ur-grue Treatment Writer
What This Skill Does
Writes a professional screenplay treatment — typically 5–10 pages — covering premise, tone, characters, three-act story breakdown, and thematic statement, formatted for submission to producers, financiers, or development executives.
When To Use This Skill
- You have a developed premise and beat sheet but need a full prose treatment to send to a producer or development meeting
- You are submitting to a screenwriting lab, fellowship, or fund that requires a treatment alongside your application
- You want to test whether your story holds together in prose before spending months on a draft
- You need to brief a co-writer, director, or producing partner on the full story without sharing pages
What You Need To Provide
Required: Logline or premise; protagonist name and core role; the three major acts in summary (beginning, middle, end); the film's central theme or emotional argument Optional: Beat sheet (if available); character list with brief descriptions; tone references; target format and length (feature, TV pilot, limited series); writer's vision statement for the project
How the Assistant Approaches This
- Opens with a title block, logline, format specification, and a one-paragraph premise statement — the material a development executive reads before deciding whether to continue
- Writes character introductions in present tense, establishing each major character's want, flaw, and relationship to the protagonist in 2–4 sentences — enough for a reader to track them through the story without a separate cast list
- Writes the three-act story in present tense as a continuous prose narrative, not a bulleted synopsis — using scene-level specificity at turning points (Inciting Incident, End of Act One, Midpoint, All Is Lost, Climax) while compressing connective tissue
- Closes with a brief thematic statement (1 short paragraph) articulating what the film is really about beneath the plot — this is where the writer's voice enters
Output Format
Present-tense prose throughout. Structured as: Title Block (title, format, draft date, writer) → Logline (1 sentence) → Premise (1 paragraph, 80–120 words) → Characters (named, one paragraph each, major characters only — maximum 5) → Story (three-act breakdown in continuous prose, 600–900 words) → Theme (1 paragraph, 60–80 words). Total length: 900–1,300 words excluding the title block. Tone: confident, cinematic prose. No passive voice. No hedging language ("perhaps," "might").
Quality Criteria
- Written entirely in present tense
- Logline is self-contained and under 40 words
- Character section covers want and flaw for each major character — not just biography
- Story section uses scene-level specificity at every major structural turning point
- The theme paragraph makes a claim about the human condition — it does not describe what happens in the plot
- No character names or plot points are introduced in the Story section that were not established in the Characters section
- Tone of prose matches the tone stated for the project (a horror treatment should not read like a romantic comedy)
Example
Input
Title: COLD GROUND Format: Feature film Logline: A grief counselor who has never processed her own husband's suicide takes a remote posting in a rural mining community — and is assigned to the widow of the man who found him. Protagonist: Dr. Maren Voss, 41, grief counselor. Competent, admired, emotionally walled-off. Moved three times in five years. Other major characters: Diane Pell, 56, the widow — direct, unsentimental, the only person in the film who says exactly what she means. Sheriff Boyd, 60, who knew Maren's husband and has been waiting for her to ask him what he knows. Theme: We cannot help others grieve what we haven't allowed ourselves to lose. Tone: Quiet, wintry, emotionally devastating. References: Manchester by the Sea, Frozen River. Act structure:
- Act 1: Maren arrives in Harlan, takes the posting, meets her clients. She's brilliant at the work. She avoids contact with the town — doesn't ask questions, doesn't learn names beyond what's required.
- Act 2: She is assigned to Diane. Diane refuses all conventional therapeutic approaches and simply asks Maren direct questions about her own life. Maren slowly loses professional distance. She learns that Sheriff Boyd was there when her husband was found and has been protecting her from the details at her own (forgotten) request.
- Act 3: Maren asks Boyd to tell her everything. The truth is ordinary and devastating: her husband didn't leave a note but he left a voicemail she never retrieved. It's still there. She listens to it. She returns to Diane for their last session — not as a counselor. Writer note: "This is a film about the arrogance of professional grief, and the grace of being seen by someone who won't let you hide."
Output
COLD GROUND Feature Film | First Draft Treatment | March 2026 Written by [Writer]
Logline A grief counselor who has never confronted her own husband's suicide accepts a remote rural posting — and is assigned to the one widow who refuses to be treated.
