Example of a Treatment - Nellie Bly

Blackwell’s Island

Treatment 9/16/05

By Sean Hood

Read the parent article about treatments and beat sheets on Genre Hacks: Writing The Feature Script: Week Three - The Treatment

Biography (Backstory) of Nellie Bly:

Elizabeth Jane Cochran (Nellie Bly) was born May 5, 1864, the third child of her father’s second marriage. There are several vivid events in her childhood and teenaged years that clearly shaped her bold and rebellious personality.

For example, little girls at the time were usually dressed in gray or brown wool with black stockings, but she always dressed in pink with white stockings. Even then she liked to stand out. Her lifelong nickname among friends and fellow journalists was “Pink.”

When Pink was six, her father died without a will. He had been extremely rich and she had lived in a big house on "mansion row." However, her mother, as the second wife, received only a small portion of his estate. She and her family found themselves living on about $16 a week paid out in a monthly allowance from the attorney who handled her father’s trust. Her family’s social status plummeted. She went from being a rich girl to a poor girl less than a single year.

So although Pink would eventually emerge as sophisticated, well-read, and educated in high culture, she had first-hand experience with severe economic hardship.

As she got older “Pink” rebelled at elementary school, with it’s nightmare of copybooks and rote memorization. She already had a natural reflex to challenge authority. A childhood friend remembered her as “a hellion.”

When Pink was nine her mother remarried, but her stepfather turned out to be a mean, abusive drunk. For five years her family life was filled with horrific emotional and physical violence. At one point, Pink physically defended her mother, knocking her stepfather unconscious, and probably saved her mother’s life. It’s not surprising that as an adult, though she was physically small and pretty, she was fearless about confrontation.

When her mother finally filed for divorce, the proceedings went badly; her stepfather accused her of lying. The trial turned however on the stunning testimony of Pink, aged 14, who shocked the judge with her blunt descriptions of her home life. Even as a teen she told the unvarnished truth.

Two years later, when the lawyer handling the trust informed them that they had no money left, it was Pink, aged 16, who was outraged and took action. The lawyer was a rich man, a relative, and someone who had profited by her father's death. She sued him for malpractice and won. Even as a teen, she felt self-designated to right injustice.

In 1880, her mother with her three youngest children in tow moved to Pittsburgh. Pink became determined to support them. Unfortunately, she was unable to find suitable employment. She tried tutoring, nannying, and housekeeping, but she felt unsurprisingly that the jobs were beneath her talents.

Ultimately, her career started when she wrote a fiery letter to The Pittsburg Dispatch. In a column entitled "Women's Sphere" a columnist had admonished every member of "the fair sex" to make "her house a little paradise, herself playing the part of angel." It suggested, in so many words, that women shouldn’t work.

Pink's response to the column was so effectively written and persuasive that the managing editor tracked her down and gave her a job. She already seemed to have a distinct voice and a natural talent for shocking detail and moving narrative.

However, she also had personal charisma and a disarming smile that allowed her to get away with doing and saying outrageous things (for a woman) without seeming abrasive or “radical.” She could charm anyone, and her personality was always half the “story.”

By the time she wrote her second piece, she took the pen name Nelly Bly - a name from a popular song of the time.  She wrote about factory girls, their working conditions and lifestyle. This assignment taught her the difference between what people said in public and what they said anonymously.

On the one hand, interviews with women on the factory floor were blithe: their employers were peaches. The factories were clean, healthy places where one was lucky to have a steady job. Their lifestyles after work were upstanding and chaste.

However, when Pink interviewed the working girls informally she got a different story. The women reported picking up men on streetcars after work, going to beer halls, getting drunk, and then having sex. When Pink asked if they didn't “fear losing their reputations,’ they replied that they had no reputations to lose. They lived in cheap rooming houses, worked miserable 16-hour-days for dirt wages doing boring, repetitive tasks. They feared rampant illness and industrial accidents. There was no way to improve their nightmare lives, so they took their amusement anyway they could get it.

Many of the details of their lives were “unprintable” at the time, but Nellie Bly saw that to get the real story on explosive subjects she had to work from the inside and get people to reveal what was really going on. These were the only stories she was interested in.

So, when the Pittsburg Dispatch kept assigning her articles for the "women's pages," (society weddings, fashion reports, flower shows) she quit the staff and traveled free lance to Mexico. Thirty times over the next six months the Dispatch and other papers carried columns under the headline "Nellie! In Mexico."

