—or won’t he? Will mother get child—or won’t she? Will cop get robber—or won’t he? Will alcoholic wife beat booze—or won’t she? Will mouse win self-respect—or won’t he?
Now though this simplistic approach appears ridiculous at first glance, it works. Skillfully and subtly handled, it needn’t prove so artless, either. And other ingredients, without it, add up to little.
In weak scripts, all sorts of preliminaries have been known to precede the moment of commitment. A central character may move through this sequence and that, assorted incidents and events, all with no goal in view, no purpose he’s dedicated to achieving.
To try to make bricks without straw has nothing on trying to build a story in which the central character has no clear-cut goal. And the sooner he’s committed to that goal, the better.
On the other hand, it’s by no means necessary to jump in feet first when considered judgment opts in favor of a smoother entry. Here, as everywhere, horse sense does count!
Indeed, often it’s wise to build to Character’s commitment. Perhaps, for example, you’ll want to begin by establishing situation … revealing that Character can go in two or more directions. For him to choose to strive and struggle quite possibly will seem insane—even though Audience aches for him to do so. In consequence, when Character decides to plunge ahead despite the odds, audience satisfaction is intense. Your viewers are hooked so firmly it will take truly bad work in the sequences that follow to disenchant them.
Cases in point? They range from Tightrope to Yentl. Black Widow to Raiders of the Lost Ark. In all you find carefully built commitment.
Nor does any of this mean Character needs to recognize or babble about his goal or his commitment. Quite possibly all that’s needed is an apparently minor action—a flipping away of cigarette, a tossing down of cards, a turning on or off of lights. The issue is merely to let the audience know, somehow, that Character has direction.
It also should be noted that sometimes we fight to retain rather than to attain. A woman may battle for the right to stay single, a man to keep his job past compulsory retirement age, a couple to defend their home against an encroaching freeway. It still adds up to purpose and commitment.
A corollary: Character’s goal when the film begins may not be the goal your story deals with. Quite possibly he’s “just passing through,” in the words of veteran scriptwriter William Bowers, when the story situation brings him up short and plunges him into adventures unrelated to anything he’s previously anticipated.
In brief, then, the whole world is open to you where openings are concerned. You can play it any way you like—from the long minutes of mood that begin A Passage to India or Witness to the wild tension and terror of Aliens or the scream in the night that rivets Agnes of God’s viewers—so long as you end up with a hook and a commitment.
What about Earl Parrish? Faced with an appeal to join in the money truck robbery, he too must make a decision, a commitment. Until he does, we have no story.
It’s also important that
4. You plan your peaks.
Just as a story begins when the central character commits himself to a goal, a purpose, so it ends when he either succeeds or fails in his efforts.
Between beginning and end, in a series of confrontations, Character strives against odds to reach his goal.
The writing of confrontations is an art in itself, spelled out in our next chapter. Here, suffice it to say that a confrontation is a unit of conflict—the entity sometimes known as the dramatic scene—and is the basis on which any story develops and progresses. These units and the transitional episodes that join them, when linked one to another, make up the body of your picture.
Beyond this, in framing your treatment, three things are important to bear in mind.
a. Avoid the predictable.
Your goal in blocking in your picture should be a series of logical yet unanticipated developments, sufficiently exciting to keep your viewers intrigued with your story. Even though experience tells them that the hero will surely win, how he wins should come as an exciting, delightful surprise to them.
The same principle applies at every stage. Take it for granted the audience will know something is going to happen at a given moment. But gnaw your nails if they know what that something is.
How do you avoid the predictable?
In theory, it’s no problem. First, you put yourself in the audience’s place and figure out what they anticipate will happen. Second, you list possible alternative developments and then choose the one you feel will prove most effective. Third, at the proper points in your script you plant the elements/objects/events necessary to make the twist you’ve chosen come off.
