PITCHING YOUR MASTERPIECE
by PJ McIlvaine

You can meet Chris at this year's Great American PitchFest. At 9am on Saturday, June 13th, he will be teaching a FREE class on MILLION DOLLAR PITCHING at the Marriott Burbank Hotel and Convention Center (2500 N. Hollywood Way, Burbank, CA 91505). To RSVP for Chris's class (or any of the other 30+ classes being offered), please email info@pitchfest.com. You can also check out more on Chris by visiting www.milliondollarscreenwriting.com or http://www.hollywoodbyphone.com.

You might have the written the greatest screenplay ever, but that’s only half the battle. Pitching the script is an essential element to getting it sold. At this year’s Great American Pitchfest, you’ll have the opportunity to learn and apply the tried-and-true techniques from one of the pros, Chris Soth, screenwriter and star of the pitching bestseller DVD SOLD! How I Set Up Three Pitches in Hollywood. Note: Bring in your pitches, a few will be selected and workshopped during the lecture.

PJ : Is this your first year with GAP or have you given classes with them before?

CS: I’ve known Signe for a few years. When I started my website and started teaching my Million Dollar Screenwriting.com, I knew the Pitchfest was coming up and I asked if she could distribute some flyers for me, and she did. Then last year I gave a lecture including my method of screenwriting, Million Dollar Screenwriting, and my Mini-Movies method, which is my method of breaking your full-length screenplay down into smaller mini-movies like chapters in a novel. Then I also did a Hollywood by Phone interview with a Hollywood manager, J. C. Spink, live in front of her audience. And it was also phonecast to everybody on my email list so that they could listen in live and ask their questions as well.

So this is my second year coming back and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m going to teach a course that’s a little more geared right at pitching, because as well as being a teacher and a working screenwriter, I’ve sold three pitches myself. I think SOLD! is the only DVD where the writer pitches to camera exactly what he said to the studio or the independent producer the day he sold the pitch.

PJ: So it’s immortalized, right?

CS: (Laughs) Well, I thought I might as well record it, because the movies might never get made. We’ll have to see about those.

PJ: Right. The pitch might be bought, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the movie will be made.

CS: Well, it does the mean the script will be written. I’m glad to say I’m moving forward on one of those pitches, which I will direct myself. I’m excited about that. Last year I think Signe included copies of the SOLD! DVD in the early bird kit, or the survival kit for the Pitchfest. So I have heard a lot of great comments about that from Pitchfest attendees from last year.

PJ: People are going to be able to pitch live to you, is that correct?

CS: At the moment, I don’t know if I’m participating in a producing capacity. Certainly in my workshops I will help people tweak their pitches and their loglines. Whether I’ll be there in some sort of capacity as a buyer remains to be seen. My guess is I’ll just be there as a lecturer and coach. I did coach a couple of people last year, to great effect actually. I heard back from someone who said they had 16 requests for their script and another who had 12. I remember they had very good pitches when they came to me and I helped them see that that was the case.

PJ: A lot of my screenwriting friends ask, when you pitch a script, is the script necessarily written or are you just pitching an idea? I think people tend to confuse the two in their minds. Sometimes my friends say they’re pitching and I ask them, is it a completed script or is it an idea? And they say, oh, it’s just an idea. But I think when we talk about pitching, you and I, we’re talking more in terms of pitching a completed script.

CS: Well, I think this is actually a distinction between the consumer-based Pitchfest and the producer-based business. I’m a producer in that I produce written work. And there are a few ways that I can get paid to do that. One is to write on speculation and try to sell the product in the marketplace. The other is to go out with a pitch first and pitch an unwritten work to a buyer with the idea that they will commission that work, as any artist is committed to create any work of art. That is generally what I do. That is, and what should be, the difference between me and your average aspiring screenwriter attending the Pitchfest. The goal when I pitch to a studio or other financial entity is that they will pay me to write the script, and so I tell them the whole story from beginning to end. I’m trying to sell them a very pricey product, which is me as a writer and my literary work. It can cost as much as a very nice house and you wouldn’t buy a house unless you were taken through every single room of it, and be allowed to inspect the foundation and so forth. And then I can’t say, oh, and there’s this great ending. I have to tell you the whole story. That’s a long form pitch and that generally takes me 15 to 20 minutes to do.
However, at a Pitchfest we’re more in an elevator pitch situation. Our goal is to get a script read, so we’re pitching a work that is already written and so the goal is different. In the first example, I’m saying that if you like this story, pay my fee and you will own it. And in many Pitchfest situations, the goal is to get the script read. My situation is pitching an idea that they will pay me to write and develop.