Her Mexican experience also underscored the difference between soft news and the truth. While there, Nellie became aware that criticizing the government could get her thrown in jail or killed; so, she wrote fluff articles about costumes and fiestas. But, when she got home she wrote all about corruption in the government, oppression of the Indian population, the obstruction of a free press and other “unspeakable” matters.

At this time she became a minor sensation in the small papers of the Mid-West. She learned how to ferret out the truth, to write about it in a sensational way that would sell papers, and to SELL HERSELF in the process. Her career was always an interesting mix of moral crusade and self promotion.

However, when the editors dared to give her another "women's" assignment she quit again and headed for New York. She left her former employer’s a note:

    Gentlemen, I am off for New York. Look out for me.

                   -    Bly

Remember that at this point she is still only 24 years old.

Arriving in NYC in May 1887, she was still unemployed in August, and slowly running out of cash. Ironically what little money she had she made by sending fashion features back to The Pittsburg Dispatch and by doing a series of articles on why NYC papers didn't hire women reporters.

The day she lost a purse containing her last dollar, she borrowed carfare from her landlady and went to the offices of The New York World. She talked her way past the guards and stole up the elevator to see the managing editor. She came with a list of subjects/stunts of undercover reporting that she was prepared to do and said that if he didn't retain her she would go to another paper.

When she left the building, she had been hired by The World to feign insanity and get herself committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.

There were other published reports of mistreatment of patients taken from "sources." Two keepers in another institution had been indicted for manslaughter in the killing of a patient. Two nurses made charges "seriously affecting the character" of two physicians (code for sexual assault). Blackwell's Island Facility responded by suspending the nurses.

By Oct. 9, 1887 she had returned from Blackwell’s and her first installment spanned two entire newspaper pages. She got the by-line Nellie Bly when most New York reporters weren’t given credit by name, and she landed a permanent staff appointment.

Two months later TEN DAYS IN A MAD HOUSE appeared in book form and she was a national sensation.

CHARACTER LIST:

Asylum Staff – all of whom seem more “insane” than the patients.

Nurse Bodfish – The Head Nurse on Nellie’s Ward. She views insanity as a moral problem and sees the insane as subhuman wretches who “deserve” to be punished for their behavior. She is obsessed with order and obedience. Her religious fervor borders on mania.

Doctor Frick – An incompetent yet arrogant man who doesn’t pay any attention to what his patients tell him. He speaks in a learned and grandiloquent way, but his theories are pure quackery… especially to a 21^st century audience.

(There are only 12 physicians total for over 1500 patients.)

Nurse Sweet – A heavy brute of a woman who chews tobacco. She takes sadistic pleasure in physically beating the patients, humiliating them, and subjecting them to ice baths and restraints. It’s shocking to see a woman delight in torture.

Nurse Springer – A perverse nurse who makes it her business to procure patients for the male attendants. With Nurse Sweet, she enjoys humiliating the women under her control. However, what goes on in the wards at night is starting to get to her.

Dr. Williams – Blackwell’s superintendent, a tired, old man who rarely spends any time on the island and doesn’t realize that horrors are perpetrated by his staff.

Three Patients whom Nellie befriends are (by today’s standards) all perfectly sane.

Juana Espinoza – A poor, immigrant woman who speaks no English. No one can understand her except Nellie Bly (who traveled to Mexico after a story). She is shy and obedient, but doesn’t understand why she’s there.

Mary White – As a teenager, Mary had a frivolous affair with a coach driver, and her family committed her for “nymphomania.” Ironically, it is by providing sex that she is able to win special treatment and survive in the asylum.

Annabel Smith – Her husband and father conspired to have her committed because she “embarrassed” the family with a poor business deal. She is nurturing, patient and kind, but has lost all hope of getting out.

Sammy O’Neil – another Pittsburg reporter, the official NYC correspondent.  Although he is extremely charming, and Nellie’s only friend in NYC, he is also a drunk. She is depending on him to get her out of the Asylum if she can’t do it herself.

The villains of this story are ordinary people in the outside world. Only in the dehumanizing context of the asylum do they become sadistic and cruel.

ACT ONE:

SEQUENCE ONE: Nellie concocts the stunt.

