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Dissed

This is my favorite backfired “I am Spartacus” moment ever, I think.

I’ve talked about step-outlines before, but in case you forgot, here’s a slight refresher of the very obvious meat of the step-outline: it’s the story told through steps. Zing. Basically, you number (or bullet-point) the various “steps” you require to get the story from its start to its conclusion, with as few frills as possible. Note that a “step” is not necessarily a scene; two or three scenes may accomplish one step of the story, or one scene could accomplish two or three steps. It sounds weird, but it makes sense when somebody who isn’t retarded explains it.

I like step-outlining because it’s basically a map, for me. Every step has a story-related purpose. When I try to free-write, I have a tendency to meander, and while I used to like the whole idea of just writing and working the story out that way, then going back and focusing it, I decided less time is wasted by just step-outlining the beats of the story and getting right to it. Or, even if I have a vague notion of what the story will be, when I get down to writing it, I tend to forget things and leave them out. When I step-outline, I’m free to insert and remove things even as I write the script. It’s a lot easier to add or remove a step than to add or remove a scene or two. For me, anyway.

This is different from a treatment. I feel like treatments, like pitches, should be created after the screenplay is finished, because it’s basically a summary of the story. It’s not an outline; it tells you what you need to know about the story in the simplest terms possible, and it’s normally not used in aid of writing the story (although some people, for reasons I personally don’t understand, use it for that) but as a tool to sell the story.

So, for this conspiracy class I’m taking, we were assigned to write both a step-outline and a brief treatment of our stories. I guess the treatment I wrote worked quite well, which surprised me, because I thought it was pretty incoherent. The feedback I got was pretty positive, particularly from the professor, who insisted there was “a lot of good writing” in the treatment. Apparently I have a knack for summarizing complicated characters in less than a sentence, which I know is good in treatments.

Owen, however, was not overly fond of my treatment. He decided it was “too conversational and too literary, and therefore not a treatment.” I actually agree with the first clause of Owen’s assessment: I write treatments like a story, sans dialogue and overly flowery language. For example, I will write something like, “They hide out in a fleabag motel” rather than “A cracked and ancient sign over the filthy glass doors read ‘Duncan’s Motor Lodge.’ The door creaked slightly as Alfred opened it and entered a high-ceilinged lobby that smelled of stale cigarettes and a prostitution ring…” and so on, which would go on forever.

The first example tells you everything you need to know: They (Alfred and his lover, Bartleby) hide out (hide out) in a fleabag (unpleasant) motel (cheap). The second, in addition to being a terrible description, goes into waaaaaaay too much detail for something that’s all about brevity. Nobody who reads a treatment gives a shit about the look of the sign or the filthiness of the glass doors or the name of the motel or the creakiness of the doors or the smell of the lobby. Hell, you can’t even smell things in movies (although really good cinematographers and production designers can sometimes do a hell of a job making you think you’d know what the place would smell like, if you could).

Which brings me to my problem with Owen’s treatment, if you’ll allow me to digress even further away from the original point of this entry. And I am ready and willing to school his enormous, probably hairy ass as soon as we read his treatment aloud in class. Owen’s treatment is currently, according to his first readers, 17 pages long. The maximum page-count is supposed to be five.

I think he thinks his exorbitant page count is really impressive to the peons who could only come up with five measly pages. Except I am much more impressed by the people whose treatments started out at 17 pages, which they then chopped down to five. Again, brevity is the key for a treatment, so the fact that they initially believed the minimum page count to fully tell their story was 17, and then they managed to cut it all the way down to five and still tell a coherent (probably tighter and more interesting) story, that’s impressive. I had to chop my treatment from 12 pages down to five, and I still went a half-page over and felt like a jackass (until I found out that almost everybody else did, too).

I respect Mike (who plays a prominent role in my last entry) more and more every day. First, he gave me really kick-ass suggestions to improve two of the scripts I’ve pitched. But he’s also the only guy in class who has managed to cut his story down to the required page length and still have it be coherent and tight. His two-page treatment was spectacular, and his five-page one just filled in a few gaps. He’s an impressive writer.

Anyway, to the point of this digression: the problem with Owen’s treatment is that it’s overlong, but it’s not even remotely concise. The treatment I read, which was 11 pages long, spent way too much time being, you know, literary. (It was not at all conversational, because he has all the style and wit of a Joan of Arcadia erotic fan-fiction author.)