Thus, in one distinctly unmemorable horror script, I had my hero prowling the Mad Scientist’s lair. There he discovers a group of The Fiend’s zombie-like servitors standing in a trance state in coffin-shaped boxes. Moving on, he enters another room … sneaks up on Scientist. But just when it seems as if he’s finally triumphed, the doors of two cabinets flanking the entrance swing open. A zombie lunges from each and seizes Hero, and he’s right back where he started, only worse—for now he’s Scientist’s prisoner.
The pattern is, I trust, clear. Audience knew something must surely happen, but not what. Since the zombies already had a known potential from earlier sequences, I simply planted them in the room adjoining Scientist’s laboratory, then let Hero proceed. Obviously, in their trance state, they were harmless.
Now Hero enters laboratory … creeps towards Scientist. Only then, behind him, the cabinets open, revealing non-cataleptic zombies, their presence logical yet hardly predictable. They lunge, and—well, you get the idea.
Unfortunately, such tricks seldom work out quite that neatly. Hair-tearing, breast-beating, and plain old dogged hanging in there often will be required before you find the right answers.
b. Accentuate the negative.
The example above illustrates this point also. Since audiences come to the theater to worry, it follows that they enjoy themselves more if Hero gets into deeper and deeper trouble as the film progresses. To that end, follow the out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire principle. Each of Hero’s efforts to improve his situation should end up making said situation worse: Villain, knocked down, comes up with a knife in either hand. Heroine, saved from dungeon, turns out to have lost her mind. Treasure chest, opened, sets off a blast that sinks the ship.
Too melodramatic? Then how about Hero returning to family after 18 months’ service overseas. His wife waits for him at the gate … ever so obviously pregnant. Or he reaches down to pick up his two-year-old son … and the child bursts into screams of fear. Or he opens the kitchen door of what he thought of as his and Woman’s dream cottage … and two rats race across a filthy, garbage-strewn floor.
‘Nuff said?
c. Space out your crises.
It’s essential that, in planning, you decide which incidents are going to be the big, important, decisive ones. Then, having decided, space them out, so that your viewers have an opportunity to recover from one before you overwhelm them with the next.
How do you arrange your crises? It will help if you have some sort of pattern to follow until you get the feel of such. One treatment I did was titled Wedding Week. Because a week is comprised of seven days, it gave me a built-in structure. Action rose step by step through the daylight hours to a major crisis each evening—a cliff-hanger to ensure the heroine a sleepless night, as it were.
In television, commercial breaks offer a similar guide. Same for the acts—two, three, five—in stage plays. And there are worse tricks than to plan in titled chapters the way novelists used to do.
Thus, suppose you have six, eight, ten crises: some major, some minor; some mountains, some foothills. Ordinarily, you’ll arrange them in a pattern of what’s termed rising action, ascending intensity, with tension building from beginning to end.
The tension can’t just build, however. You need valleys between your peaks.
This being the case, you’ll need to insert quiet episodes to balance the taut … maybe introduce a subplot (a sort of separate-but-related minor story probably centering on minor characters), or comedy relief bits, or material that concentrates on passage of time or space briefly instead of bearing down with such emphasis on story progression.
And yes, the place to work all this out is in your story treatment … even though you’ll deal with it in more detail later, in step outline and master scene script.
5. You resolve your issues.
Sooner or later, you’re going to have to end your story. That means, also, that you’re going to have to release the climactic tensions you’ve built up in 80 or 90 or 100 minutes of manipulation of desire and danger.
It will help, at this point, if you acquire some small understanding of the dynamics of ending a story/script/film.
In practice, a script’s “end” portion breaks down into two segments: climax and resolution.
Climax is the point in a screenplay at which the conflict between desire and danger reaches its ultimate peak. It’s the final clash between hero and villain; the win-or-lose moment where the forces of good either triumph or meet what’s euphemistically known as a fate worse than death.
Obviously there are as many ways to handle this moment as there are scripts and writers. As a general rule, however, most center in one way or another on a morally oriented decision by the central character: He or she must choose between doing the right thing or the wrong, the unselfish or the selfish; and Character’s choice determines whether he wins or loses. Skill or strength or smarts, alone or together, isn’t enough. Ethics and principles, social or personal, also have to enter.