For me as a working writer and WGA member, I have working relationships with studios and buyers and producers and I am going to pitch to them a script that is unwritten with the implication that I would like them, or they would be lucky, to have me to write that script for them. And that’s very pricey, so I tell the whole story and I don’t want to tease them with a really cool twist ending that I don’t reveal in the pitch. I’m going to try to wow them with that twist ending.

Whereas at a consumer Pitchfest, the idea is usually – and I think it may be even a policy of the Pitchfest – to not pitch unwritten work. The idea is to pitch just enough to get your script requested for a read.

So two different techniques apply, but what you don’t want to do in that short pitch or elevator pitch, is to give away your twist ending. You don’t want to obviate their need to read the script. You don’t want to reveal your twist ending, you just want to intrigue them.

If I am out there pitching work that I want to be paid to write and I happen to have written it or be writing it, I don’t divulge that either. THIS SOUNDS CONTRADICTORY.

So you don’t want to give away too much but also don’t give away too little. Any time I’m pitching an idea to get someone to buy the script, the conversation is much shorter. I don’t want to tell you so much that you feel like you’ve seen the movie or the trailer and you saw the best parts. I want you to feel like, oh, I have to read that.

PJ: But you’re at a level, Chris, where you’ve established a relationship where you can go in and pitch an idea rather than an entire script. The average screenwriter attending the Pitchfest is not at the level where they would have those kinds of relationships. They would have to write the script first and then try to sell it as a spec, is that right?

CS: Exactly, and more important than that is they’re trying to create those relationships and one thing they’re going to want to build is trust. So say I give a very brief pitch to a producer and it does hook him or her and they request the script. Then I want to send the script as quickly as possible, with a reminder of who I am and how we met and what they said about the idea. I want them to read it and what I want to build up there is trust: He said he had this script, the idea seemed good, he sent it to me as he said he would, and lastly of course, the script is really good.

And then you never know, after that, whether they buy that script or not or move it forward to their company or their studio, and then I may be in a position to talk with them about ideas before I’ve written them. I’ve built up that trust where they know I have good ideas and my scripts are well written. And I’ve made a friend, which is what I would go to a Pitchfest with the goal of doing. If I’ve made a friend, then maybe I will be pitching them unwritten ideas at some point in the future., if only to get their opinion or only to have them say, you know what, you need to work up a whole pitch and come in to these buyers with me.

PJ: In the pitches that you hear, not necessarily in a producing capacity, perhaps more in a writing capacity, what are the things you hear in pitches that you don’t want to hear, or maybe the common mistakes you hear when somebody tries to pitch?

CS: The common mistakes for me are getting bogged down in unnecessary details. It’s a common pitfall in writing and it’s a common pitfall in pitching. Knowing how to distill a story to its essential elements and pull those elements into a logline that is gripping is a vital skill for anyone who wants to pitch a story. And we as writers love the small, telling detail and get caught up in tiny details we are going to embroider in the corners of our story and they are beautiful and we miss the fact the fact they are not at the forefront of our story. Because they’re elegant and we like them, that doesn’t earn them a place automatically in the 1, 3, or 5 minute pitch. So a writer gets caught up in the trees rather than the forest. I want to hear what this forest is like and what great adventure is going to happen to me there. Then when you hand me that script, I want to fall in love with each and every tree.

PJ: So give me what you would consider the perfect pitch.

CS: The perfect pitch? I have a friend who claims that “Liar, Liar,” while maybe not the greatest movie, is the perfect pitch ever. The pitch is, a dishonest lawyer loses the ability to lie for 24 hours. That’s good and you certainly see where the comedy is going to come from there. I don’t know if I even need the word dishonest in there. Dishonest and lawyer to most people is redundant. There it is, in a single phrase, and everything in the story generates from that one idea.