• Teaser: We jolt the audience with a short, terrifying, impressionistic glimpse of Nellie Bly in an asylum cell lit by oil lamps. Broken and hysterical, she rants, “I’m not mad. I don’t belong here.” The shadows of unseen tormentors mock her.

(Note: The poetic image of the floating body may be worked in as well)

• We meet Nellie Bly three weeks earlier - a charismatic, articulate, self-assured journalist, trying to make it in New York, but after four months, she’s had no luck.

During the highly competitive “newspaper wars,” Nellie attempts to land a job at The Times, The Sun, The Tribune, but the lower level clerks and beat reporters don’t take her seriously and won’t let her in to see the editors.

Nellie hears children singing a chilling nursery rhyme about Blackwell’s Island. She gets an idea. Down to her last dollar, she makes a last desperate attempt to get a job.

• The Pitch. Nellie brazenly talks her way past guards, secretaries and junior editors right into the office of Joseph Pulitzer, owner of NYC’s most popular paper, The World. She pretends she is doing a flattering article for papers in the Mid West.

The interview goes badly; Pulitzer suspects she’s really pulling a stunt to land a job, but Nellie uses her wit and charm to spin the disaster to her advantage.

Isn’t a “stunt” just what the editors of The World need to sell newspapers? She pitches three outrageous ideas for undercover articles.

Pulitzer likes her spunk and is intrigued by the asylum idea. But, he thinks she’s too frail and inexperienced to pull it off; he hires to write a “woman’s interest” article.

• The Society Party – Nellie must cover an event launching the season’s newest corsets. The assignment is far beneath her talents and her blood boils. The audience is reminded of the rigid etiquette, naiveté and prudery of Victorian ladies.

(Note: Perhaps Dr. Williams is there lobbying for charitable donations to the woman’s asylum on Blackwell’s island. TBD)

• The Library. Nellie goes to the library to research corsets and fashion, but on the way there she sees Blackwell’s Island across the river…

She researches asylums instead. The audience is reminded of the primitive state of psychiatry in 1888. We are at a time before Freud and neurobiology, when Asylums were dominated by quackery and superstition. She learns about the more humane and modern theories of a famous Blackwell’s superintendent, Dr. Williams.

She practices acting “insane” in front of the mirror. Nellie resolves to get the Blackwell’s story on her own. If Pulitzer doesn’t want it, she’ll take it to The Times.

SEQUENCE TWO: Nellie gets herself committed.

• Nellie brags to another reporter, Sammy O’Neil, that she is going to go ahead with the asylum stunt. He’s the only one she tells.

She tells him “If I am not out by Wednesday, October 10^th, check up on me. I’ll be using the name Nellie Brown.” Nellie is recklessly self-confident, and he is her only friend in New York. He enthusiastically agrees to help her…

… but after she leaves, Sammy jokes with the bartender, and we realize that Sammy would as soon steal the story as help her. He’s charmingly two-faced.

• Nellie goes undercover. Posing as a poor woman, Nellie takes a room at a low rent boarding house, and she spooks the other mild-mannered tenants by acting delusional. By midnight, the others fear Nellie will murder her in her sleep.  

Nellie’s is taken away by policemen in the morning.

• Nellie faces the judge, and baffles him. Because she is young, beautiful and clearly upper class (given away by her grammar and diction), she is treated very differently than the other women in her situation. She notices a poor Spanish Speaking woman, Juana, is ruled insane for no other reason than no one can understand her.

She is scrutinized by doctors, but Nellie cleverly tricks them all. It’s TOO easy.

• Nellie travels to Blackwell’s Island on the ferry.

At the sight of Blackwell’s, Nellie wonders what she has gotten herself into.

ACT TWO:

           

Note: The outside of Blackwell’s is well kept and beautiful. The entrance lobby, with its baroque spiral staircase, is stunning. The visiting rooms are comfortable and charming. The face the asylum shows to the world gives no indication of the nightmare inside the wards.

SEQUENCE THREE: The Shock of Asylum life.

• Nellie is stripped of identity. Her clothes and notebooks are taken. This stylish, well mannered, Victorian woman is dragged naked into icy baths, her hair is cut short, and she is dressed in a coarse uniform. It’s like she’s entering a prison.