Premise Harlan is a copper-mining town in the high country, three hours from the nearest city, where winter arrives in October and stays until it's ready to leave. DR. MAREN VOSS arrives in November. She is 41, credentialed, and very good at her job. She has been very good at her job since her husband died four years ago and she discovered that working inside other people's grief was easier than inhabiting her own. This is a film about what happens when that stops being true.
Characters
Dr. Maren Voss wants to do her job, help her clients, and leave Harlan in the spring without having become part of it. What she needs — though she would not use the word — is to grieve. Her flaw is the professional distance she wears like protective clothing: it makes her excellent and it makes her unreachable.
Diane Pell is 56, a retired mine administrator whose husband, Frank, died of a cardiac event in the snow eighteen months ago. She is not depressed. She is furious, and she is direct, and she has no interest in therapeutic frameworks. She does not want to be helped. She wants to be understood. She may be the only honest person in the film.
Sheriff Boyd Cutter is 60 and has known Maren's name for four years without ever contacting her. He was the first responder at her husband's death. He has been honoring a request she made in the immediate aftermath of the event — a request she has no memory of making. He is not a villain. He is a man who made a decision he believed was kind.
Story
Maren arrives in Harlan on a Sunday afternoon in November. The clinic is in a converted hardware store. Her supervisor, a tired man named Doherty, hands her a caseload of eleven clients and tells her there is a waiting list. She begins work the following morning.
She is exceptional. Within six weeks she has stabilized three clients, referred two for medication review, and developed genuine trust with a young man dealing with the death of his mother. She lives in a rented room above the hardware store. She does not learn the names of her neighbors.
In week seven, Diane Pell arrives for their first session, referred following a twelve-month wait. The session goes wrong immediately. Diane does not answer questions about Frank. She asks Maren a question instead: "Is this helping you? Because it isn't helping me." Maren redirects. Diane comes back the following week and asks a different question. Maren realizes, slowly, that she is being treated.
The sessions with Diane become the center of the film. Diane is not cruel and she is not performing insight. She is simply unwilling to perform a grief she doesn't feel for the benefit of a system that wants her to feel it. In refusing, she names the thing Maren has been doing for four years. Maren begins, slowly, to come apart at the professional seams.
In the third month, Maren sees Boyd's name on a sign at the sheriff's office. She has heard it before, in a context she cannot place. She asks Doherty. Doherty says only that Boyd is a solid man who has worked the high country his whole life. That night, Maren calls her sister for the first time in fourteen months and asks whether she knows a Sheriff Boyd Cutter in Harlan. There is a pause on the line.
Boyd comes to her. He explains, quietly, that he was the first responder at her husband's death and that in the hours following, still in shock, she had asked him not to share any details of the scene with her — not then, not later. He had honored that. She looks at him for a long time. She asks him to tell her everything now.
The truth Boyd knows is not dramatic. Her husband did not leave a note. He left a voicemail on Maren's phone — recorded thirty minutes before his death — that she never retrieved. It expires after thirty days. It has long since been deleted from the network. But the phone still exists, in a box in a storage unit in the city, and it was never reset. The voicemail may still be in the phone's local memory.
Maren drives to the city over a single weekend. She finds the phone. The voicemail is there.
We do not hear what it says.
She returns to Harlan on a Sunday afternoon in March. She has one remaining session with Diane before her posting ends. She sits down across from Diane. Diane looks at her face and says: "You look different." Maren says: "I know." Diane asks if she wants to talk about it. Maren says yes. And for the first time in the film, she answers a direct question directly.
Theme COLD GROUND argues that grief is not a problem to be solved and that the professional apparatus we build around loss — the frameworks, the stages, the clinical distance — can become its own form of avoidance. It asks whether it is possible to truly accompany someone in their grief if you have never allowed yourself to be accompanied in your own. The answer it reaches is: not sustainably, and not without cost.
Known Limitations
- Treatments written from brief act summaries will necessarily generalize some connective story tissue — scenes between major turning points will be sketched rather than specified; writers with a full beat sheet should provide it to get a more scene-level treatment
- The skill writes in a confident, authoritative narrative voice suited to contemporary drama and thriller treatments; genre projects with unusual tonal requirements (absurdist comedy, surrealist horror) should specify the voice explicitly or the output will default to realist dramatic prose
- A treatment is a selling document, not a contract — it presents the story as complete even when the writer is still developing details; the skill will make reasonable story choices to fill gaps, and writers should review the output for decisions that may not match their vision