chitlik

From FilmCourage.com

Film Courage: Do you hate beat sheets?

Paul Chitlik, Author/Writer: No, as a matter of fact, I think beat sheets are required. I always write a beat sheet. Sometimes I skip a treatment. It depends on if I’m writing for money. If somebody’s paying me to write I still will write a beat sheet, then I will write a treatment because that’s the only part you get paid for. You don’t get paid for a beat sheet. Then I turn in the treatment, then I get to go ahead to do the script, etc. 

If I’m writing for myself sometimes I’ll skip the treatment but I always write a beat sheet. Beat sheets are necessary because you need to know where you’re going before you set out on your journey. So if you go to the airport and you don’t know where you’re going. you have a passport and you just walk onto the first plane that you see, you might end up on a desert, you might end up in a communist country, you might end up in a war zone, you might end up on a beach in the Bahamas, you never know where you’re going to go. But if you know where you’re going to go, if you have a general plan, you’re going to end up someplace where you’re going to be happy. 

Now the same thing is if you have a general plan when you’re writing a movie, if you have your seven points and you link those seven points with beats, then you know where you’re going to go when you start writing your script. If you start writing your script and you don’t have that planning, you write yourself into a corner and then you don’t know how to get out of it. 

When I was teaching at UCLA, they have a 10-week course called 434 for Graduate Students in the MFA program. You have 10 weeks to write your film from start to finish. That’s a lot and it’s a fast way to write a film. But to make things worse, the first week is taken up by pitches. The students would pitch to you their stories and you would choose eight students to be in your class and they would have the opportunity to choose which professor they want to be in…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).

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