• The Ward by Day. With the fifteen other patients in her ward, Nellie is put to work. They wash sheets and scrub floors. It’s more like a sweatshop than a hospital. The nurses themselves do no work.

• In order to teach the women the virtues of obedience, patience, and humility, Nurse Bodfish forces the women to complete projects that the modern audience recognizes as obsessive/compulsive.

She has them count and recount hundreds of tin spoons. She makes them sort crates of potatoes by size, shape and color. She has them hand sew the torn seams of old uniforms. Then, in the evening, she orders them to tear the seams back open so that they can sew them together again the next day.

• Nellie is quiet an observant, but she is shocked to see Nurse Sweet and Nurse Springer take sadistic pleasure in humiliating the patients and forcing them to work - especially the pretty ones, who seem stricken with fear and dread.

• When Nellie arouses the anger of the head nurse by declining to eat a moldy slice of bread, Annabelle takes her under her wing.

Annabelle explains that in order to be left alone by the nurses and doctors, she must follow the rules and avoid calling attention to herself. “Left alone?” asks Nellie, “But aren’t they supposed to be curing us?”

Says Annabelle, “Treatment is exactly what we’re working so hard to avoid.”

Nellie realizes that most of the women in the ward have been there for years, even though none of them show any sign of mental illness.

• The examination. Dr. Frick takes measurements of Nellie’s ears, feet and breasts, and he concludes that her insanity is congenital. Nurse Bodfish gives fabricated (and insulting) descriptions of Nellie’s symptoms.

The indignity of the absurd exam pushes Nellie to “break character.” She demands to know how he can determine her sanity without speaking to her directly. How can he treat the other patients if he never visits the ward?

Nellie’s intelligence and assertiveness are seen as further evidence of insanity. She is punished for speaking out with traumatic hydrotherapy and ice baths.

• The ward is terrifying by night. Nellie awakes to the sounds of disturbing moans, screams and weeping. It sounds like beatings, or torture… or perhaps something far worse.

SEQUENCE FOUR: Nellie rebels.

• Character development. Nellie discretely interviews the women for her article, discovering the forces that sent them to the asylum. Nellie realizes that most patients were simply inconvenient or rebellious women who were sent away by their husbands and fathers to get them out of the way.

Now the patients lost all sense of how outrageous their incarceration is and lost all hope of ever getting out. (Annabelle thinks that when her son to reaches 18, he might petition for her release. But that is eight years away…)

• Nurse Springer asks Nellie if she likes handsome men; she asks if she would like to meet one here in the asylum. Nellie assumes she is just teasing her… until another patient, Mary, explains that the nurse is dead serious.

• Nellie Snaps. When Juana falls ill with fever, Nellie forgets herself, and she demands that her friend be given extra water and medicine. This enrages Bodfish.

• Annabelle steps in and attempts to physically defend Nellie. Nellie watches in horror and the five attendants surround Annabelle like riot police and brutally hammer her with the handles of broomsticks as she crumples to the ground.

Later, Annabelle is thrown in the violent ward. Mary whispers that this is the end of Annabelle. The violent ward will surely drive her mad. Truly unspeakable things happen there. Nellie feels responsible.

• Tricking Nurse Springer into leaving the door unlocked, Nellie creeps through the asylum, trying to discover what happened to Annabelle. In an extremely tense sequence, she quietly slips around corners and thresholds, fearful of discovery.

She witnesses the orderlies and nurses humiliating the patients by forcing them to dance, recite obscene poetry, and take demeaning positions.

• Note: Here we are exploring the Abu Graib theme - what happens in an institution where the poorly trained and unsupervised caretakers no longer have empathy for the people who are under their control.

• As Nellie gets lost trying to make her way back to her ward, she catches a terrifying glimpse of the surgery rooms.

• The next day, Nellie sees the superintendent, Dr. Williams, from afar on one of his sporadic visits to the island. He is old and his health is failing – much like the institution he is supposed to be running. He has completely lost touch.

• The Show for Visitors. When a group of wealthy benefactors visit the asylum. Nellie and a few other “presentable” patients are put on display in a quaint sitting room with paintings and a piano. The hypocrisy is sickening.

The asylum is a charitable organization, and they go to great lengths to make the institution seem comfortable and civilized during RARE visits from the outside.

Nellie recognizes one of the women from the society party she covered. She has an opportunity to tell her who she really is and escape, but she remains silent. She chooses to stay, to find out what has happened to Annabelle.

