Musings

So, I’m taking a break from reveiwing my outline of my pitch. Later today I will actually do the pitch out loud for an invisible audience. But let me back up. What is a pitch, and why do we do them? Long ago George R.R. Martin pointed out to a fascinated audience that in Hollywood you are rewarded for how well you talk, not how well you write. Oh, the writing plays a role. Without a good sample script (spec) you are never going to reach the critical point — a meeting — but what is going to seal the deal is how well you intereact in a room full of strangers. Periodically I run a ninja screenwriting crash course at various science fiction conventions. The one point I stress (in addition to _move to Los Angeles_) is that if you have a shy and retiring personality you don’t want to try to become a screenwriter.

You will make the pitch both in television and in feature films. Preparation times vary for these two mediums, but preparation is key. Let’s say I’ve written a spec HEROES script, and it’s gotten me a meeting on SUPERNATURAL. (You never send your spec script to the show for which it’s written. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but I will explain this in a later post.) That meeting a Supernatural is to see if I have any good freelance script ideas. (Another aside. More and more shows are doing away with the pitch, and taking fewer and fewer meetings with freelancers.) I try to go in with three to five script ideas. The first idea I have worked out in pretty fair detail witht the act breaks established, and what is the major character arc I want to explore. From there the remaining pitches become less detailed. I generally go in with three because you normally have about thirty minutes in a meeting. When you present your story you don’t do it in excruiciating detail. Drone on, and you will be out of there in ten minutes. Keep it conversational, keep it flowing, keep it breezy. Watch the staff’s eyes. If they’re starting to glaze over wrap it up, and move on to another idea.

If I’m going in to pitch an idea for a show during development season I have the pilot worked out in pretty good detail, I have a strong sense of the characters, and what issues I want to explore with them over several years, and I have a few sample ideas of episodes. There are a lot of cool ideas that leave you wondering what the hell you will do for episode three. For this pitch I prepare far more intensely. I write it out. I rehearse it. I time it. I reduce it to bullet points on a three by five card. And I make really sure that it doesn’t sound like I rehearsed it.

For a feature pitch you do the same work as for the pilot pitch, but more so. This is The Show. I try to have a movie pitch run about 13 minutes. I know where to expand if the listeners are really into it, and I know where to compress and cut if I’m losing them. I practice and practice and practice. I used to do a lot of stage work, and this is no different than learning your lines. I’ve got a perfect description of my heroine that I know will get me a laugh, and I build and play for it. I ask long suffering friends to sit while I “do the pitch for them”. I ask them to interrupt me with questions, because that can and will happen. You have to be able to answer the question and go smoothly back to the pitch without missing a beat.

For the purposes of this meeting you are a troubador telling a story, and trying to transport your listeners out of their office where they have listened to twenty other pitches that day. So, you have to keep eye contact and exude charm and enthusiam with every pore, and never, ever, bore them.

So I’m going back to my outline for a little more review before I start actually start practicing. And I need to kill this lingering cough. Tomorrow before the first meeting I’m going to load up on Dayquil and cough lozenges, and take shallow breaths so I won’t cough for 13 minutes and some 35 seconds.

Melinda

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 9:42 am and is filed under hollywood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.