You can see this in its clearest form in a host of pictures, ranging from The Maltese Falcon to Tootsie to The Karate Kid. In each instance the protagonist made a difficult decision and was rewarded. Whereupon viewers, emotionally rewarded, rewarded the producers on a financial level.
It goes without saying, as anyone who has tried it will tell you, that arranging this isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Yet it’s far from impossible, especially if you bear a basic principle in mind.
Specifically, the trick is always, at the climax, to provide your hero or heroine with an easy way out—a course of action that will get him off the hook with minimum trial and tribulation. All he has to do is tap the till or seduce the woman or reveal the name that he’s promised to keep secret.
Then, don’t let him take that route. Even though all logic and self-interest push him in that direction, and despite the fact that disaster in its purest and most pristine form hangs over him in a veritable sword of Damocles should he follow conscience, let honor guide him. Heedless of impeding doom, he does the “right” thing, the moral thing.
Not that Character need be sanctimonious or verbal about this. It’s better, indeed, that he play it cool. Silence or surface cynicism are quite acceptable—witness Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of Rick in Casablanca.
What does matter is that, under pressure, Character shows courage. Why? Because both in life and on celluloid, courage remains the quality most prized and admired by viewers.
Especially esteemed is moral courage. Rambo notwithstanding, film-goers recognize that they’re not Superman. But they can imagine themselves saying no, as when Dolly Parton refuses to be seduced in Nine to Five … confessing painful truths with Adela Quested in A Passage to India … going ahead in the face of odds, the way the Cambodian photographer does in The Killing Fields. So while they love to fantasize themselves as Conan or James Bond or Indiana Jones, the stubborn refusal to surrender of a Paul Newman in Verdict turns them on at a deeper level.
So much for climax. On to resolution!
Despite all the odds against him, all the looming cataclysms, you make your hero win—in heart and mind, if not in body. He knows he’s done the right thing; that’s his payoff, even though he loses the gold or the battle or Mary Astor.
How do you manage this? You do it by manipulation of some pre-planted element, some logical yet unanticipated ace in the hole you’ve introduced earlier: the gun in the drawer, the death-bed statement, the previously established attitude of some character who now takes center stage. Whereupon, Indiana Jones survives the Temple of Doom, and Teen Wolf not only wins the game but at last sees which girl is the right one.
Obviously, this isn’t always painted in with a barn brush. The skilled scriptwriter modifies it by introducing appropriately realistic touches. Not every victory is total. Bad things do happen to good people. But the overall picture is of what we loosely term poetic justice … of the way audiences would like life to be.
Can you find this pattern in all films?
No, of course not. Partly, this is because filmmakers grow bored like anyone else. Tiring of traditional—which is to say, predictable—lines of development, they attempt something “fresh,” something “different,” even though they recognize that it’s a gamble.
Viewers, in turn, feel helpless and out of control of their lives, upon occasion. They want to believe they’re not alone in said feeling. The very idea of irresponsibility or immorality or a world without rules pulses at them like Las Vegas neon.
In consequence, many pictures, today, stop instead of ending. Or they settle for shock instead of story. Or they present a “slice of life” that proclaims the meaninglessness of existence, or focuses on greed, short-sighted selfishness, or mindless pursuit of pleasure.
The result, too often, is a picture that depresses rather than entertains, where a mass audience is concerned. Because, actually, of course, if you want to be philosophical about it, life is predictable and it does have meaning. Predictably, birth is followed by life is followed by death; and its meaning is that the species survives a little longer.
Permit me to reduce this to ground-level, personal terms. I’m fully aware that, as my father used to say, “Life is real, life is earnest, and we all die sometime.” But I also remember lying on a red-mud riverbank in southern Nicaragua not too many years ago. I had a broken rib and a smashed knee and I felt like hell and the sound of gunfire was echoing disconcertingly close.
