Have you written a screenplay or a teleplay that you hope to get read by an agent. (You probably won’t get it read by a legitimate producer with access to a large enough budget to make your vision come palpably alive because most producers won’t read spec scripts so as to avoid the potential for a lawsuit should they actually make a movie that bears a resemblance to a screenplay they rejected.) And since most agents are far too buy trying to buy back their souls from Satan, they prefer something known in the industry-and by the industry I mean, of course, the business-as a “treatment.”
A treatment is a boiled-down prose version of your screenplay. Don’t inject dialogue and for God’s sake never suggest a camera angle or move. If your strength is dialogue, don’t be ashamed to hire a professional prose ghostwriter for your treatment. You won’t have to worry about sharing credit with the ghostwriter unless you accept any suggestions or changes; so don’t! It is your screenplay, all a treatment doctor is doing is reshaping it from screenplay form to short story form.
The example of a treatment that I have written is based upon an unfinished screenplay which is in turn based upon an unfinished novel of mine. While I would never recommend sending in an unfinished novel manuscript, there is really not much wrong with sending in an unfinished treatment. In fact, it might even be a benefit. That way if an agent does get it to a producer, the producer can pretend that he his job has actual value by suggesting his own ending. There are several ways of writing a treatment and though it’s not exactly unknown for treatments to be as long as thirty or forty pages, most are no longer than seven to ten. The shorter, the better, as long as you can get all the pertinent information in.
Treatment for Alison Wonderland
Alison Wonderland is an up and coming rock star. Her popularity cuts across a wide swath of the population. Her music is deceptively upbeat bouncy electronic dance music, but upon closer inspection her lyrical content is revealed to be dark and paranoid, but that is usually overlooked by those too busy dancing to it. Young girls and young women look to Alison Wonderland as a role model. Their mothers like her because though she can be sexy, she’s a sex symbol without being a flesh peddler. Their brothers and fathers like her because she’s a sexy, whether she peddles flesh or not. Her second album is in the top five and her concerts are selling out in large arenas and theaters across the country.
At one of these rock concerts is a young women who look to Alison Wonderland as a role model, and who constantly declares that one day she is going to become somebody. Britney Spears Knott is about the same age as Alison and bears a faint resemblance marred by the fact that Britney Spears Knott has different colored hair, a slightly bigger nose and a significantly bigger chest. The resemblance ends there. Where Alison Wonderland is popular and desired by just about every man she sees, Britney Spears Knott isn’t terribly popular and has never even been involved with a man in any serious way. Britney Spears Knott pours herself into her songwriting, desperately hoping to one day become Alison Wonderland’s songwriting partner.
But Britney Spears Knott has another talent. Britney discovers that she sing pop songs exactly like Alison Wonderland. At a party with her friends, when she covers her hair with black scarft to make her look more like the raven-haired Alison, she realizes that she actually does bear a physical resemblance to her hero that she hadn’t realized before. Britney Spears Knott sings as Alison at a popular karaoke club and is invited to work up a routine for a celebrity impersonator act the club’s owner is developing.
Dying her hair to look more like Alison, Britney Spears Knott quickly becomes the star of the club, which quickly becomes the biggest surprise hot nightspots in town thanks to an amateur video of her performance that becomes a big hit on You Tube. Alison Wonderland meanwhile releases a new album and becomes a full-fledged superstar. Britney Spears Knott decides to improve upon her resemblance to Alison by getting a nose job and the facial resemblance is now so striking as to become impossible to tell the difference.
Alison’s new tour brings her to Britney’s hometown again, and as part of the concert promotion, an Alison lookalike contest is planned. Britney Spears Knott is convinced that winning this contest will be the key to becoming Alison’s songwriting partner. But the contest and concert are both cancelled after Alison suffers a personal tragedy. Britney Spears Knott decides it’s time to dive completely into the lucrative celebrity lookalike business. After undergoing breast reduction surgery, Britney is now an amazing double for Alison Wonderland. She moves to Los Angeles and becomes a nationally renowed Alison Wonderland, though she fails to win a reality TV show that revolves around celebrity impersonation. As a result of her success, she lands a job at a very hot celebrity impersonator revue in Los Angeles where one night she is approached after the show by Alison Wonderland herself, in disguise.
