John August

Treatments

Taking notes

Episode - 86

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Apps, Film Industry, Formatting, QandA, Screenwriting Software, Scriptnotes, Transcribed, Treatments

Craig leads the discussion on how to survive a notes meeting. As screenwriters, our instinct is to defend, deny and debate — but these are almost always the wrong choice. By reframing the discussion about the movie rather than the script, you can often end up at a better place.

From there, John opens the listener mailbag so we can answer questions about cheating scene description and romantic obsession. Plus we talk about Slugline, Highland, Final Draft and the plethora of screenwriting apps available to screenwriters today.

LINKS:

* [Slugline](http://slugline.co/)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* [Fade In](http://www.fadeinpro.com/)
* [Final Draft](http://www.finaldraft.com/)
* Screenwriting.io on [page numbering and other basic formatting](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-standard-screenplay-format/)
* Tweet your clams to [@johnaugust](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) and [@clmazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) with #CutItOut
* [Scriptnotes, episode 52](http://johnaugust.com/2012/grammar-guns-butter) featuring Go Into The Story’s list of dialogue clams
* [Rentrack](http://www.rentrak.com/) and [BroadwayWorld](http://broadwayworld.com/)
* [The Boys in the Band](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001CQONPE/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Internet K-Hole](http://internetkhole.blogspot.com/2013/01/dead.html?zx=87aad0c98be70c6c) (Warning: NSFW!)
* [Sleep No More](http://sleepnomorenyc.com/) NYC
* [Slacker Radio](http://www.slacker.com/)
* How to [submit your question](http://johnaugust.com/ask-a-question)
* OUTRO: [Obsession](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4wM9w79_YI) cover by TERMINATRYX

You can download the episode here: [AAC](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_86.m4a).

**UPDATE** 4-28-13: The transcript of this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-86-taking-notes-transcript).

Outlines, treatments and numbered pages

Formatting, QandA, Treatments

questionmarkI was looking through your library section at the TV shows you’d written and noticed a few things that caught my eye. I’m trying to write a treatment/pitch for a TV series and, well, first of all:

In writing it out, is it called a “pitch” or a “treatment” or a “write-up”?

I noticed that all three of your “write-ups” were different in terms of style, as in there didn’t seem to be any sort of template or format to follow specifically, like you would with a screenplay. How do you know what to do technically? Even down to the fonts used, and what is in bold. Sometimes there are bullets.

I also noticed your page numbers: 1 of 5, 2 of 5…. and so on. How did you do that? Did you do that manually or is there some setting I am not seeing in Word that allows for that, because I couldn’t find it.

— Jeff Fradley
Anchorage

answer iconTo me, an outline tends to be less prose-y and feature more bullet points, but there is no common consensus in Hollywood about what’s what. In features, we use “treatment” and “outline” and “beat sheet” interchangeably.

A “write-up” is generally a written version of something you’ve pitched. It could be long or short. A “leave-behind” is a written summary of a pitch that you literally leave behind after the meeting. ((Leave-behinds are often a terrible idea, because this written version becomes the basis of all future conversations. And you’ve essentially just delivered free work.))

As far as page numbers, I’m a big fan of X of Y headers — I even do it on handwritten documents. They were probably more important back when we were faxing documents around, but they’re a good idea overall.

ops sample

Pretty much every word processor can do this kind of page numbering.

In Pages, Insert > Page Number. Then type “of.” Then Insert > Page Count.

In Word, use the header bar/ribbon thing to Insert Page Number, then “of,” then Insert Number of Pages.

In Google Docs, well. It’s hard to do in Google Docs.

Pitching Star Trek

Television, Treatments

[Several](http://betweenthepagesblog.typepad.com/between-the-pages-blog/2011/01/cool-find-gene-roddenberrys-original-star-trek-pitch.html) [blogs](http://blastr.com/2011/01/found-gene-roddenberrys-original-1964-pitch-for-star-trek.php) have recently linked to this [1964 pitch document](http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Star_Trek/1_Original_Series/Star_Trek_Pitch.pdf) by Gene Roddenberry laying out his initial vision for Star Trek. It’s great reading for anyone interested in the Star Trek universe or TV writing in general.

Documents like this are still common in television. I’ve heard them called different things: formats, treatments, show outlines, write-ups, pitch documents.