But it was an incident, an episode; a story, if you will, not life itself. I survived it. The years since have seen good moments for me as well as bad.
The thing a scriptwriter needs to remember is that a story concerns a problem and its solution; and most of us, most of the time, do solve our problems.
We do it by hanging in there, as it were. Instinctively, we know that. So if you write scripts in which you let your characters give up, cop out, abandon hope, and deny the relationship between cause and effect, not all viewers will love you for it.
Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it, you understand. There have been major hits that did so—remember Easy Rider? But there also have been major failures, a lot of them. As a rule, your chances for success will be better if you search for freshness and the unanticipated via floor-pacing and new lists of ways to kill with doorknobs to keep you clever.
How do you release climactic tensions? More specifically, how do you release them in a manner satisfying to your viewers? Two issues are involved.
a. Releasing topic-engendered tensions.
Topic tensions are those based on largely mechanical issues: How do you get Heroine out of burning building? How do you save Hero from firing squad? How do you decipher the code, find the will, control the dread disease?
This obviously can be a problem. By the time you’ve built your story to a climax, odds are you’ve created a state of affairs that’s tangled and taut indeed.
Fortunately, you’ve already mastered the principles of the unraveling process. It’s the procedure you used in inventing logical, unanticipated, non-predictable complications and crises back in your film’s middle sector.
Now, you use this same approach to resolve instead of complicate: You figure out what the audience expects … you devise a different alternative … and plant (or expunge) such elements as are necessary to bring it off.
b. Releasing character-engendered tensions.
Your viewers’ tensions won’t be totally released till they’re satisfied with the way things worked out for the characters in your film. Solutions to mechanical problems alone just aren’t enough.
Again, however, the answer is relatively simple: You give each character what he’s demonstrated he deserves, on a basis of both competence and conduct.
Competence? That means only that you don’t have a dub golfer winning the championship over a pro, or a janitor stumping the college physics faculty, or the town hag claiming the cup in the beauty contest. It’s the element of potential that we discussed in Chapter 8.
Conduct is something else again. For lack of a better word, let’s equate it with morality. It means that if a character has behaved the way the audience thinks he should, he wins; if he hasn’t, he doesn’t.
The problem here—and not just for scriptwriters—is that morality is changing, especially for the young people who make up the overwhelming majority of the film audience. “Situation ethics” increasingly is taking over, with “right” and “wrong” determined on a basis of circumstance, rather than absolutes.
Thus, not too many years ago, the penalties for sexual irregularity, for the woman, included illicit pregnancy, venereal disease, community scorn, and economic disaster.
Enter the so-called sexual revolution. The Pill gave a considerable degree of control over pregnancy. Antibiotics kept disease pretty much in line. Mobility and women’s lib blunted scorn’s edge. Womens’ movement into better-paying jobs made economic survival feasible.
But, as the saying goes, the only thing unchanging is change. Just as the “new morality” seemed to have triumphed, herpes surfaced, and then AIDS. Together, they gave birth to what amounts to a sexual counterrevolution. The “counterculture” of the ‘60s and 70s faded. Government deficits, disastrous foreign balance of trade, the devaluation of the dollar, and lost jobs increasingly played havoc with attitudes and prospects. Crimes against people and property (rationalized a few years earlier in such films as Save the Tiger, The Sting, Charley Varrick, Cops and Robbers, Death Wish, Clockwork Orange, and Bonnie and Clyde) lost much of their charm. Audiences pondered Iranscam, the Nicaraguan Contras, insider trading, and the peccadillos of TV evangelists, and began rethinking their own views on morality. And the end is not yet in sight.
That all this has influenced film attitudes goes without saying. But as this is written no clear picture of a new attitudinal set has yet emerged. Films featuring sexual promiscuity (The Morning After, Half Moon Street) and criminality (Prince of the City, The Pope of Greenwich Village) are still being made, but social values (The Verdict, A Passage to India) and religious themes and backgrounds (Agnes of God, Name of the Rose, Witness) increasingly are moving into prominence.
