is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Friday
Jun 22, 2007

Pitch by Example posted by kza

Here’s the pitch I was talking about in my last post. The pitch is by Andrew Hunt, and he was given the logline, “A priest meets the woman of his dreams before he is to be ordained.” I’m curious to see what you think, Burley. (I’m assuming that you haven’t seen the show.) Does it work only as text? Or does it need the excellent delivery to really make it sing? (As judge Carrie Fisher remarked aftewards, “You inspire confidence by being so confident.”)

Here it is, pretty much verbatim:

Charlie Potts has been raised through the Catholic Church in Boston, Massachusetts. This guy is gonna be the next big bishop — hell, this guy might be the first American Pope. We’re gonna send him down to South America, have him work at a missionary before we ordain him. But there’s this one girl, her name is Alex and she’s a pilot. She flies in and brings in cargo and supplies for this missionary. And what happens is Charlie and Alex start to develop this relationship. She’s wild, she’s crazy, she’s everything that he’s not. She’s teaching him things like how to dance for the first time, how to take shots of tequilia. And finally it’s getting to the point where he’s falling in love with this woman. All of a sudden it starts raining. Raining for one day, two days, three days, four days — boom! A levee breaks. A flood comes in and just rips through this village, Alex and Charlie are trying to grab all the different people and get them to higher ground. And as they’re doing it, they get separated. Next day, stops raining, everything is calm. On the roof, he sees Alex, she’s passed out, or she’s dead. He’s looking up, saying, “I have never asked you for anything, but I’m asking you for one thing right now.” And finally she coughs up water, she’s alive. We’re now in Boston, Massachusetts. A huge church. And we see Charlie standing there, about ready to get ordained. But then we pull back to see that it’s actually a wedding. We’re out.

Total time (assuming nothing was edited out in the broadcast; it looked “whole” to me): 1 minute, 13 seconds. Word count: 263.

I’ll provide some commentary on this pitch later. Right now, I’m more interested in what you (and the readers) have to say.

Anyway, I gots to get working on me own pitch…

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What is Spitball!?

Spitball! is two guys collaborating to write about writing and collaboration. We're writing partners who have worked together since 2000, and placed in the top 100 in the last Project Greenlight for our script YELLOW.

Currently, we are both working on multiple screenplay, short story, and novel ideas independently and together, and collaborate on this blog.

What Spitball! used to be

Spitball! started as an attempt to collaborate on a screenplay online in real time. From January 2006 to July 2007 we worked on an interactive process to decide the story we were going to make. A full postmortem is coming, but you can find the find all the posts by looking in the category Original Version.

During this period, we affected the personalities of two of the most famous spitball pitchers from the early 20th Century. Look at our brief bios for more info about this, and so as not to be confused as to who is talking when.

We rebooted the franchise in early 2009 in its current form.


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Kent M. Beeson

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Kent M. Beeson (aka Urban Shockah) is a stay-at-home dad and stay-at-home writer, living in Seattle, WA with his wife, 2 year old daughter and an insane cat. In 2007, he was a contributor to the film blog ScreenGrab, where he presciently suggested Jackie Earle Haley to play Rorschach in the Watchmen movie, and in 2008, he wrote a film column for the comic-book site ComiXology called The Watchman. (He's a big fan of the book, if you couldn't tell.) In 2009, he gave up the thrill of freelance writing to focus on screenplays and novels, although he sometimes posts to his blog This Can't End Well, which a continuation of his first blog, he loved him some movies. He's a Pisces, and his favorite movie of all time is Jaws. Coincidence? I think not.

Martin McClellan

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Martin (aka Burley Grymz) is a designer and writer. He occasionally blogs at his beloved Hellbox, and keeps a longer ostensibly more interesting bio over here at his eponymous website. You can also find him on Twitter.