He writes paragraphs like these: “The Preacher walks up the dusty driveway, gravel crunching beneath his feet. An old gray Volvo is the lone car in the parking lot. The Preacher approaches the entrance to a store called JOE’S VIDEO DEPOT. Inside, many people talk, discussing the new movies that are on display in the video store. The Preacher speaks to no one. He walks past a door labeled “ADULT VIDEOS” and passes a bin filled with various genres of pornography: STRAIGHT, GAY, SHEMALE, LESBIAN, ASIAN, and so on. The Preacher goes through the bins and finds his selection: THE AMAZING ANAL CANAL PART 6, starring Kristy McNichol and Michael Clarke Duncan.”

Which is a little too much. I mean, sure, parts of it would probably be acceptable in the script itself (especially if the excessive details, like the Volvo and the stars of the porno, are important later, or if they hit on a joke of some kind — like, haha, the washed-up ’80s starlet will do anal with that huge guy from The Green Mile), but that is not a treatment. Here is a treatment: “The Preacher goes to a video store and rents a porno.”

It’s not the best writing in the world, but that’s how a treatment is written. It’s supposed to be a drab and styleless description of the story, but the trick is to engage the reader with your complete lack of style in describing the meat and potatoes of your plot. I can’t figure out this trick, which is why my treatments are always so “literary” and “conversational.” The “literary” is so the reader can see the film in their head — I put in enough visual information so that they can hit on their own image of it, so they understand what I’m going for. Everybody has an idea of what a fleabag motel looks like — it starts to get confusing when you go into details about what the lobby looks like, because what does that have to do with the story?

Every single sentence has to pertain to what happens in the story. You can write about a gray Volvo being the only car in the parking lot if it becomes important later, and if you do write about a gray Volvo and it doesn’t pay off later, the person reading it is gonna get pissed off, because if you wrote it in your treatment, it’s gotta be important to the story at some point.

Okay, sorry about getting so ranty, but this actually does pertain to the story I planned to tell (plus, I wanted to document what a hypocritical asshat Owen is). Owen went off on my treatment being too literary and conversational, and I got pissed and was about to defend my work when something completely amazing happened: everybody else, including the professor, defended it for me. Everybody liked my treatment. They thought, as I said before, that it was tight and conveyed everything I intended to convey without getting bogged down in details.

Owen maintained that my treatment was not “visual enough,” but he’s missing the point of the context of “visual” as it pertains to a treatment. A treatment is not merely visual, in the sense of overlong descriptions of stuff nobody cares about; a treatment is observable behavior. That’s what makes it visual. So while parts of my treatment got bogged down in dialogue-heavy scenes (which are mostly written like “She tells Alfred that he’s an asshole. Alfred tells her Bartleby never loved her.”), it’s there because without descriptions of the dialogue in those scenes, the story makes no sense. I’m not going to get all flowery-symbolic to explain dialogue in my treatment, because you know what it is in the screenplay? Dialogue. Not symbolic action. Not visual poetry. Just people standing around talking. Which is boring as hell in a treatment, but it can week exceedingly well in a screenplay, especially when you’re ripping off the scene in Marathon Man where Janeway explains to Babe every single thing that’s going on, and then double-crosses him.

So, with everybody defending my work and wanting to make out with my treatment, I felt slightly vindicated. But not vindicated enough, which is why what happened next totally kicked ass.

A little while later, Owen started bitching about step-outlines. I don’t remember what, if anything, prompted it, but basically he said something along the lines of, “Doing a step-outline was a complete waste of time. It doesn’t help at all.”

Our professor said, “A lot of students have told me they’ve been very helpful.”

Owen was wearing dark sunglasses, but I totally have the feeling he rolled his eyes at her. He looked to the students, his peeps, from behind those dark glasses and said, “Raise your hand if you found the step-outlines at all helpful.”

The professor started to defend herself, saying, “I don’t really think that’s —” but then yet another amazing thing happened: every single person in the class, except for Owen, raised his or her hand.

Owen stared at us, his jaw slowly dropping. He really, honestly believed we would all rally on his side. “I, uh, I…” he stammered. “I guess I’m in the minority here.”

“I guess so,” the professor said as the rest of us snickered in amusement.

Like I said, I find the step-outlines very useful. I know lots of others do, as well. I don’t think everybody in the class did, but I think those that didn’t raised their hands anyway, just because nobody wants to agree with anything Owen says at any point in time.

I was so glad for that, since we didn’t have time to read his treatment, Owen at least got some sort of comeuppance.

Posted by Stan on May 16, 2004 1:20 PM  | Permalink | School Rants | Digg It