Is Your Treatment Less of a Treat? (How to Make it Sell for You)

The function of a treatment is to sell your screenplay. There are no right or wrong ways to write a treatment—just more effective ways.

For the record, I’ve only been asked for a treatment a handful of times, although, along with all my marketing material, I always have one written up. Typically, if your pitch goes well, you deliver a completed movie script. (This isn’t a reason not to write one, it’s simply an observation.)

RELATED: The Noodles and the Tanks: Pitching Hollywood

If you haven’t written your movie script yet, this is a great way to draw up a draft of your story. I’ve written treatments too lengthy to hand out to studios, and then kept them as a plot outline that helped guide me in writing the full screenplay.

What is a Treatment?

A treatment can be considered a prose narrative. It presents the main story idea, characters and conflict in a way that helps the reader to understand, quickly, what the movie script is about. If a screenplay is the blueprint for a film, the treatment is the blueprint for a screenplay.

What Goes Into a Treatment?

A treatment can be anywhere from one to thirty pages. But, let’s face it, if you’re writing up to 30 pages for a treatment, it should start to look more like a film deck (more on that later), rather than a treatment, and realistically no one wants to read that many pages. So, go for brevity.

Here’s What it Should Include:

 This should go without saying, but include your name and information on the first page, make sure your phone number and email are correct. (You’d be surprised how many people go through so much effort to find out their phone number or email is wrong!)
 If you WGA registered your screenplay, put the registration number with your information. If your script hasn’t been written yet, register your treatment with WGA. (Yes, you can register a treatment!) Go here: https://www.wgawregistry.org/
 Start with your logline at the top of your page

RELATED: The Single Sentence That will SELL Your Script

 Write out each main character and key side characters; give a brief, but exciting, description of each one. Stay away from things like the color of their hair, instead focus on what it is that makes them unique
 In paragraph form, clearly state the premise of your film
 Get to the heart of the story right away
 Keep it succinct, and relatively brief; it’s a loose narrative pitch of your movie script, so it should not be comprehensive
 Make it engaging right away—after all, you’re selling something meant for entertainment purposes, even if this is a documentary. It needs to grab the reader’s attention
 Write to be emotionally engaging. It may be worth pushing your script aside as you make this a creative, appealing piece—otherwise you may be tempted to write a blow by blow of your screenplay when you want to write about is the main characters and the central plot
 Formatting is crucial. It should be easy on the eyes, that means user-friendly and straightforward
 Make headings, the way you would in a blog. It breaks up the chunks of information, so it’s easier to read
 Shorter is better because, and I’ll be straightforward here, you’ll be leaving it behind, or sending it to people with short attention spans (and who are inundated with content)
 Try to use any kind of artwork, photos or illustrations to catch the reader’s attention; we’re dealing with humans here, and people are attracted to visually attractive documents. Don’t steal things off the web—take your own photos, have a friend illustrate, or buy stock photos

After you’ve written your first draft, go back and shorten it. You don’t want to summarize each scene, or even convey the exposition. Let the movie script do that for you. The treatment is vivid and dramatic. Ultimately, it’s the short story of what your movie script is about.