Writing The Script: Part 2 (The Treatment)
Below are my insane ramblings about treatments.
Why are the ramblings insane?
Because treatments drive you insane. Everyone differs in opinion on treatments and below is just my take on them. Therefore if you’re going to read just once article on treatments I suggest you read this terrific post by Terry Rossio and ignore what I’ve written below.
Death to treatments!
Lets get this straight from the start… no one likes treatments. Writers hate writing them, producers hate reading them. Therefore why the hell does anyone write them?
Okay lets back track first by explaining what a treatment is:
A treatment is a prose document that sells your story.
Reading a screenplay can take a good chunk of time therefore some producers prefer to read a treatment first (as it’s shorter) to see if your story is interesting enough to invest their time in reading your script. Alternatively I have been asked in the past to write a treatment first and have then been commissioned to write a screenplay afterwards.
With New Year’s Evil I decided to write the treatment before writing the screenplay – my view was that seeing as I would at some point to be asked to produce a treatment after finishing the screenplay, I might as well write one first as part of the development process instead of an outline.
However I still kind of technically did an outline anyway because I wrote a description of each scene onto a bunch of index cards first to help structure the treatment.
Some writers don’t like to plan out their screenplays in advance – the Farrelly Brothers don’t do it because they believe they kill your creativity. And for a comedy screenplay they might be right – but from previous experience, I would say it’s essential for you to plan out your horror screenplay.
I once started writing a feature called You Can Run. It was about a group of cross-country runners who were being hunted by a sniper. I never outlined or wrote a treatment before starting the screenplay which meant by page 20 I had killed almost all the characters already. For a horror, that’s not good. So for me the main purpose of writing a treatment for NYE was as a blue-print to write the screenplay.
If writing screenplays is like doing homework then writing a treatment is like when your homework is algebraic equations. They’re not fun to write. They they are incredibly dry because they don’t have cool lines of dialogue nor can you really go into the kind of detail where your action scenes can truly come alive. That’s not to say you can’t write a treatment that sizzles but compared to the screenplay they are just the support act and no one really wants to see the support act.
The length of a treatment can vary considerably – mine tend to be three to five pages long (NYE was five pages long) however they can be much, much longer. I’m working on a project a the moment where the producers eventually want a 30 page treatment from me. James Cameron writes even longer treatments – the treatment for The Terminator was over 40 pages. I think if you’re going to write a 40 page treatment you might as well just invest that time in producing the screenplay but Cameron has Oscars – I do not.
So to summarise I hate treatments.
Happy Valentine’s Day
From Team Evil to you with love…
Top Five Heart Ripping Out Movie Scenes
5. Apocalypto
Unpleasant, gruesome, disturbing, but enough about Mel Gibson.
4. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
There were times when I was watching this movie I wished I could rip my own heart out.
3. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
They simply don’t make family movies like this anymore.
2. From Dusk Till Dawn
A case of lead poisoning. Snarf.
1. Dumb & Dumber
Disembowelment has never been so funny.
NYE Interview
A few weeks ago myself, NYE director S. J. Evans and film makers James Plumb and Dave Beynon conducted a Skype interview with horror journalist AndyErupts about the recent explosion of horror movies being made in Wales.
The result was a no-holds barred discussion that was too much horror awesomeness for one post to handle so here is Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3.
I doth my cap to AndyErupts for transcribing our epic conversation and, even more amazing , some how making sense of my ramblings.
