Treatment

A treatment is your movie told in prose — present tense, no dialogue formatting, typically anywhere from two to twelve pages. It sits between the logline (one sentence) and the screenplay (a hundred pages) in the family of selling documents.

Producers ask for treatments for two reasons. Before a script exists, a treatment proves the story holds together at feature length. After a script exists, a short treatment (often called a synopsis at 1–2 pages) lets an executive absorb the story in five minutes before deciding whether to invest two hours.

A working treatment reads like a great magazine feature about your movie: momentum, voice, and cause-and-effect. The most common failure is the "and then" treatment — a flat list of events with no engine. If your treatment reads like minutes from a meeting, the story has a structure problem the script will inherit.

Practical rule: keep a one-page synopsis, a 3–5 page treatment, and the full script current at all times. Different rooms ask for different lengths, and rewriting them under deadline is how errors creep in. Our coverage scorecard flags structural gaps at the script level — the treatment is where you fix them cheapest.