[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
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).
About:
Paul Chitlik has written for all the major networks and studios in English and in Spanish. He was story editor for MGM/UA’S “The New Twilight Zone,” and staff writer for Showtime’s sitcom “Brothers.” He has written features for Rysher Entertainment, NuImage, Promark, Mainline Releasing, and others. He has directed episodes and been coordinating producer for “Real Stories of the Highway Patrol” and “U.S. Customs Classified.” He wrote and produced “Alien Abduction,” the first network movie shot on digital video for UPN. He wrote, produced, and directed “Ringling Brothers Revealed” a special for The Travel Channel. (He had been a roustabout for Circus Vargas years earlier.) Most recently he wrote, produced and directed “The Wedding Dress,” for Amazon Prime. He received a Writers Guild of America award nomination for his work on “The Twilight Zone” and a GLAAD Media Award nomination for “Los Beltrán,” a Telemundo show. He won a Genesis Award for a Showtime Family movie. He has taught in the MFA programs of UCLA, the University of Barcelona’s film school ESCAC, Cuba’s film school EICTV, Chile’s film school UNIACC, The University of Zulia in Venezuela, The Panamerican University in Mexico City, The Story Academy of Sweden and as a clinical associate professor at Loyola Marymount University. Now writing full time again and living near his grandson in Chapel Hill, NC, with wife, Beth McCauley.
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