With society itself in such a state of flux, the scriptwriter should need no crystal ball to make clear the importance of staying ever so aware of his audience and its thinking. He dare not deal out penalties or rewards to his characters blindly or by the old standards, lest he lose contact and shatter believability in the process. Indeed, he need not—should not—ever forsake his personal code. For if standards truly make sense, and Writer truly possesses a modicum of creative imagination, he still can sell them to any audience, providing he approaches them in terms of that audience’s point of view.
* * *
So much for the do’s of framing your treatment. Now, how about the don’ts?
We’ll limit them to five notes of warning:
1. Beware of idiot plots.
2. Beware of static situations.
3. Beware of diffuse opposition.
4. Beware of too many characters.
5. Beware of theme and symbolism.
Here we go!
1. Beware of idiot plots.
An idiot plot is one in which one or more key characters have to behave like idiots in order for the story to come off.
These are tales that feature heroes who defy killers, heroines who make appointments to meet murderers in isolated castle towers, villains who decide the detective has suddenly switched over to their side.
To avoid such, merely make it a practice to ask yourself, “Why does Joe (or Sam, or Suzy, or Griselda) do this? Is there so much pressure on him (or her) that, in the same circumstances, an ordinary, intelligent man or woman would act this way?”
2. Beware of static situations.
A moving picture should move, should tell its story in action. Otherwise it’s not taking proper advantage of the film medium’s potential.
Unfortunately, all too often, writers write scripts in which people merely sit around and talk about past, present, or future action.
Even worse, they choose topics which offer little opportunity for things to happen: for the story to develop in terms of people doing things. Even a highly successful stage play, for example, as a film may founder on verbosity and the innate limitations that go with its medium.
Now good films can be and have been made in which settings were restricted, action limited. But special problems always are involved, so be sure you’re prepared to take on such before you dive into such murky waters.
3. Beware of diffuse opposition.
Simultaneously or in sequence, all sorts of elements may oppose your central character as he moves through your story towards his goal. Not only is the weather against him, the ferryman won’t cross the river with the water this high, the Mennonites down the road resent his use of tractors, Banker is determined to foreclose on the old family homestead, Heroine’s brother wants to knock his block off, Rival has sworn to have his blood, and Neighbor is loading his shotgun with buck instead of bird.
One of these factors should emerge as dominant in Character’s struggle—and the sooner, the better. Why? So that Character will have a specific someone or something to defeat—or be defeated by—at the climax, the culmination of his fight to attain his goal: witness Rick versus Strasser in Casablanca, Ringo versus the Plummer brothers in Stagecoach, John Book versus the three crooked cops in Witness.
This is tremendously important. Without such a dominant opposing element, it will prove difficult if not impossible to bring your climax into effectively sharp focus. There will be no way to demonstrate, through your hero’s victory or defeat, that he has won or lost.
A climax which does not pivot on such a demonstration will prove vague and mushy. In consequence, it will fail to give your audience that sudden release of pent-up tension that constitutes ultimate and total satisfaction.
4. Beware of too many characters.
Pay no attention whatever to how many characters you use when you set down the first draft of your treatment.
The second time round, cut out half.
The third, trim to bare-bone minimum.
Thing is, most of us tend at the beginning to bring in story people not as single spies but in battalions. Which is fine, except that (a) actors cost money (how many spectaculars has MGM released lately?) and (b) too large a cast confuses your viewers.
Further, that mass of players is seldom vital. The people you need are those who build your story, advance the conflict, stand for or against your hero in his struggle to attain his goal. Drop all others. (We’re not talking about crowds, spearbearers in the chorus, and the like, you understand. The issue is characters developed as individuals, people who play distinctive roles within your story.)
Then, go over the list of those who remain and ask yourself if you can’t combine one with another, or perhaps cut bits or incidents to eliminate a few more.
Yes, I grant you all this is tedious and painful. But you’ll be glad you did it when, later, producer or director pokes at this role or that and you’re already primed and ready to justify the character’s retention.