• (MIDPOINT) The Nellie directly confronts Nurse Bodfish, sticking her with the pin of a sewing needle, and deliberately gets herself sent to the violent ward.

• Note: Nellie’s goal getting into the asylum was to get the story, get a job, and become a celebrity. However, as she witnesses the situation of Annabelle, Mary and Juana, her goal changes to helping these women survive and get out.

SEQUENCE FIVE: The Violent Ward.

• It’s far worse here than Nellie could have imagined. Nellie is heavily drugged (injections) and then kissed and groped by the male attendants. She realizes that patients here are violently abused and even raped, and there’s no one to appeal to.

• She discovers that the male attendants are inmates from the prison and workhouse on Blackwell’s, brought over to work at the asylum.

• Stuck in a common room with delusional and aggressive patients, Nellie has to use her wits to avoid assault. The slightest misstep could set them off. The miserable patients rave that the attendants are murderers.

But Nellie can’t find Annabelle anywhere in the ward.

• Note: During this sequence, Nellie becomes so drugged, disoriented, and paranoid of assault that she actually starts to lose her mind. The environment gets to her. Her goal changes from “getting the story” to escape.

• After a frustrating search, Nellie feigns seizures in order to get sent to the infirmary.

There she finds Annabelle who looks weak and emotionally shattered by some sort of operation - one so painful and humiliating that she won’t describe it.

Nellie gets further glimpses of the barbaric state of 19^th century surgery.

• Annabelle sees Dr. Frick and tries to help herself and Nellie by telling him of the abuse in the violent ward. However, Nurse Bodfish covers up by telling Dr. Frick that Annabelle is suffering from violent hallucinations and delusions.

• Bodfish vows to punish Annabelle for making her look bad to the doctor. But when they are sent back to the violent ward, Nellie convinces Dr. Frick to allow her and Annabelle to sleep in the same room. Nellie hopes somehow to defend her.

• In desperation, Nellie confesses that she is a journalist, and warns that anything they do to Annabelle will appear in her story. But the violent ward attendants just laugh; a woman claiming to be a journalist in 1888 sounds as crazy as a patient calling herself the Queen of England.

Nellie has played her last card. There is no way out.

• During a harrowing night, every footstep or jangling key outside their door makes Anna and Nellie fear that they are about to be killed. But they survive until dawn.

• Nellie leaves the room to see Nurse Bodfish. Nellie submits; she apologizes, flatters her, and begs that she and Anna be allowed to go back to the original ward. Bodfish, pleased with Nellie’s submissions, finally agrees.

• But when Nellie returns to get Annabelle, she finds the older woman dead on her cot - her head and body swollen with bruises. Dr. Frick dismisses the “murder,” concluding that Annabelle died in the night of “convulsions.”

SEQUENCE SIX: Nellie plots her escape.

• Nellie is sent back to her original ward, and discovers that these “accidental” deaths are common when a patient becomes a threat to the nurses. A graveyard on the island is filled with the bodies of women who caused the attendants trouble.

• Mary reveals that she has been spayed as “therapy” for her nymphomania and to keep her from passing her madness on to her children. Its clear now how sexual abuse happens at the asylum without women getting pregnant.

• Nellie and Mary attempt to escape the asylum. Mary has been planning the escape for months. They use Bodfish’s insane projects to their advantage.

They don the uniforms they are supposed to be sewing, pose as kitchen workers delivering the supplies they are supposed to be sorting, and attempt to sneak out of the complex onto the ferry. Their attempt fails.

• In order to avoid a terrible beating for the escape attempt, Mary betrays Nellie. Mary lies to the doctors about Nellie’s behavior, suggesting that Nellie is sexually obsessed and hallucinating about abuse to the other patients.

• In a drug induced delirium, Nellie is examined by doctors who conclude that her sexual organs and genitals have been over-stimulated by self-abuse, causing her hysteria, and that they need to be removed.

Ironically, the doctors tones are learned and kind. They genuinely believe they are helping Nellie with her problem.

A “circumcision” is scheduled for the following evening…

…Wednesday, October 10^th.

• With Nellie in her most gut-wrenching predicament, we cut back to Manhattan. Pulitzer is happy with Nellie’s first article on corsets, and has decided to hire her to do her Blackwell’s asylum idea, but no one can find her.

