Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 79
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MCKEE
I would never try to sell the treatment. Instead, just tell the story as
vividly and succinctly as you possibly can, because there’s nothing
you can say about a story that’s going to make them want to buy it.
You can’t make promises. You can’t
say, “This is a story; it’s going to be
wonderful because it’s got this and
it’s got that.” You can’t sell that to
people because they’ve heard it all.
But what sells it is the story.
Why did one producer or another
buy something? Was it a short treatment? Well, who gives a damn? It
doesn’t matter. Whatever happened
in another case is irrelevant to us.
We can’t pray for miracles. We just
tell the story in a clear way. In this
day and age, I would never give a
treatment to anybody for sale.
If you want to write the screenplay
then write a screenplay. If you’re an
unknown writer and you sell a story from a treatment, they’re going
to get somebody else to write it. It’s
not going to be you, because you’ve
never had a credit.
whatever. Let them do that because, first of all, treatments are not
only very difficult to write, but it’s
difficult to capture the story with
one. Second, you want to write the
screenplay, so you have to prove to
them that you can write.
If you give somebody a treatment
and they like your story, and then if
they raise $30 million to make the
film, they’re going to hire a $1 million writer to write it.
If you’re going to write a thriller, it’s
a good idea to write a novel. Get it
published. Hopefully it becomes a
great success as a novel, and then
get film producers to option the
novel. As a condition of optioning
the novel, you say, “And I must write
the screenplay, at least the first draft.”
At that point, when they want your
novel, then you have the power to
say what you want.
So, if you write a treatment that’s
good enough to capture somebody’s interest, they’re going to hire
another writer. It won’t be the unknown commodity.
But, if you say, “I’ve got this screenplay.” They will give it to a reader,
who will read it and reduce it down
to two paragraphs, two pages, or
Story Magazine // Issue 005