5. Beware of theme and symbolism.
It’s impossible to write a script or make a film without a theme—and this includes even the most inept of blue movies.
It’s equally beyond anyone’s ability to create a picture that doesn’t use symbols.
However, the chances are good that the writer will have no idea as to what said theme is till the picture’s released and someone tells him. And the things he’ll discover about the symbols he’s incorporated—well!
The reason these things are so is that a film’s theme is merely the message it conveys. Thus, the theme of the blue movie cited above very well may be only that sex is on the sickening side when served up in such a package.
The trouble with themes is that if you bear down too hard on them, your films tend to grow stiff and preachy. You’ll fare better, in most cases, if you follow the advice someone passed on to me long years ago. “You want to build in a message? Great! Just don’t let any of your characters know what that message is!”
* * *
A symbol is something that stands for something else, on a basis of relationship, association, convention, or the like. A noun is a symbol of an object. A flag is a symbol of a country. A cross is a symbol of Christianity. A sickle and hammer is a symbol of Communism. And so on and so forth.
It follows that, in order for symbols to be meaningful, you have to know the ground rules: just what each symbol is supposed to stand for. If you don’t, the whole business becomes senseless.
When a writer decides to incorporate specialized symbols into his script, he runs the grave risk that the device that seems so clear and obvious to him may totally miss its mark where his viewers are concerned. Even 75 years of Freudianism haven’t yet gotten it across to everyone that they should equate church steeples and snakes with penises, windows and doors with vaginas.
This being the case, it might be wise for the scriptwriter to ignore the whole matter. No matter what he decides, symbols will be present, and he can leave it to the critics to decide what they mean.
Even better, he might make any key symbols he chooses to include clear to all—like bedbugs and cockroaches equal squalor. The audience, as well as critics, will have a fighting chance to understand!
WRITING THE TREATMENT
How do you write a treatment?
You’ve already heard enough and too much about my favorite tricks for getting words and ideas down on paper: focused free association, continuing elaboration, and so on. I won’t repeat them here.
More important at this point, I think, is a warning not to let facts engulf or overwhelm you. A good film is feeling first of all, remember. Your task in the treatment, in large measure, is to capture same on paper.
How do you manage this? The secret is surprisingly simple. It begins with clear realization that an urge to write anything indicates, in a high proportion of cases, that the topic holds some element you find exciting.
Apply this excitement yardstick to each successive sequence of your treatment. Ignoring plot lines and bridging bits (they’re the kind of thing you can stick in later as needed), ask yourself what there is about each person, setting, incident, speech fragment, or what have you that creates—or in the past created—a sense of eagerness or enthusiasm in you.
Get these exciting touches down on paper and, from them, write your treatment. Try to capture the feeling they evoke as you go along, setting your interlinked ideas down as if they were a story told in present tense: not “Joe turned,” but “Joe turns.” Not “Sue’s eyes widened,” but “Sue’s eyes widen.” Strive for words and phrases that will help your readers—and you too—to feel not only the flat facts of what happens, but also mood, color, tension, spirit, tone. Give heed to connotation, denotation. Make maximum use of action verbs, pictorial nouns.
Here, for example, is a passage designed to nail down the feelings that go with an opening—a time, a place, a bit of action:
FADE IN:
It’s a gray, misty morning on a Mississippi River inlet. An outboard-powered johnboat putt-putts towards us in a wide arc. It carries three men; its destination, a weathered raft/dock secured against a steep bank at the foot of a flight of rickety wooden steps.
A small, neat houseboat, the Cupcake, is moored to the dock fore and aft. The incoming boat ties up beside it and the men get out. They are DEACON DCUGHBALL, a weak-faced, country-preacher-gone-to-seed type…ANSE BLESSARD, a mean-looking river rat who carries an old lever-action .22 rifle across his left forearm…and Anse’s raffish brother, REB, a whittler who shaves a stick with the longest, wickedest-looking jackknife imaginable as he walks.
