By David Hollander
April 14, 2010
The Hollywood Pitch
In the film and television industries, auditions are not reserved solely for actors. Nearly every job in the business is won through some formal process of approval and audition, be it for a supporting role or a role making rolls for the craft service table. Producers audition for studio heads, studio heads audition for corporate CEO’s, the casting directors who audition the talent themselves audition for producers and for studio casting chiefs, line producers audition for physical production vice presidents. And writers audition for everyone: actors, directors, producers, studio and network executives.
Most of these entertainment industry auditions make sense and are pretty utilitarian. You can hear an actor read the lines, see their face and body type, get a sense of exactly what you are buying in the room before you buy it. You can look at the resume of a casting director or get a track history associated with the studio chief candidate. You can eat a sandwich made by the craft service guy and taste their coffee. Consequently, most job ‘auditions’ in this business have some basis in reality and bring the thing that is the stuff of the job into the room. Not so much the writer’s pitch. There aren’t words on paper or three by five index cards lining a wall to show story structure. In a writer’s job interview, there are words and promises and very little else.
Most writers hate pitching on its face: we are asked to leave the computer and actually speak in front of others. Simply put, we are writers for many reasons, one of the foremost of them is that because we are NOT actors. The pitch is the moment when we must take on the attributes of our extroverted cousins, however, and dress the part, practice the delivery, show up on time and sweat it out under the lights in front of a room of people that at its most intense can number in the teens.
So what is a pitch really?
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In essence a pitch is the promise of great things to come, a verbal contract before the contract, an interview in which both the writer and their promised material are examined without the benefit of any actual material being in the room. A pitch in many ways is the portent of the greatest blind date of someone else’s life in which the writer plays match maker, priest and therapist. The writer acts as if they know exactly what the listening party needs in order to love and live happily. And the writer promises he will soon deliver to his auditor someone who has every quality that the seeker desires.
It’s impossible to detail what makes a pitch good or bad, a sale or a pass. Every writer has a distinctly different style. Some act out their shows from beginning to end, some tell jokes and bring in music and tear sheets. Some stare at the floor and mutter. Some ask their producers to carry the load. Others panic entirely and come in and out of the room. Some are self-deprecating. Others deprecate others. The best in this business do it with the fewest words: in a game of less is more, they allow the auditor to imagine that which they want to imagine regardless of what they truly plan to deliver. There is no end to the style and manner, mainly because there are no rules. Ultimately, in a pitch, the idea is to get a new idea across in a unique and clarifying way, get people to nod their understanding, to say yes to it, and then to get the hell out of the room.
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There are many positives about the pitching process. There is something wonderful about communicating the ideas behind the ideas and playing with the structure of the piece with other professionals that feels, well, like fun. It should be fun, really, because ultimately we are talking about entertainment. If it's not, chances are the audience will never bite. It's my belief that we should limit our pitches to one category: our honest feelings about a story. It's me belief we should only talk about why the piece matters to us, about who the characters are and how we know them or how we plan to get to know them, and discuss structure with an eye toward the energy of the story and the way it impacts the characters.
As daunting as that sounds, a pitch is really no different than the internal conversation we have, as writers, with ourselves as we talk ourselves into actually writing something. We take that odd internal dialogue and show it to others. I guess, from my point of view, the pitch is an antidote to the loneliness of creating a story behind a script. It’s also a great way to force ourselves to clarify our ideas and decide whether what we want to do makes any sense or is just totally inane.
Yet, outside the benefits of scrutinizing and development of the material, there is a fatal flaw here. Mainly because we pitch to sell, and in that phrase is the implicit truth that we pitch to please. This business of pleasing is double edged: the problem with only trying to sell or please is that you just very well may. And then you are left with the disastrous reality of having to write something you don’t really know how to write or don’t really want to write. If the win is simply making the sale and pleasing the buyer, the next few months of the writer’s life are going to be deeply painful. Sleepless nights, endless notes and rewrites and ultimately, usually, a promised blind date that is so not what the person was hoping for that they will leave before ordering dinner.
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If I had control over the business, I would actually eliminate the pitch altogether. It's my belief that studio and networks buy because they think they need something, they don’t usually buy to be surprised. And yet there is nothing more surprising than the script that follows the pitch. I’ve never sold a pitch and then turned in a script and received a phone call where an executive said the script was better than they expected. The blind date analogy again: we all expect the person of our fantasies to show up. When the real person arrives, they are always imperfect and always, well, themselves. Scripts are the same thing. They can never be what the pitch is, because the pitch, at its essence, is an advertisement for a script. The commercial that gets you to buy the thing itself. And commercials never advertise any let downs or disappointments.
I often wonder why our business likes to spend money on promises instead of fully written scripts. I have certainly noticed that selling a speculative script, fully written, can be much harder than selling an idea that is simply a seed. In truth, the reason the pitch is the gateway to employment boils down to the perception of control. The buyer wants to build a house from the ground up, not live in something another man built. And so they shop for an architect to design to their specifications and buy themselves the right to complain loudly if the shape feels wrong. This is why, ultimately, at many networks and studios, the films and shows begin to feel the same. The writers sell a pitch and then conform it to the taste of their buyers. Thousands of writers writing to the specifications of a dozen or so people in true power. It's no wonder the product feels somewhat similar - in truth there are twelve real writers in control of the end product.
So what are we really doing when we pitch? Asking permission to write and asking permission to please with our writing. We get paid for this, sure, yet more often than not we pay for it by neutralizing the vision. On the other end of that big promise is the price of some form of disappointment, or, as I like to write about, the death of fantasy. The collaboration that follows that is really what the job is – the pitch starts it, the first draft kills it, and the work that follows that draft becomes the real part of the process.
Posted By: David Hollander in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette April 14, 2010 edition.
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David Hollander is a producer and screenwriter who is a part of the judging panel for FILM FACORY and native to the Pittsburgh area, has joined the blogging community of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Hollander, a member of the FILM FACTORY’S judging panel, has been notably credited for producing and writing “The Cleaner” and “The Guardian.” He was raised in Pittsburgh, PA and began his career as a playwright. Later, he turned his passion towards film and television. Today, Hollander’s blog in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette titled “Letters Home from Hollywood,” focuses on what its like to do his line of work. He writes honestly from the inside to an audience who wants know more about Hollywood and how it works.
For an archive of David's Blog, please click here:
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