Gotta/Wannabe had me laughing with his logline for CHINATOWN, and I thought this question was worthy of its own thread.
Last week I got a call from Gary at Sherwood Oaks College. He does this course where students go to 5 studios in 5 days and meet about 8 producers at each studio. I have an article about it on my site. You usually get to pitch your script... and to the top guy! Doug Wickes (producer of GLADIATOR) and Mike Medavoy (Phoenix Pictures) heard pitches at the class I attended.
Gary had a problem: Many of the people in his class can't pitch their way out of a paper bag. He wanted me to meet the class and run a pitch clinic before they go off to the studios.
1) I hate pitching.
2) I'm not very good at pitching.
3) This would take 3 hours out of my life, and there's no pay. Not even gas money for driving over the hill!
So I agreed to do it.
I figured by listening to pitches that don't work, I may figure out why... and improve MY pitching in the process.
You could break down the class into two groups:
Those who had good stories but were pitching them all wrong and those who had not-good stories and there was no way to pitch them so that they sounded any good.
By "not-good" I mean BORING. Stories that would only be of interest to the screenwriters and maybe their moms... but the moms would by lying. All of the boring stories had one thing in common - they were based on actual events in the lives of the screenwriters. Because they were actual events, they were not "spiced up" in any way.
You want the frightening truth? Writers are boring people! No one wants to hear about what happened to us! And 99.999999% of reality is REALLY boring! Unless you're on the bomb squad, no one cares about your day-to-day life. No one cares about your broken heart, failed marriage, personal tragedy, trouble getting a date because of your scars, your ungrateful kids, or relationship with your dog. And they REALLY don't care about your political beliefs!
They're paying $8.50 to be entertained.
They want to ESCAPE from the boring events in every day life. They want LARGER THAN LIFE conflict.
I brought the entertainment section of the LA Times with me (the big, fat Sunday section) and asked the folks to find a movie that was similar to theirs in the paper. (Lots of full page ads.) The people with interesting stories could either find a similar movie or had no problem giving me some recent examples...
So here's a good exercise: Write down the last 5 films you saw in a theater, and write down the names of 3 recent films that are similar to your script.
I used this analogy: Hollywood is like your favorite restaurant. When you go there, you usually order the same dish or dishes. You find something you like and stick to it. (I have an Italian restaurant I go to where I usually order spinach ravioli.) You expect that dish to be "the same" every time you order it. You don't want it to be out of a can! You want it to be made specially FOR YOU (originality)... but you don't expect to find marshmallows or jalapeno peppers in your ravioli. The same is true with movies.
If your script is too different than other movies, the audience won't want to see it. But if it's "canned" and bland they also won't want to see it.
If you can't think of any recent films like your script, there may be a very good reason... they don't make movies like that! If that's the case, I'd start looking for similar stories in other media... maybe you wrote a movie for Lifetime!
The best part about this group at Sherwood Oaks is that they were open to the idea that their script may not be a big studio film starring Tom Cruise.
But there were stories that didn't match anything at all. Not a movie, nor a cable film, nor a TV film, nor a direct to video... nothing that people would pay to see.
When those people tried to pitch their scripts, they rambled on and on, but there was nothing INTERESTING in their pitch.
The other pitches could be fixed. They could take out the detailed back story stuff, focus on the conflict, etc. In one case a woman pitched a script about a 50 year old widow that was turning off the young development people. When I asked who would play this widow, she said Bette Midler. The solution was to never mention the widow's age, just say "a Bette Midler type".
I think if you KNOW WHAT YOUR STORY IS ABOUT you can figure out how to pitch it... but if your story isn't interesting, who would want to hear it?
- Bill
Last week I got a call from Gary at Sherwood Oaks College. He does this course where students go to 5 studios in 5 days and meet about 8 producers at each studio. I have an article about it on my site. You usually get to pitch your script... and to the top guy! Doug Wickes (producer of GLADIATOR) and Mike Medavoy (Phoenix Pictures) heard pitches at the class I attended.
Gary had a problem: Many of the people in his class can't pitch their way out of a paper bag. He wanted me to meet the class and run a pitch clinic before they go off to the studios.
1) I hate pitching.
2) I'm not very good at pitching.
3) This would take 3 hours out of my life, and there's no pay. Not even gas money for driving over the hill!
So I agreed to do it.
I figured by listening to pitches that don't work, I may figure out why... and improve MY pitching in the process.
You could break down the class into two groups:
Those who had good stories but were pitching them all wrong and those who had not-good stories and there was no way to pitch them so that they sounded any good.
By "not-good" I mean BORING. Stories that would only be of interest to the screenwriters and maybe their moms... but the moms would by lying. All of the boring stories had one thing in common - they were based on actual events in the lives of the screenwriters. Because they were actual events, they were not "spiced up" in any way.
You want the frightening truth? Writers are boring people! No one wants to hear about what happened to us! And 99.999999% of reality is REALLY boring! Unless you're on the bomb squad, no one cares about your day-to-day life. No one cares about your broken heart, failed marriage, personal tragedy, trouble getting a date because of your scars, your ungrateful kids, or relationship with your dog. And they REALLY don't care about your political beliefs!
They're paying $8.50 to be entertained.
They want to ESCAPE from the boring events in every day life. They want LARGER THAN LIFE conflict.
I brought the entertainment section of the LA Times with me (the big, fat Sunday section) and asked the folks to find a movie that was similar to theirs in the paper. (Lots of full page ads.) The people with interesting stories could either find a similar movie or had no problem giving me some recent examples...
So here's a good exercise: Write down the last 5 films you saw in a theater, and write down the names of 3 recent films that are similar to your script.
I used this analogy: Hollywood is like your favorite restaurant. When you go there, you usually order the same dish or dishes. You find something you like and stick to it. (I have an Italian restaurant I go to where I usually order spinach ravioli.) You expect that dish to be "the same" every time you order it. You don't want it to be out of a can! You want it to be made specially FOR YOU (originality)... but you don't expect to find marshmallows or jalapeno peppers in your ravioli. The same is true with movies.
If your script is too different than other movies, the audience won't want to see it. But if it's "canned" and bland they also won't want to see it.
If you can't think of any recent films like your script, there may be a very good reason... they don't make movies like that! If that's the case, I'd start looking for similar stories in other media... maybe you wrote a movie for Lifetime!
The best part about this group at Sherwood Oaks is that they were open to the idea that their script may not be a big studio film starring Tom Cruise.
But there were stories that didn't match anything at all. Not a movie, nor a cable film, nor a TV film, nor a direct to video... nothing that people would pay to see.
When those people tried to pitch their scripts, they rambled on and on, but there was nothing INTERESTING in their pitch.
The other pitches could be fixed. They could take out the detailed back story stuff, focus on the conflict, etc. In one case a woman pitched a script about a 50 year old widow that was turning off the young development people. When I asked who would play this widow, she said Bette Midler. The solution was to never mention the widow's age, just say "a Bette Midler type".
I think if you KNOW WHAT YOUR STORY IS ABOUT you can figure out how to pitch it... but if your story isn't interesting, who would want to hear it?
- Bill
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