Climbing the stair, the trio get into an ancient, battered car. Deacon Doughball at the wheel, the car lurches down a rutted lane andonto a gravel road that parallels the river. Signs tell us that we’re entering GLEN FORK…POP. 1549, and welcome us to RIVER COUNTY, HEART OF EAST ARKANSAS… SEE OUR HISTORIC STEAMBOAT LANDINGS
This is atmosphere stuff, of course. It’s designed to establish location, set a mood, and raise questions.
The pages that follow introduce us to our hero, young Ross Cope-land … his employer, Possum Wilberforce, publisher of the Glen Fork Eagle and East Arkansas’s answer to Colonel Blimp … and Lorena Wilberforce, Possum’s daughter and Ross’s betrothed.
Now, the treatment gives action with a light touch, as Possum takes Ross to collect a printing/advertising bill from an appliance dealer new in town. They’re accompanied by the Blessards, a pair popularly known (but not to their faces) as the Buzzard Brothers.
The dealer refuses to pay. Possum sighs gustily in apparent defeat and heads for the door. But Anse says something should be done about the flies buzzing about the store. When one lands on a shiny new refrigerator, he eliminates it—and punctures the refrigerator—with a shot from his .22.
Reb, in turn, chides Anse for wasting ammunition. To demonstrate that such isn’t necessary, he slices a second fly in mid-air with his jackknife.
Quaking, the dealer pays up.
Currently, Ross has two major goals in life: to get Lorena alone, away from Possum’s ever-watchful eyes, and to escape Glen Fork with her.
Regards Goal No. 1, he’s secretly acquired a boat so that he can take her, unobserved under the cover of night, to the Cupcake, where he lives.
They board the Cupcake…lock the door.
Ross reaches for Lorena. She flings herself into his arms in a wild embrace, and reveals that she’s persuaded her father to give Ross an interest in the Eagle, chaining him to Glen Fork for all time to come in a fate which he considers worse than death by far.
The pages that follow see Ross, in his desperation, involving himself with such divergent types as Stacey Suggs, henpecked country-western star who dreams of singing lieder … Suggs’ bitchy, blue-haired wife, Gladys, a termagant’s termagant … tough, sexy Beverly English, an A&R rep who’s trying to talk Stacey into switching to her record company … and our ultimate heroine, Carole Foster, would-be songwriter currently working as a waitress.
The wrap-up:
Carole saves innocent Ross from a shotgun marriage to Lorena by pretending he’s spent the crucial night with her.
Raging, Possum departs with a worshipful Lorena, Deacon Doughball, and the Buzzard Brothers. Ross and Carole are left stranded on the river bank: broke, jobless, blacklisted.
They do have one asset, however: the boat Ross bought in his early effort to seduce Lorena. Which means that at least they can get across the river and, from there, hitchhike to Nashville and check out Carole’s songs.
It’s a good moment. Laughing, they scramble aboard. Ross starts the outboard. The boat swings out into the Mississippi in a long arc past the Cupcake…farther and farther into the distance in an approximation of our opening shot as we
FADE CUT
And there you are. Your goal in your treatment is persuasion—persuasion of a very special kind: You want to convince the key personnel who read your effort that your story’s strong, tight-knit, gripping: the kind of property that will pull viewers, fill theaters.
Nor do you want to leave any doubts as to your epic’s cinematic practicality. That means: no holes, no flaws, no problems; no doubts but that the story will take form effectively on film.
Treatment length? Don’t worry about it too much. Good treatments have been written in ten pages, and in a hundred. What counts, as more than one old hand has pointed out, is not how many words you write, but how convincingly you sell your idea.
I should also remind you here, in all fairness, that there are all sorts of ways of handling treatments. Writers range from those who like to write extremely “full” to those who prefer to keep their copy “tight” or “lean.” Most fall somewhere in between. Again, you pays your money and you takes your choice.
Whichever route you choose, though, one thing is absolutely essential. It’s mastery of the art of creating and building and bridging confrontations, and we’ll take it up in the next chapter.