How to Teach How to Write Screenplay Treatments

Before diving into screenwriting, teach your students to write treatments.

Though the screenplay for a feature film may have anywhere from 90 to 120 pages, a treatment for the same film will be significantly shorter. A treatment is a present-tense summary of a screenplay, written in prose and used to pitch a project to potential producers and talent. To teach your students how to write treatments, you should begin by helping them master writing story summaries and build on that fundamental skill over multiple classes until they can write original treatments based on their own ideas.

Instructions

1. Assuming that this is a film class, look back to a film screened earlier in the course and use it as the subject of a reverse-engineered treatment. If the class does not incorporate screenings, pick a film that exemplifies excellence to you. Tell the class to imagine that they are a team of screenwriters and that the film in question has never been made. Ask the students to work together as a class to summarize the basic idea behind the film. Write this summary on the board.

2. Work together with your students to revise this summary into a longer treatment that describes the film in a compelling way. Begin by listing all of the scenes that make up the movie. Expand each list item into a short paragraph. Stress the importance of clarity and word economy. Remind students that treatments -- like screenplays -- should describe physical actions rather than internal thoughts.

3. Ask the students go home, choose a film they love, change the character names, write a reverse-engineered treatment and bring it to the next class.

4. Have students pitch their reverse-engineered treatments to the rest of the class without revealing their source films. Ask the class, your virtual panel of producers, if they would buy the treatment. Why or why not? Respond in detail to each treatment, touching on points of success and areas of weakness. Have a brief class-wide brainstorm session and come up with ways to improve each treatment, even if that means deviating from the plot of the original film. Have each student reveal the source film for their treatment, then compare the two. Did the treatment accurately portray the project? Might the improvements the class suggested have improved the actual film?

5. Work with the class to compile a list of elements of the most successful treatments of the day. Give them another treatment-writing assignment that requires them to come up with an original idea instead of working from an existing film and repeat the pitch process and critique in the next class.

References

• "Writing Treatments that Sell: How to Create and Market Your Story Ideas to the Motion Picture and TV Industry"; Kenneth Atchity and Chi-Li Wong; 1997
• University of Kansas Continuing Education: English 353: Screenwriting 1