What Is a Treatment? Screenplay Treatment Format, Length and Example

What is a treatment in screenwriting?

A treatment is the story of your film written out as prose, in the present tense, from the opening image to the final one. It is longer than a synopsis and shorter than a script. It has no scene headings, no character cues and, with rare exceptions, no laid-out dialogue. A stranger who reads it should be able to describe the whole movie, including how it ends.

The word comes from the studio era, when a writer was hired to "treat" a property and turn it into something a studio could decide to make. That is still what it does. A treatment is a decision document: someone with money or influence reads it and decides whether to commission a script, option the idea or take the meeting.

Writers also use treatments for themselves. Prose will not let you skip from one set piece to the next without explaining how you got there, so it exposes gaps an outline hides. If you have a logline that works and a script that does not, the treatment is usually where the problem shows.

How long is a treatment?

Two to ten pages is the typical range for a feature. Shorter than two and it is a synopsis. Longer than ten and it has become one of the longer forms below, which have their own names and their own readers.

Whoever asked for the treatment sets the length. If a producer asks for five pages and you send twenty, you have demonstrated that you cannot compress, which is the skill being tested. If nobody has specified, aim for six to eight pages: long enough to show the second act exists, short enough to read in one sitting.

Genre moves the number. Comedies run short because elaboration flattens the jokes. Heists and mysteries run long because the reader needs to see that the mechanism works.

Screenplay treatment format: the conventions

There is no fixed template the way there is for a script, but readers expect the conventions below and notice when they are missing.

• Present tense, third person, throughout. "Ada opens the safe," not "Ada opened the safe." Present tense mirrors how an audience experiences a film; past tense reads like a report on a film that already exists.
• Prose paragraphs, not scenes. No sluglines, no character cues, no parentheticals, no transitions. If those appear, the reader assumes you pasted a script and stopped thinking.
• Character names in CAPS at first mention, with age. ADA, 34. Plain text after that. It lets a skimming reader find who someone is.
• Short paragraphs with white space. Three to six sentences each. A wall of text is read as a warning about the script.
• 12-point type, one-inch margins, numbered pages. Courier is not required. Treatments get printed and separated, and an unnumbered page is a lost page.
• A header block. Title, "Treatment by" and your name, genre, contact details and a logline. A full title page is optional for short treatments and expected for long ones.
• Subheads only when long. Under ten pages, none. Over ten, short act or sequence labels help a reader who is skipping to the ending.

Dialogue is allowed but rationed. One to three short quoted lines across the whole document, folded into the prose, is the working range: When she finally asks him, Ada says only, "I was never in the building." A page of laid-out dialogue in a treatment reads worse than either a script or prose would.

What to include in a treatment

What readers look for, in order:

1. Title, genre and logline at the top. The reader should know what kind of film this is before the first paragraph.
2. The world and the protagonist in the first paragraph. Who this is about, what they want, and what is normal for them. Not atmosphere. A treatment that opens on a rain-slicked street has spent its most valuable paragraph on weather.
3. The inciting incident and the choice it forces. Usually by the end of the first page.
4. The second act as escalation, not a list. Each paragraph should raise the cost of the goal. Include the midpoint reversal and the low point by name if it helps the reader keep the shape.
5. The climax and the ending, plainly. Never withhold the ending in a treatment. The reader is deciding whether you can land a story; an unresolved ending tells them you have not yet.
6. Tone, by demonstration. Write the treatment the way the film feels. A horror treatment should be unsettling to read; a comedy treatment should be funny.

Leave out theme statements, casting suggestions, budget talk and comparisons to other films unless the buyer asked. All of that belongs in the query letter or the pitch, not the story document. If you already have an outline, the screenplay outline is the skeleton the treatment puts flesh on: same order of events, but told rather than listed.

Treatment example: an excerpt

From an invented seven-page treatment for a thriller. Note the tense, the capitalised first mentions, the single folded-in line of dialogue, and the absence of anything that only belongs in a script.

THE LAST SHIFT. Thriller. Treatment by [name]. Page 2.

NOOR, 41, has worked the overnight desk at a private air-ambulance dispatch centre for nine years. The job is mostly waiting. She knows the pilots by the sound of their check-ins and the doctors by how fast they talk. Tonight one of the pilots, a man she has never met called DESMOND, 55, checks in from a helicopter that, according to her screen, is still on the ground in the hangar.

She reports it. Her supervisor tells her the tracking system has been flaky all week and to log it and move on. She logs it. Then she pulls the flight manifest, which she is not supposed to do, and finds that the patient listed on Desmond's flight died in a road accident four days earlier.

Noor does not call the police. She calls Desmond back on the pilot channel and asks, as if it were routine, for his fuel state. He gives it without hesitation. It is exactly what a full tank would read on the ground. She says only, "Copy that, safe flight," and starts writing down everything she can see.

Three paragraphs establish the protagonist, the routine, the anomaly and the choice, in behaviour rather than statement. Nowhere does it say Noor is careful or brave. It shows her pulling a manifest she is not allowed to pull and then lying calmly on the radio, and the reader assembles the character. That is the register a treatment wants: close to what the camera would show, with just enough interior room to explain a decision.

Treatment vs synopsis vs outline vs logline

These documents are requested interchangeably, which is why writers confuse them.

The synopsis and the treatment are the pair most often muddled. Both are prose, both are present tense, both include the ending. The difference is room. A one-page synopsis is a summary: it tells you what happens. A treatment is a telling: it lets you feel how it happens, with texture, behaviour and the occasional line. A synopsis proves the story is complete. A treatment proves it is a film.

The outline is the odd one out because it is for you. Zen Writer's scene navigator does the same job inside the script, with a synopsis field on every scene and drag-to-reorder, so many writers drop the separate outline once drafting starts and keep the treatment as the prose record of the story they meant to tell.

Who asks for a treatment, and why

• Producers and development executives, after a pitch they liked, to see whether the story holds beyond the logline before they read or commission a script.
• Financiers and funding bodies. Public film funds and co-production schemes often require a treatment with the application, and specify its length.
• Studios and streamers on assignments. When you are hired to adapt or develop, the treatment is the approval step before the paid draft. Long treatments and scriptments live here.
• Lawyers. In an option or purchase agreement the treatment is often named as the underlying material, which defines what was sold. Keep dated copies.

Contests and cold queries mostly want a logline and a synopsis, not a treatment. Send what was asked for. When the treatment gets a yes, the next step is the script; the screenwriting guides pick up from how to write a screenplay onward. Draft it in Zen Writer for Mac and the prose you paste in is formatted as you go, with scenes appearing in the navigator as you add headings.

Treatment mistakes that lose the reader

1. Withholding the ending. The most common and the most damaging. A treatment with a cliffhanger ending reads as an unsolved story.
2. Past tense, or drifting tense. Pick present and stay there. Tense drift is the first thing a professional reader notices.
3. Opening on atmosphere. Weather, light and music are not story. Open on the person and the want.
4. Scene-by-scene listing. "Then Noor goes to the hangar. Then she finds the log. Then she calls Desmond." That is an outline with sentences. Tell it with cause and effect.
5. Telling the reader what to feel. "In a heartbreaking scene" and "hilariously" are claims the prose should make unnecessary.
6. Pages of dialogue. A treatment is not a script with the margins removed. Fold in one or two lines at most.

One check catches most of these: read the treatment aloud in one sitting. If you find yourself skipping paragraphs to get to the good parts, the reader will too. Before you send it, run the logline at the top through the free logline builder so the first line the reader sees is the strongest one on the page.

Frequently asked questions

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