Memorabilia screenwriting

I’m stealing a few minutes in the middle of a Memorabilia scriptwriting session. Rhys Davies and I are sitting in an upstairs office in The Art Organization on Humberstone Gate, Leicester. Outside the window, rain is spattering against the glass. We’re both sitting as close as we can to the heater without our coats catching fire, because it is cold in here!

The process we’re going through is different to the collaborative writing I have done before. This time we are taking a well-worked treatment and transferring it to screenplay format. That might sound like a mechanical process. Merely reformatting. The reality is quite different. We are finding that the process of unpacking the treatment to form the screenplay leads us to make many discoveries.

Some scenes do not work in the form that we initially conceived. Characters do not want to do what we imagined they would. Transitions between scenes turn out to be visually jarring. Or maybe the flow of emotions doesn’t work.

All these discoveries are the direct implication of what was in the treatment. But it is only at the point were it is written out in full that cause and effect is revealed and the discoveries are made.

In answer to these newly revealed problems come new ideas. If one character is changed from benign to scheming – what will it do to the dynamic of the story? And from these fresh ideas come the real joy of the process.

The treatment we had was good. The screenplay is in my estimation much stronger.
Today we will reach the point where we have the first act scripted in rough. On Friday I hope to spend some time on my own editing dialogue and making the prose of the scene descriptions smoother.

Script Development

The last week has been full of script writing. Mostly this has been for 'Interviews With a Serial Killer' - the film Chris Jones invited me to work on. But today I headed off to The Art Organisation in Leicester and had a day of script development for the 'Memorabilia' movie, working alongside director Rhys Davies.

Memorabilia has been bubbling along on the back burner since the end of last year. It started as a one line idea, supplied by Martyn Quin. From there Martyn, Rhys and I figured out a rough three-act structure. And from there, after many re-writes, a long treatment.

Throwing ideas around is one thing. Sitting down to write a screenplay as a team is quite another. Would the creative chemistry work?



At 9am, surrounded by pictures and models illustrating Rhys's love for horror movies, we started scripting Memorabilia - a gentle and poignant comedy. We worked through solidly until 3.30pm - (other than the twenty minutes we took for lunch and the twenty we took to silence the building's alarm system.) I arrived home a couple of hours ago exhausted but happy.

Did the creative chemistry work? I'll give a big, fat yes to that.

What are film treatments for?

I have spent the last two days working on two versions of the Memorabilia treatment (formally known as the OTHER treatment!) The process has made me focus on the fundamental purpose of treatments.

Just so we all understand each other, by 'treatment' I am talking about a document which conveys the movie in prose. It typically reads rather like a short story and is usually written in the present tense. There is significant variation in what different people expect from a treatment, but this is my simplistic take on it.

Having said the above - what is a treatment actually for? I don't know about other people, but for me treatments fall into two distinct classes.

The first kind of treatment is a document written as a precursor to writing the screenplay itself. It is a form convenient to work with, readable, comparatively short and easy to navigate. Writing a screenplay from this kind of document would be a comparatively simple task. In the extreme case, it would only require reformatting.

The second kind of treatment is a document designed to get other people interested in the project. It could be produced before the screenplay is written or after it. Either way, it is short, simple and readable enough to tempt a busy person. Its job is to generate an emotional response in the reader.

We have been working on the first kind of treatment for Memorabilia for several months. Each reworking has improved the document. And we stand almost ready to launch into screenplay writing.

Only today have I started to produce the second kind of treatment for Memorabilia.

Project Memorabilia

We had an excellent script development meeting last night at The Art Organisation in Leicester. The guys liked my re-working of the OTHER treatment. A couple of problems were pointed out, talked through and solutions devised.

Since 8.30 this morning I've been working on making those changes. All are now in place and I am presently in the middle of a final edit through. (Well, as you can see, I am in fact taking a few minutes break from doing the above!)

In the meeting I complained that I was having to call it the OTHER treatment on here, as we didn't have a working title. So we agreed on calling it MEMORABILIA.

There is another title, which is our preferred option. But we are not ready to reveal that as yet. So Memorabilia it is - for now.