Film Courage: How many times have you been hired by a Hollywood studio or
producer where they did not require you to outline for writing a script?
Glenn Gers, Screenwriter: That's sort of tricky because I would never not outline so therefore
whether they required or not I was going to do it. The interesting thing is whether or not they
understood how much work an outline is because the truth is very often in order to figure out
the solutions to a story to make the choices of a story because that's really what figuring
out the solutions is saying it's going to be a story about this it's going to be a story
where this is the central action that's the outlining process and that's very difficult
that can take as harder work than writing the script and so everyone is always asking you
to essentially do that work before they decide whether they're going to hire you
although things have changed a little bit but truthfully most people assume that an outline
is very short and they did them in school so it's not a big deal but an outline is really the main
work of screenwriting and it can take twice as long as writing the script
itself if you've got a good outline you can write a script and it will go pretty quickly
figuring out all the possible shapes and choices of an outline that's brutally hard so the answer
is I would never take on a job that I hadn't at least roughly outlined because I wouldn't know
that I could solve it um do people ask you to do outlines for free yes should you do it for free no
it depends on where you are in your career and what it's worth to you if you want the
experience of doing the outline and you want to gain their trust but don't do something you're
going to regret for free I think that would be my advice on that um the other thing is um features
and shows are very different in shows the outline breaking the story is a required step
for the company it's also usually not done alone you don't usually send one
person off to do it although sometimes you do depends on the showrunner but outlining a show
is part of the literally part of the job like you go into the room you start by breaking the story
so um nobody would ask you to do that without being paid because you're already on the job
do you have a proven style of outlining that has worked for you the most it's proven to me
in the sense that yeah I think it's great I’ve done a if you check out my videos there's one
called why outline and one called how to outline the how-to has the outline system
but basically what it really comes down to is the important thing is to think in scenes and
write a a written version where you are writing down the scenes in a list that's what an outline
is an outline is a list of scenes some people can do it on index cards they even have index
card software where you can put a lot on it I believe that the important thing is to understand
that you are breaking a story into scenes and then when you have your full list of scenes
and you know what everything is going to happen in every scene and there's nothing missing then
you're ready to write so that's the importance of an outline the actual form of it it's whatever
works for you I believe that the most important thing the thing to put in that first line the
the the headline of each outline step is not where it takes place or even what happens it's what is
the essential action the point of the scene so the point of this like we were talking before
about a scene where maya gets fired the point of that scene is that maya gets unfairly fired
um you try to make things active always try to put things in active form so maya gets fired is
actually passive she's getting fired the scene actually is Tommy fires Maya unfairly now for
me that's a scene line because I know exactly what the action is and I try to always break it
down to that sometimes you know I'm the only one looking at it oh that's the other thing outlines
should be for you outlines are not to be read by other people it's a workspace it's a workplace
if you have to do an outline for another person that's a performance you should copy your outline
and then write a version for other people to read but but for you to work in an outline the
important thing is that you're doing whatever will trigger you to understand the point of the scene
sometimes I know a scene so well that I'll just write joe drives to Dallas
now I know that during the course of that he has to have a breakdown but doesn't matter I know
what that means but really the scene is joe has a breakdown while driving to Dallas the important
thing is the central action of the scene and while there may be many steps in any scene
there's usually one thing more than anything else that that scene is about
and that's the point of the outline then for me underneath it I’ll put everything I can think
of I’ll write dialogue in my outline I'll do whatever I can because I can always just cut
and paste it out later but that space under the headline is where you can ask yourself questions
you can and I write them in a different color I write why is joe having a breakdown
how do we know that joe is having a breakdown and then I'll answer it and I'll describe maybe I'll
say like he crumples up his hamburger and smashes it into the rear view mirror whatever it is I'm
trying to get everything I can into the outline so that I will know what it is when I write the scene
those outline descriptions can be very long they can be arguments with myself the most important
thing to do though is break everything into a scene there's nothing that is going to go into
your script that isn't in a scene so the whole point of an outline is to get you to remember
if I don't have a scene where that happens if I don't have a scene where that subject is raised
or that feeling occurs it's not going to be in the story how common is it for you to write backwards
I always believe everyone should write backwards but by that I do not mean you actually start in
the last scene and write it right backwards I mean know the ending that's really what right backwards
means right backwards is a crucial thing because until you know the ending you don't actually know
what your story is about for instance if if you're telling a story in which someone is trying to
save their sister from lions then whether or not they actually do save their sister and how they
do it do they do it by overcoming their fear of lions or do they do it by learning lion language
and telling the lions to stop that's going to be what the story is about until you know that last
thing the thing that resolves the tension you don't really know how to write anything else so
work backwards really means know your ending once you know the ending everything else makes sense
in a different way because you know that it's an obstacle towards that or a step towards that
when you were asked to take out that core part of the one script um did you go back to your outline
and you saw it there I don't know if it was like the midpoint or where it was and then try
to reiterate like how did when you went to that what was your reaction to seeing that actually
