How to Write a Movie Treatment

Have you written a screenplay or a teleplay that you hope to get read by an agent. (You probably won't get it read by a legitimate producer with access to a large enough budget to make your vision come palpably alive because most producers won't read spec scripts so as to avoid the potential for a lawsuit should they actually make a movie that bears a resemblance to a screenplay they rejected.) And since most agents are far too buy trying to buy back their souls from Satan, they prefer something known in the industry-and by the industry I mean, of course, the business-as a "treatment."

A treatment is a boiled-down prose version of your screenplay. Don't inject dialogue and for God's sake never suggest a camera angle or move. If your strength is dialogue, don't be ashamed to hire a professional prose ghostwriter for your treatment. You won't have to worry about sharing credit with the ghostwriter unless you accept any suggestions or changes; so don't! It is your screenplay, all a treatment doctor is doing is reshaping it from screenplay form to short story form.

The example of a treatment that I have written is based upon an unfinished screenplay which is in turn based upon an unfinished novel of mine. While I would never recommend sending in an unfinished novel manuscript, there is really not much wrong with sending in an unfinished treatment. In fact, it might even be a benefit. That way if an agent does get it to a producer, the producer can pretend that he his job has actual value by suggesting his own ending. There are several ways of writing a treatment and though it's not exactly unknown for treatments to be as long as thirty or forty pages, most are no longer than seven to ten. The shorter, the better, as long as you can get all the pertinent information in.

Treatment for Alison Wonderland