Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Script Day Gets The 'Treatment' Treatment
After acknowledging the frustrating nature of Script Day - the day we traditionally bring in fully finished scripts for selection, dissection, group rewrite and finally production - today was the first day we accepted 'treatments'.
The idea was to avoid the frustrating process of an author hammering out a finely polished piece for submission only to see it either rejected by the production heads (me and our executive producers Pep & Andrew) or, if the author's piece got selected, they then got to watch their carefully worked-over darlings killed by the ha-ha committee of his or her peers in rewrite.
SO - today we implemented project 'treatment' (Amber: I'm using definition 3a. in this case... there's no mention of a 30-page minimum. Or ponies. Sorry to disappoint!).
As expected, the most well-defined treatment got chosen, but it wasn't for that reason alone - it had more to do with topic and frankly, that was my responsibility. Instead of the Space Shuttle topic that Tim and Amber both wrote on, we went with a parody of History Channel documentaries on WWII anniversaries as this is what is being hailed as the last Great Anniversary of the Greatest Generation's Greatest War. Great.
The Shuttle will be too old next Thursday in terms of the news cycle to really work - even though WWII anniversaries is a general Summer topic, it still edges the aging Shuttle out...
It was a good experience, I think - it had all the hallmarks of a solid script production: good pitches from all involved, a fairly ego-less defense of jokes, and a well-embraced goal of getting out a good script. Which we did, I think. Watch next Thursday to see if I'm right...!
The idea was to avoid the frustrating process of an author hammering out a finely polished piece for submission only to see it either rejected by the production heads (me and our executive producers Pep & Andrew) or, if the author's piece got selected, they then got to watch their carefully worked-over darlings killed by the ha-ha committee of his or her peers in rewrite.
SO - today we implemented project 'treatment' (Amber: I'm using definition 3a. in this case... there's no mention of a 30-page minimum. Or ponies. Sorry to disappoint!).
As expected, the most well-defined treatment got chosen, but it wasn't for that reason alone - it had more to do with topic and frankly, that was my responsibility. Instead of the Space Shuttle topic that Tim and Amber both wrote on, we went with a parody of History Channel documentaries on WWII anniversaries as this is what is being hailed as the last Great Anniversary of the Greatest Generation's Greatest War. Great.
The Shuttle will be too old next Thursday in terms of the news cycle to really work - even though WWII anniversaries is a general Summer topic, it still edges the aging Shuttle out...
It was a good experience, I think - it had all the hallmarks of a solid script production: good pitches from all involved, a fairly ego-less defense of jokes, and a well-embraced goal of getting out a good script. Which we did, I think. Watch next Thursday to see if I'm right...!