The editors track down Sammy O’Neil, but he is drunk and no help to them.

Then Sammy realizes that it is the morning of Wednesday, October 10^th, the day he is supposed to go get Nellie if he hadn’t heard from her. His conscience is stirred.

Slurring and stumbling, he makes a trip to the asylum, as he had promised.

When he reaches Blackwell’s, he asks the nurses to see “Nellie Bly” or “Mary Jane Chochran” or “Pink Chochran,” they claim to have no record of her. He is too hung-over to remember that she told him she would register under the name “Nellie Brown.”

Nurse Springer overhears the conversation, particularly when Sammy mentions that Nellie is a journalist. She almost says something...

But the moment is lost; she lets Sammy walk out, back to the ferry.

ACT THREE:

• Nellie has been thrown in a tiny cell in the basement level, the terrifying place we saw in the opening teaser. Here the grotesquely and dangerously insane are kept. She has truly been thrown into the snake pit.

• Nurse Springer approaches Nurse Bodfish. She explains that two years ago, when she was living in Pittsburgh, her sister was quoted in a newspaper article, an expose about working women in factories. Springer shows Bodfish the clipping she kept for her scrapbook. At the top of the item is a picture of the author, Nellie Bly.

“Shouldn’t we tell the doctors?” asks the young nurse.

But Bodfish is afraid of exposure, and she warns Springer never to mention this to ANYONE ever again.

• Nellie dreads nightfall. What to fear most? Rape by the orderlies? Attack from one of the psychotic patients. Genital mutilation under the scalpel of the doctors?

• In a chilling scene, Nurse Bodfish visits her and explains why she dislikes her so intensely and why she believes Nellie deserves what is happening to her. Nellie understands that Bodfish will insure that she doesn’t survive the operation.

• When Dr. Frisk and the surgeons arrive at her cell to examine her in preparation for her operation, Nellie makes a final, desperate plea.  Surely, now that she is lucid, they will listen to her and realize their mistake.

But the doctors gently and kindly explain to her that her fantasy about being a famous reporter is just a delusion, but she will feel much better after the operation. Nurse Bodfish smiles at her from the hall.

She demands to speak to the superintendent, but they inform her that Dr. Williams has fallen ill, and is about to leave the Island. 

Nellie looks to Nurse Springer who hovers over her. For a moment, it seems that Springer might speak up, but Bodfish scowls, and the nurse holds her tongue…

… and gives Nellie Bly the injection.

• Nellie is left alone in her cell waiting for the drugs to take effect. Nurse Springer is the last to leave. She whispers her goodbye to Nellie…

“I’m not a bad person,” Says Springer. “It’s this place. We all lose ourselves here.”

Then Springer slips Nellie a key, and reveals that the injection she gave her was only water. She distracts the orderlies so that Nellie can sneak out…


ESCAPE SEQUENCE:

 Can Nellie get to doctor Williams before he leaves the island? The Asylum is large. And the Nurses and orderlies soon discover that Nellie is missing.

• The Chase. The nurses and orderlies mount a search and we fear they are ready to kill her if she is found. The complex is like a maze, and Nellie gets lost in it.

She is almost caught several times, but the other patients help her at every turn, hiding her, urging her on, and giving her hints about the right direction.

We intercut Dr. Williams, walking through the Asylum with the other doctors on his way out. Nellie gets close, but misses him as he turns down a different hall.

• Nellie is cornered by Nurse Sweet. There’s physical confrontation, and Nellie seems grossly overmatched, but she outwits the much bigger woman and knocks her unconscious.

• Climax: Just as Dr. Williams walks out of the building, Nellie bursts into the group of doctors seeing him off. Nurse Bodfish and others attempt to restrain and silence her, but Nellie is able to quote Dr. Williams own words (from her earlier research) back to him, and his eyes light up in recognition…

… and he asks to speak with her.

• Epilogue: In a short, cathartic series of images, we see that Nellie publishes her story and becomes an instant sensation. At Blackwell’s, there is an attempt at a massive cover up, but the testimony of several female patients supports Nellie’s account.

However, Juana and Mary have disappeared. Nellie is heartbroken and she embarks on a world-renowned career exposing injustice.   

Read the parent article about treatments and beat sheets on Genre Hacks: Writing The Feature Script: Week Three - The Treatment

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