Why We Write a Treatment Even When Nobody Asked for One

A treatment is filed, most of the time, under selling documents — the thing you write because a producer asked for one before they'd take a meeting. We write ours on projects where nobody's asked for anything yet. No festival deadline, no client, sometimes no crew attached. Just a question worth answering on paper before it gets answered with a shot list.

What it does for us has nothing to do with selling. A treatment is a written argument for why the film should exist, made before any visual decision — a mood board, a lens choice, a location scout — gets to stand in for that argument instead. Once the visuals show up, they're persuasive in a way prose isn't. It's easy to mistake a good frame for a good reason. A treatment is what you write while there's still nothing to hide behind.

What follows: what a treatment forces us to decide, why the version nobody asked for is often the more useful one, and what we leave out of ours on purpose.

What a Treatment Forces You to Decide Before the Camera Rolls

The document sits in a specific place in the process — after the story's been sketched on scene cards, before it's been given dialogue and formatted into a screenplay. It's prose, not an outline, written in present tense, read like a short story: a deliberate constraint. An index card can hold a beat without explaining it. Prose can't. Write "she leaves" as a sentence in a paragraph and you're forced to also write what came before it that made leaving the only option. That's the whole point of doing this in prose instead of on cards.

There are two conventional lengths, and they're not interchangeable. A long treatment — thirty to eighty pages — is for working the story out with yourself: every scene, every turn, committed to paper so you can see where it stalls. A short one, seven to twelve pages, is for putting a plan in front of somebody else. We treat length as a decision about audience, not a formatting default. That distinction matters more once you start writing treatments nobody commissioned — there's no brief telling you which one to write, so you have to know which job you're actually doing.

The Treatment Nobody Asked For

The value of an unsolicited treatment isn't that it might sell something later. It's what it forces you to commit to before you've spent any time on dialogue: which characters, which events, actually drive the story forward, as opposed to just filling its runtime. Craig Mazin wrote a thirty-page treatment for Identity Thief specifically to get a team back on the same page before a major rewrite — not because a studio required it, but because a rewrite without one is a rewrite where everyone quietly disagrees about what changed and why.

That's the case for writing one before a shoot too, not just before a script. Once a project has a crew attached, a treatment written for no particular reader is often what keeps a composer, a sound department, and a director arguing about the same film instead of three adjacent ones. It surfaces the disagreement early, on paper, where it costs nothing to resolve. Found on a call sheet three days into production, that same disagreement costs a day and a half.

What We Put In, What We Leave Out

The components that earn a place are narrow: a logline, character summaries built around what actually changes for them, plot laid out by act or sequence, location notes where they matter, theme only where it's load-bearing rather than decorative. It's the same instinct behind running camera tests before storyboards on a small shoot — resolve the concrete question first, the comprehensive one second.

What doesn't earn a place is anything that performs rather than argues: no dialogue, no reference images, no clever formatting standing in for a decision you haven't made yet. A treatment that reads like a pitch deck has usually stopped doing its actual job, which is to convince you, first, before it tries to convince anyone else. We keep ours under ten pages unless a specific reader has asked for the long version. The length limit is what keeps it a thinking tool instead of a performance of having thought.

A short working note

A treatment is a written argument, made before the visual ones are ready to speak for the film. That's a decision we make, never a default — the same posture we take toward the frame. A spotting session runs on the same logic: an argument made in a room, out loud instead of on paper, before anyone commits picture to a piece of music. Different room. Same reason to have it before you need it.