I i totally failed on the first time I had to do this so I'll tell you about the second time
when I succeeded at it but the important thing is if you're taking out the core of a story
if you're talking about the essential center of the story it's not going to be in one place the
horrible thing the reason that you can't do it is because it's in every scene and that every single
action the person's taking is about a thing and if they say let's not do that thing then you're
really in trouble because you have to rewrite everything and worse than rewrite everything
you don't have any reason to do the other thing so you don't just tear it out you have to replace it
I was working on a thriller it was about a schizophrenic woman living in New York she
had just been released from a mental hospital and she's living in a crappy poor apartment
in hell's kitchen and the woman next door to her is having an affair with a police officer
a street cop and the they have an argument the lovers have an argument and during the argument
they the woman grabs the cops gun it goes off while he's trying to get it back and he kills her
the schizophrenic woman hears all this through the wall and tries to leave and when she does the cop
sees her and the rest of the thriller is what's going to happen about that I was in a very ornate
1970s character-based kind of frame of mind so not only did I add that but I added two more
characters one was an evil sergeant who was trying to force the cop who was actually not a bad guy
to kill the witness so the villain is actually the murderer's boss
the woman who has the witness has nowhere to go no no one's gonna listen to her she's schizophrenic
she says she heard something to the wall what you know um so the one person that she had to
turn to in my first draft of the story was a guy who wasn't orderly in the hospital where she was
and he was very kind to her and she finds him and she tells him what happened she asked for his help
that was a very ornate complex set of relationships and
Jody Foster's company loved it but it was difficult and they bless them they
gave me a lot of money and a lot of time and they worked with me and we worked
on it trying to figure out how to make it a little more acceptable to the studio system
and the executive there was Meg LeFauve who is now a phenomenal teacher and writer um and
we worked on it and she never asked the thing that I knew we needed but she never said could we cut
one of these four characters you've got a thriller with four main characters and I eventually said
I think there's a way to get rid of the guy that the mentally ill person goes to now that
was taking out the core of the story because by the end of the story they have teamed up to
defeat the evil sergeant and so I was removing the center of the story and I had been asked before in
other jobs to remove the center of the story and it just ruined my life so in this case I thought
you know I asked the essential question what is this story about and the story was about
this woman who knew that she had heard a real thing but because of her disability people were
not taking her seriously and the people who were taking her seriously were trying to kill her right
she's the center of the story and I had divided her action among two people I thought that was
cool as a writing exercise it is cool as a movie for jody foster it's not cool it was a dumb choice
but on the other hand when I wrote it jody foster wasn't going to do it so um once I moved into
that position I thought you know what this woman's character needs to hold the whole story on herself
and the relationship really is about her and the poor policemen in between her and the villain
so from a four-way story I made it a three-way story it was better it was a better version now
I had worked really hard on the four-way version and I loved it and I was very proud of myself
for recognizing that there are even with something that is like I think it's great
the original version but it's not the only way to do it and that was a real breakthrough for me to
recognize that something that I loved and felt right also had another version that I loved and
eventually felt was even more right the triangle version was much more powerful and the characters
became much more interesting so how do you do it you look at what is the real center of the story
the center of the story was this woman that because of her disability had very limited
ability to defend herself or get help and how she found the resources of communicating with people
to solve that problem did the film ever get made with another last no it didn't and they tried they
tried so hard they were wonderful um they they did but it was just a really hard project at a really
hard time and there's a lot of times when something you don't get all the pieces together
and if you follow the trades you'll often see this happening where a passion project for someone
but it requires to get the right alignment of stars and financing and all these other things
have to come together and everyone has to believe in it for all their own reasons
it's a frankly a astonishing that anything gets made at all
I would watch that movie me too yeah yeah that's well it's it's powerful
but um but the answer is how do you remove the center of your story and the answer is
you look for where it is in the story and you'll usually find it's it's not where you're the
thing you're clinging to because the thing you're clinging to is clearly making people uncomfortable
and if enough people are telling you something is not working for them you have to come to
a choosing point you have to say I want it to work for me and I don't care about anybody else
but if an if a lot of people are saying I really love this but it's not working in
this way you have to think about is there something about that that you can rethink
the other thing is sometimes you have to remove the heart of your story and then you better just
replace it find a new heart find a new core to the story that works well and the story will
keep living wow that was like so metaphorically well-turned yeah with with this story was was
the schizophrenic woman was it her journey out of um the hospital into quote normalized life or was
it also getting people to regard her as that was actually one of the big problems was it was very
important to me to fairly portray what often is not shown in movies most movies are like well
if they could just get sympathy they'd be cured and the reality of her illness was that she was
not going to get all over it with an insight she had a serious mental illness and the question was
how can she communicate and gain others trust and learn to trust them in order to get help
and so one of the hardest things was essentially a lot of people wanted it to become
a story about someone who's a neglected action hero and and that's not what what the company
wanted you know they really respected the point of the script and certainly not what I intended
I wanted to try and talk about what it's like to have a mental illness and need to work with it.
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