As with everything involving screenwriting rules it seems that everyone has a different and definitive way to do things. I am at the point of writing my treatment but I have some concerns involving format.
I've done some searching and have found some contain dialogue, some do not, some have scene headings, some do not, some have capitalized character introductions, some do not, and some contain editorial comments, and others do not.
I am having a difficult time writing the treatment without including large chunks of dialogue. "Explaining" a conversation without dialogue is coming across as pedantic and dull, in my experience writing this thing. Any advice regarding this?
Is 10-30 pages adequate?
Thanks.
You only write a treatment under two circumstances. One, when you're working as a professional and somebody is paying you to write one or has asked you to write one (and you really want the job so you do it, even though you really shouldn't).
The other time is when you're doing it for yourself as part of the process of writing a spec.
In the former case, you write it whichever way they want it. In the latter case, do it whichever way you want.
Regarding dialogue, unless it's some particular line that serves some critical purpose, you want to avoid it, the same way that you want to avoid getting into too much specific detail in action scenes or sequences.
That's not the purpose of writing a treatment. What's important, in treatment-writing, is to take a step back from the dialogue, or the particular action and focus on the "story-content" of a particular scene. Not what they are saying or what they are doing, but rather, what is the story purpose of that dialogue exchange or that action.
That is, two characters meet. They are in one story condition at the beginning of the conversation. Over the course of the conversation, something changes. At the end of the conversation, they are now in a different "story condition" than they were at the beginning.
Okay -- for instance.
Charles Foster Kane is standing on a street corner in the rain. He's splashed with mud. Annoyed, he hears the sound of a girl's laughter. He looks up and sees the source -- a pretty young girl, Susan Alexander, watching him. He's angry at first. Embarrassed, she invites him up to her rooms to clean up. Still a bit annoyed, he agrees. Up stairs, they chat, and he finds himself unaccountably drawn to the decidedly lower class, yet strangely innocent young girl.
That's the kind of thing that you'd put in a treatment. You don't need to write their conversation. What you need is to describe the *story content* of the scene.
That means that you need to know what it is that *happens* in every scene, not just what the characters say in a scene.
What happens in a scene is the reason that the scene is in the movie. What the characters say and do may change -- may change drastically. In fact, characters may come and go in the scene. Where the scene happens and how it happens may change profoundly over the course of rewriting, while "what happens" -- in the sense of the reason for the scene being there, remains the same.
For instance, you may write in a treatment, "With Gloria's help, Bob and Larry manage a daring escape from the maximum security prison."
How does Gloria help? You don't know. How do they escape from a maximum security prison? You may have no idea. Are there other people involved in the jailbreak. Maybe. Who knows? You haven't written it yet. You haven't figured it out.
But the point is -- for the purposes of a treatment, you know exactly what's going on in that sequence -- it's the "jail break sequence. Gloria's going to figure in the action. Bob and Larry are going to stage some sort of daring escape. And it's going to be a big action sequence. Details to follows.
Now, if something critical were to happen. Bob got shot. Gloria got killed along the way. That is, something "within" the sequence that's going to change the story trajectory -- then you'd need to include it. But otherwise -- you don't have to.
Include what you need to convey the "content" of scenes and sequences. Don't even necessarily worry about describing each and every scene. Chances are, you haven't even thought of every scene and won't think of every scene at the time you're writing the treatment, especially if you've got a lot of expository material. It'd get awfully awkward if you tried to convey that stuff, in the treatment, in the same way that you'd be bound to convey it in the course of the finished screenplay.
Often, in a treatment, you just lay that material out, "As we come to find out, Gunther was orphaned in World War II and grew up struggling for existence in the fire-bombed ruins of Dresden." Seriously, just lay that stuff out. Don't even try to finesse it.
When you write the script you *will* have to finesse it. But don't worry about it when you're writing the treatment.
As to length, there's no hard and fast rule. I know people who've written treatments as long as forty pages -- they're essentially finishes screenplays except for the dialogue. And others that are as short as three or four pages.
Mine tend to come out to be around ten pages. I know that some producers prefer them shorter because they don't like to read as much. Four or five pages -- but it can be hard to get in as much stuff as you'd like (if you're writing for other people) and keep it interesting.
That's always the challenge. Just as a movie is always at its worst when its in a rough cut (it is, by the way), so a screen story is really always at its worst when it's in the form of a treatment. Thrills aren't thrilling. Comedy isn't funny. Scares aren't scary. Sad stuff doesn't make you cry -- but every producer in the world is sure (just as they're sure that they can look at your rough cut and see the finished movie, which they can't), they're equally sure that they can read a four page or a ten page treatment and "see" the finished hundred and ten page screenplay - and from thence to the finished movie.
Which they also can't.
That's why every professional screenwriter hates to have producers and execs get their hands on treatments.
NMS