Whatever you call them, they generally cover a few topics:

1. What the show is (logline, genre, themes, similarities to existing shows)
2. What happens in typical episodes
3. The main characters
4. The primary locations/sets
5. Special opportunities and challenges
6. Future episode ideas

In the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), you can see similar write-ups for D.C., Alaska and Ops.

In the case of Star Trek, it’s not clear at what point in the process this document was written. Generally, pitching a show is something you do in person, with writer(s) meeting with executives. If the pitch goes well, you might leave a document like this behind — in which case it’s called, quite unimaginatively, a leave-behind.

Executives like leave-behinds because it gives them something they can use to pitch the show to their bosses. Agents and seasoned writers caution against them, because it gives executives specifics with which to find fault.

So instead of a leave-behind, you might send something like this over a few days later, writing up the pitch so everyone agrees what kind of show was discussed in the room, including issues that came up. Ideally, you would want your deal closed before emailing this over, but everything in television happens with a sense of rushed deadlines, so that’s hardly a given.

Looking through Roddenberry’s Star Trek write-up, it’s tempting to focus on all the things that changed. The Enterprise is the Yorktown. The captain is neither Pike or Kirk, but Robert M. April. Spock has red skin. Bones is Bones, but his real name is Phillip Boyce.

But it’s more helpful to marvel on how much of the vision and philosophy for Star Trek shows up in this early incarnation:

> The “Parallel Worlds” concept is the key to the STAR TREK format.

> It means simply that our stories deal with plant and animal life, plus people, quite similar to that on Earth. Social evolution will also have interesting points of similarity to ours. There will be differences, of course, ranging from the subtle to the boldly dramatic, out of which comes much of our color and excitement. (And, of course, none of this prevents an occasional “far our” tale thrown in for surprise and change of pace.)

A quick read through the proposed storylines gives a very strong sense of what the show would become. Some of these ideas became episodes; most didn’t. But they all feel like they could be part of the show.

You can read the whole thing [here](http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Star_Trek/1_Original_Series/Star_Trek_Pitch.pdf).

WTF is a beat sheet?

Charlie's Angels, Ops, Projects, QandA, Treatments

questionmarkFirst, thanks for telling me to [buy a new car](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/fix-or-ditch-the-car). (I did.) Second, what the frak is a beat sheet?

I’ve taken screenwriting, short-story writing, and novel writing classes. I’ve taken filmmaking classes. I’ve read several writing manuals. Writers and professors all love to talk about the importance of beat sheets. While they are apparently the single most important thing a writer can ever do, they never show examples. And I’ve heard multiple definitions, from a one-sentence description of each scene to a detailed breakdown of every action in the script.

I’m beginning to suspect conspiracy. I don’t think anybody really uses beat sheets. They claim to in order to sound responsible, much like the myth of flossing. Can you post an example of a beat sheet and blow this mystery out of the water?

— Nick T.

Beat sheets are a form of outline. Each major plot point gets its own bullet point (or occasionally, a number). That’s it.

They can be a helpful way of discussing the storyline of a movie.

PRODUCER

What if Shoe and Dog’s dance number at Marvin Gardens came before Race Car discovered the Community Chest? We could get rid of these three beats, including Top Hat and Thimble’s knife fight.

SCREENWRITER

Did you know Inception wasn’t based on anything?

In the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), you can see a minimal [beat sheet](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/ops_venezuela_who_writes_what.pdf) that Jordan Mechner and I did for our never-shot pilot Ops. It includes a column showing which characters are in any given scene, and which one of us was going to write it.

For the first Charlie’s Angels, I did a series of beat sheets as we debated and formulated. [This one](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/charlies_beat_sheet.pdf) shows a pretty close approximation of what I ended up writing for the first draft. Numbering the beats ended up being a huge help for conference calls.

(Trivia: You’ll notice there’s a villain character named “Lucy Liu,” which far predates the actual Lucy Liu being involved with the movie. That villain character was ultimately played by Kelly Lynch, while Lucy was later cast as the third angel.)

Note that beat sheets are also commonly written after there is a draft of a screenplay. I’ve asked my assistants to do a beat sheet of a script I’m about to begin rewriting so that I’ll have a roadmap of how things are arranged.