Screenwriting resource: Beat Sheet Central
H/T to Colt Hansen who emailed me a link to a great new screenwriting resource Beat Sheet Central. The host of the site Nick Jarecki explains:
I’m a screenwriter and a director, and I made this site for myself.
Often when I’m writing a film or teleplay, I like to go back and look at movies and TV shows in similar genres and see how they are constructed.
After a little while in the business, many writers come to agree that a movie or TV episode is all in the structure. That is to say– what happens in each scene.
Many writers work from something alternatively called a step outline, treatment, or beat sheet. I like beat sheet. The sheet describes the entire movie from start to finish, and breaks it into beats, or scenes. These are the key components that form the script.
The point of this site is to collect beat sheets for every movie and TV episode, generated by you, the users, by watching the pieces and writing down exactly what happens. I’ve kicked the site off with 20 beat sheets I’ve made myself. And to those of you brilliant women and men who wrote any produced movies, would you please share your beat sheets here, too?
Nick knows of what he speaks. Here’s his bio from the site:
Nicholas Jarecki is the director of the critically acclaimed Showtime documentary THE OUTSIDER (featuring James Toback, Woody Allen, Harvey Keitel, Robert Downey, Jr., and Neve Campbell). He is the author of the Doubleday 2002 book “Breaking In: How 20 Film Directors Got Their Start.” He is the co-writer (with Bret Easton Ellis) and producer of the screen adaptation of the bestselling novel THE INFORMERS (starring Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, Billy Bob Thornton, and Mickey Rourke.) Most recently Nick produced TYSON, the incendiary doc on the legendary heavyweight which won a special jury prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and opened theatrically to critical acclaim in May 2009. TYSON was nominated for an IFP / Gotham Best Documentary award in October 2009.
I got in touch with Nick to tell him I’d be featuring Beat Sheet Central, recounting to him:
When I first broke into the business, I had sold a spec script (K-9) — good fortune, yes — but in actuality, I knew very little about story structure. So I did what you did, breaking down perhaps 30 movies into beat sheets. It was a great exercise and I still have hard copies of a number of those movies.
I’m looking at some of my hard copy beat sheets right now: 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Running Scared, Die Hard, Stake-Out, Thelma and Louise, Terminator. We’ve done some in my UNC courses: Shakespeare in Love, Adaptation. There are others somewhere, I’ll have to dig them up.
If you haven’t ever done this exercise, you should. And if you have or do, check out the guidelines Nick has posted on his website, and upload them there. You’ll be doing the online screenwriting community a favor. I know I’ll be posting some there as soon as I get the chance.
And while you visit Beat Sheet Central, give Nick a shout-out and thank him for starting up this very cool resource website.
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