Pitching and Moaning

Filed Under Culture

I pitched my screenplay in class last night. I don’t particularly like pitching, nor do I think I’m very good at it. But I think it went okay, all things considered. I was a little flummoxed when I realized that my classmates thought the script was set in the modern day after I’d mentioned the Cold War twice at the top of the pitch. Still, I hit upon all the major story points in the two minutes I had allotted. So what if I forgot to mention the hero’s name?

We’ve been reverse-engineering tons of films in class and examining their component parts. I find that sort of thing fascinating. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s redundant when a critic attacks a film for being formulaic. Well, yeah. It’s supposed to be, goofball. The trick is disguising that formula with a fresh approach to the material. Of course, therein lies the challenge of making your film sound like what Joel Silver calls, “uniquely familiar.” Once you’ve done that, you’re halfway home. Then you’ve got to condense all your genius ideas into a two-minute pitch and a two-sentence logline, distilling all your brilliance into something so reductive, it’s hard for the layperson (or some development executive schmendrick) to muster much enthusiasm.

Hey, we’ve hit upon why I hate pitching! As a writer, my last instinct is to be concise. Look at some of my overly wordy blogs about movie quadrilogies. Stripping my script down to a short pitch is physically painful. I have to leave so much out, and then everyone’s confused by the big friggin’ holes in my story. It sounds disjointed and not very well thought out. I’ve been banging away at this idea for over a year. In that time, I’ve solved many of the problems that my classmates brought up after my pitch. And so pitching’s almost an exercise in confusing the hell out of people.

One thing we’ve been doing in class is breaking down popular mainstream films into short pitches, movies like “Gladiator” and “E.T.” Problem is, we’ve all seen those movies and can fill in the narrative gaps, like how does Maximus go from being a Roman general to a slave? That seems like a bit of a leap in logic, but in the context of the film in works. The same goes for “E.T.” He dies and then he comes back to life? That sounds awfully convenient. Again, in the movie, it’s terribly effective. These are two films that either won Best Picture or sat at the tippy-top of the ten highest grossing films of all time. If you pretend you haven’t seen the movie, though, their pitches sound like they were made up on the spot.

That said, I guess I shouldn’t take it to heart when people don’t understand certain elements of my story because I couldn’t flesh them out in the pitch. There’s a lot of world-building (well, world-destroying) that’s going on in my script. I might not be able to shoehorn all of the details into a short pitch, but maybe next time I can get the character’s name in there. And I should bring up the fact that it’s the 1960s.

-Brad Lohan

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