RE: I challenge thee! posted by kza

Dude — it’s like you’re reading my mind. Like, trippy. I just picked up “Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds: The Guaranteed Way to Get Your Screenplay or Novel Read” from the library, for crying out loud.

I’ve been thinking about pitches for a couple weeks now, ever since the debut episode of On The Lot, that new reality show/director contest thingy. (Show’s crap, btw; it started off well, but they kept changing the format and, incredibly, skipping stuff — at the end of one episode, the contestants are given an hour to direct a one-page script, and then we never hear about it again. WTF?) Anyway, in the first episode, the contestants are given one of four loglines to build a one-minute pitch around, and after some remarkably embarrassing attempts, this one dude gets up and just throws one straight down the plate, 100 mph.

(See what I did there? I literalized the phrase “pitch”. Comedy gold!)

I have the episode saved so that I could transcribe his pitch — it really was terrific. And between that, and a book Burley and I talked about offline a few weeks back, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” , I’ve become interested in the idea of simplicity, and how it applies to screenwriting. And the most direct way it applies is the pitch.

Burley and I haven’t really thought much about pitches, generally speaking. (Or if he has, he hasn’t been telling me.) I suspect that, for me at least, the main reason is a kind of artistic snobbery. Pitches are what those slick, know-nothing Hollywoof types do, right? It couldn’t have anything to do with art and film, could it?

Yet, I’m beginning to believe that they have everything to do with art and film. No, not every kind of film — pitches would seem kinda meaningless for a Brakhage piece, and maybe even certain David Lynch films. But that’s not what we’re trying to do here at Spitball!. I think the ideal here is for something that hits two targets that are rarely hit together: mainstream and smart. And in order to hit that first one, the pitch is absolutely necessary. Nearly every movie that’s considered mainstream (and I imagine quite a few that are considered smart) began life as a pitch. So we’ll begin there as well.

But what is a pitch, exactly?

A pitch is both an idea for a movie and the attempt to sell said movie — “sell” in this case meaning to persuade an audience that your idea is a good one. The pitch itself tells you just enough about the main character, what they want, what kind of obstacles they might face, and most importantly, why the hell you should care. This last one is key. Everything in the pitch is completely worthless if you can’t make the audience care about the main character. (Which is what makes the pitch so tricky — you don’t have time to go into detail about the protagonist’s dead dog. Time is running out! Press A! Press A!)

Note again that the pitch is just the idea for a movie — although the pitch might be based on a completed work, it will only communicate the bare essentials. It’s likely that the pitch will never detail the obstacles, or the name of the protagonist, or even how the story ends. (Note: our Time to Die pitches will include the ending.) It’s understood that the pitch will only bear a passing resemblance to the finished screenplay, in the same way a TV Guide entry only kinda looks like the real movie. There’s always going to be a sense of “yeah, but…” about the enterprise. That’s normal. Go with it.

In fact, I’m starting to think that a lot of “blank space”, so to speak, is a pitch’s secret weapon. Since a pitch is by definition just a sketch, there’s a lot of room for the listener to mentally inhabit the idea, either by imagining the rest herself, or just by enjoying the unresolved tension created by the idea. For example, I really love the idea of Fred Claus: Santa’s bitter older brother is forced to move to the North Pole. The contrast between the standard image of Saint Nick — jolly and goodhearted — with an older brother, who is probably an asshole (it’s Vince Vaughn!) — is just delicious. I have no idea if the actual movie will live up to these expectations it’s created in me, but that’s not the point — the point is to create the expectations in the first place.

(OT: Santa is gonna be played by Paul Giamatti!? Holy shit!)

Now, most pitches (barring the bad ones that go into too much detail) have blank space anyway. But I’m wondering: is there a way to, I don’t know, maximize the blank space payout? A way to create expectations, only, y’know, better? I don’t know, but it’s something I’m going to think about when writing the Time to Die pitch.

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