July’s Buzz:

CAN YOU SELL A TREATMENT?
(Copyright 2002)

By
Kathryn McCullough

Screenwriters often wonder if it is effective to develop an outline or treatment as a selling tool. The trades are cluttered with notices of writers who have sold pitches, which are essentially abbreviated verbal outlines. It is also true that beat outlines and treatments are often part of a writing assignment deal (in order to enable the producers and studio executives to monitor and have input on the development of a story).

Therefore, many writers feel that it is worth trying to sell a treatment first, to save oneself the trouble of writing a script. Yet, the work a writer is likely to put into a treatment, and the effort it will take to get an agent or producer to read it, will often equal or exceed what it would take to just write the script. And just writing the script is much more likely to lead to success.

Treatments and outlines are very useful tools -- for the writer. It is important to have a road map of your script before you begin, so that you can avoid getting off on too many side trips as you develop your story. For the unproduced writer, however, a treatment is useless as a selling tool. With rare exceptions, the writers who do sell pitches are produced and/or professionally established screenwriters, or they have an established producer attached to the project. The response by a reader or executive to a treatment submitted by a new writer is almost always rejection, because no matter how good the idea, it is impossible to judge the project’s merits without a completed script.

It is the execution that brings a story to life. The development of the characters, the pacing of the plot, and the richness and authenticity of the dialogue, are all aspects of a screenplay, not a treatment. This is why there can be so many movies with similar or even identical concepts, yet some will be great and some will be awful.

In my many years of reading, I have only recommended one treatment, and that was a proposal for a non-fiction book. That proposal was bought for film adaptation, but it is worth noting that although the purchase was made about eight years ago, the project has yet to hit the screen. On the other hand, almost every screenplay I’ve recommended, no matter how overtly uncommercial or “small,” has eventually found life as a film, either in the theater or on television. This is because a great script is instantly recognized by anyone who reads it as a great movie. A great outline or treatment is not yet movie; it is just the bare bones idea for one.

If you consider yourself a screenwriter, then go ahead and write the screenplay.