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My POV
Brian A. Wilson
BOOK REVIEW: "Writing Killer Treatments: Selling Your Story Without A Script" by Michael Halperin.
(Basic definition: a treatment is a relatively brief, written pitch of your story, told in the present tense. Its broad strokes incorporate all major characters and plot elements, but only a touch of dialogue. -BW)
Reading "Writing Killer Treatments: Selling Your Story Without A Script " is like ordering a steak and getting a cheeseburger: there's nothing wrong with the cheeseburger, except it's not what you wanted, and it's not what you were promised for your money.
The title, and particularly the "selling your story without a script" tag line, smack of a publisher's suggestion on how to pump sales. It IS a great premise; unfortunately, it's also another book.
For the most part, THIS book devotes itself to a fly-over of each area of the industry where a treatment might be used or bought. Halperin devotes chapters to features, TV, MOWs, adaptations, even the rarely-explored soap opera genre.
Unfortunately, these examinations are of the mile-wide, inch-deep variety, with thoughts of how the treatment applies to each area merely tacked on here and there.
The book has the feeling of never quite getting to the meat of the matter, instead contenting itself with brief perusals of three-act structure, the hero's journey, character development and so on. The book fast becomes a jack of all genres, master of none.
I'm not sure of ALL the warning signs that your book is in trouble. However, I think a major one might be when your book is 167 pages long, yet "A Final Word" appears on page 91.
That's a sign of not having enough material to cover your topic. Unfortunately, that's the major shortcoming of "Killer Treatment."
Despite whole pages devoted to three-line "exercises," abundant white space and inflated font sizes, the layout can't stretch the thin veneer of original material to cover a scant 100 pages. Even at that, much of the information is repetitive: Halperin frequently devotes an entire page to "summing up" a chapter that is perhaps a grand and glorious seven pages long.
Who's the target audience for this style of presentation? Guy Pearce in "Memento"?
Halperin bungles the one chance he has to legitimately extend the book. The "Sample Treatment" promised in the table of contents turns out to be a sample of a SCENE of a sit-com, chopped down for reasons unknown to barely three and a half pages. It's a little hard to study the rhythm and nuance of a full-length treatment when you're trying to read it through a knothole in the fence.
The remainder of the book is fleshed out with a list of movies and TV referenced in the book, a reprint of a WGA brochure, and what is fast becoming the petered-out author's favorite refuge, the good ol' list of agencies from the WGA.
I'm not saying such lists don't have some value; I'm just saying you shouldn't present material that's more current and available for free on the Internet, then charge people $15 for it and tell them it's a good deal.
The book's other major flaw is that it fails to deliver on the second premise of its title, "Selling Your Story Without A Script.:" There is almost no discussion of how, when or to whom you should expect to sell a treatment. Further, the book's minimal examination of treatments presumes having written the entire script anyway.
Naturally, this is the customary course of events, but the subtitle could be extremely misleading, especially to the novice writer with $15 burning a hole in his pocket. Of course, this is exactly the target audience for such a sucker-bait line.
Apparently, P.T. Barnum revived long enough to pen some of the back cover hype, particularly the line stating, "This is the only book that takes you through the complete process of creating treatments that sell."
Well, no actually, it isn't.
"Writing Treatments That Sell" is an excellent book by Ken Atchity and Chi-Li Wong. Indeed, if you want a book that analyzes and explains treatments and gives you good guidelines on how to use them, "Writing Treatments that Sell" is far, far better in virtually every regard than "Writing Killer Treatments."
Rating: Half baked.
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