My first treatment

I posted the picture above on my Facebook page Friday with the caption "what a movie looks like before it becomes a movie". It's a picture of the 11 page outline I'd created for the movie I've been working on for over five years now. It's the first script I wrote in film school at UCLA and then I later transformed it into a one-hour drama pilot. I love the characters and concept so much that I always hated that it sat in my portfolio, largely unread, so when I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to pitch some movie ideas to a friend who's also a producer, I jumped at the idea to pull LOVE AND EMBALMING FLUID back out. (Yep, that's the title of the movie.)

The central idea of the story never changed when I transformed it from movie to television. A story is a story is a story. (See how FX is right now making the TV show FARGO from the movie FARGO.) But the events, the pacing, actually a lot of the script does change. A TV show is written to have act outs that coincide with commercials. And it's written to be a story that unfolds over eight, 12, 15, or 22 episodes over one, two or 15 seasons. And when I wrote the pilot version of my story, I'd had a few more years of screenwriting under my belt.

Fast forward to last week. I got the go-ahead to work up a treatment based on the logline I'd sent my friend. So I set about figuring out what a treatment was. In short, it's a document that can range from one to 35 pages that tells the story of your script in prose form. So, I had to figure out how to combine everything I loved from both scripts (because the pilot had changed significantly from the movie) into one really good movie pitch (i.e., the treatment).

It took me all week. A week of outlining and reading and re-outlining. Dozens of written pages later I ended up with what you see in the photo above. An 11 page outline for a movie. A really good movie, in my opinion. From there I started writing prose. I figured I'd just write and write and then cut out some later, if necessary. My friend wanted a three to five page treatment this time around. So I started typing and when I finished?

It was five pages exactly. And I was even more excited by it.

I took the weekend to have Angela and Susie proofread, to let it sit and marinate and then I read it again this morning. Changed one word and sent it off to my friend. I'm excited. Things are moving forward. Do I have any idea if this production company will want to buy my script? Not really. Do I have any idea what's next? Nope. But I do know that I have a good story and I'm going to flesh it out. I'm going to write a new draft this week. Because that's what we writers do, we put our butts in the chair and we write. Movies, television pilots, outlines, treatments, anything and everything.