Alison hires her as a personal assistant, making sure that Britney Spears Knott always appears in public disguised so that she doesn’t look like Alison. A friendship grows between the two and Alison increasingly calls upon Britney Spears Knott to impersonate her at public functions because she can’t stand dealing with the “yahoos,” Alison’s cryptic nickname for record company executives. Britney Spears Knott becomes aware of Alison’s obsession with UFO abduction stories and begins to reassess some of Alison’s more unusual lyrics.
Britney Spears Knott eventually understands what the “yahoos” are and why Alison is obsessed with UFO abduction stories. Alison tells Britney Spears Knott that the record industry is run by one-eyed aliens who can disguise themselves as humans. The “yahoos” are bent on world destruction through a slow process of homogenizing and commercializing the entire population through a form of mass hypnosis accomplished through subliminal messages in popular music.
Alison wants to give up her music career and get away from the control of the cyclops. There’s only one way to do it and she needs an alibi in order to get it done. Britney Spears Knott begins to go onstage during the tour as Alison one out of every four or five concerts. Nobody notices it’s not really Alison Wonderland. Meanwhile, during these concerts, Alison goes out in public as an Alison Wonderland lookalike and picks up strange men and engages in a ritualistic serial killing spree. Britney Spears Knott is oblivious to exactly what Alison is doing, knowing only that she’s doing something in order to free herself from the grip of the cyclops. Britney knows, of course, that Alison Wonderland is seriously unbalanced, but what the heck: She’s living out every person’s fantasy of being a world famous rock star.
Britney Spears Knott shows up at Alison’s hotel room one morning and finds the FBI there. She finds out that an Alison Wonderland lookalike is being sought in connection with a series of murders taking place at various stops along the tour route. When she confronts Alison about the murders, Alison joyously tells her that it’s going to be okay. Alison has the alibi of being onstage. Britney Spears Knott has the alibi of being Alison’s personal assistant who is it known ALWAYS waits on the bus during the concert. And best of all, Alison only has to kill one more time and she’ll be free from the yahoos’ control forever. Britney Spears Knott consents to one more concert until she realizes that the little rose tattoo that Alison got put high on her breast before the tour-and insisted Britney Spears Knott get as well so they’d continue to be perfect matches-isn’t there.
Was Alison’s tattoo a temporary one? Is Alison Wonderland planning on revealing the tattoo to witnesses as she picks out her last victim, setting Britney Spears Knott up as an easily identified fall girl? Britney Spears Knott at last accepts that Alison Wonderland is a paranoid schizophrenic serial killer suffering from delusions of alien persecution. But she also realizes that Alison can certainly think rationally enough to cunningly entrap Britney in her web.
If she rats on Alison, her career as a lookalike ends with Alison’s career. If she allows Alison to go through with the final murder, her career may be over along with her freedom. But since she’s already proven that she can fool anyone into thinking she’s the real Alison, if she were to kill Alison and take her place completely, who would know the difference?
How far is Britney Spears Knott willing to go to live out her self-professed mantra of one day becoming somebody?
As you can see, the fact that this treatment ends ambiguously gives any potential producer the opportunity for input. Producers, the least creative arm of the moviemaking process, love for nothing more than an opportunity to prove that they are necessary. A treatment like this doesn’t really feel as if it’s unfinished. In fact, I have endings for both potential conclusions and if called in for a meeting I would be able to explain in detail how this movie could end regardless of which way it went.
That is an important detail. If you do write a screenplay that doesn’t powerhouse along toward a certain and predictable conclusion, you’d better make sure you can come up with several endings on the spot.