I’ll give you the pitch for “Firestorm”, which was pitched as a spec script. A smokejumper parachutes into a forest fire, the biggest fire in Yellowstone Park’s history, to guide out some trapped firefighters, but finds they’re actually escaped convicts and one is a hostage.
Now unlike “Liar Liar” that’s not a comedy but you can tell that it is fraught with action and fraught with tension. I do a lecture on loglines and I happen to think there are three elements and these are the three things that I put at the forefront of your pitch. To me, and I haven’t heard anybody else put it quite this way, they are the protagonist, a verb that implies conflict, and a direct object that should be the antagonist. Then there should be a prepositional phrase in which we learn what is the backdrop or the world in which this movie takes place.

I believe the logline should be one sentence, and the subject of that sentence should be the protagonist. Ideally, it should be one sentence if it’s a logline. I’m not necessarily saying your pitch should only be one sentence. The pitch I just gave you for “Firestorm” is one depending on whether you use a conjunction or put a period before it.

PJ: So you’re saying a pitch is not necessarily a logline?

CS: Well, the logline you use to entice a producer may not be the same as you use to discipline yourself as a writer. You might sex up your logline a little bit for a producer, but I would err to the side of the pitch being the logline. Ideally, you’ve got a script that is high concept enough that all you have to do is sell your logline and someone will say, yes I have to read that. I had that with “Firestorm”, that was my experience. At the time I wrote it, I only had to say, it’s “Cliffhanger” or” Die Hard” in a forest fire.

PJ: And boom, everybody knew what it was?

CS: Boom, everybody knew what it was and boom, everybody wanted to read it, back at that time. And I didn’t even have to say that I selected what I thought was the best possible protagonist, which was the smokejumper, these people who parachute into forest fires so they’re in constant peril on the ground, and just to get there you have to face death. So the three elements to me are the hero, the villain, and the backdrop.

Your absolute generic shortest possible logline should be: A hero battles a villain in a world. Those are the three things that I want to know about. Those are the three stages that I had for “Firestorm”, and the way my screenplay ideas come to me. I drove through the aftermath of a forest fire and wondered what it must have been like to be there, so I had my world. Later on I read about these smokejumpers, the guys who parachute into forest fires, and I thought why haven’t I seen that in a movie? And then the other piece, which was a long time coming, was learning that if a forest fire gets big enough they will empty out prisons and have the prisoners fight the fire. And then I had my bad guys the escaped cons. So while I sort of sexed up my logline, if I really wanted to distill that, I would say, a smokejumper battles escaped cons in a forest fire. The difference is the first version has a little more window dressing to hook you more, but the second was what I had above my computer while I was writing it.

PJ: So the pitch should have as much sizzle and pop, the most bang for the buck, in the least amount of words?

CS: Absolutely. If I had gone in to pitch “Firestorm” saying a smokejumper battles a bunch of escaped cons in a forest fire, a lot of questions come up: What’s a smokejumper, what’s he do? How do convicts get in a forest fire? But the longer pitch answers those questions but is still relatively short and is sexier – by half, I hope.

PJ: What are the best and worst pitches you’ve ever heard?

CS: The worst are hardly even worth going into because they’re all kind of the same; they get caught up in the details.

PJ: Is that a common flaw to them?

CS: It’s very often that, getting bogged down in details or minor characters. Right now, there are several areas that are bad to work commercially in. This will change. These aren’t bad pitches, and they could be very good stories told by the person pitching them, but just not a good play to make in the current marketplace.

PJ: Not commercial enough?

CS: Right. These things change, not overnight, But for the past few years, unfortunately, a female-driven historical drama, a period piece, has been a hard sell. This is because all the major movie stars are men, it’s a talent-driven system. We can still make films for women, but they have to be in a small budgetary range, and when people listen to pitches to buy they are not thinking about the budgetary range. People tend to want to be pitched blockbusters. If something is going to be bought on a pitch, or read with a blockbuster in mind, you’ll have an easier time than trying to give them the, hey maybe if you work really hard for 20 years in the studio this can be your passion project. Everybody who listens to pitches wants to make their hay by bringing in the next blockbuster. At this time, although it will change, the next franchise blockbuster tends to be a male protagonist, tends to have a lot of action, be very visual, and take place contemporarily. Historically, there has been an ebb and flow of that. In the thirties’30s and ‘40s, all the biggest stars were women.

PJ: Now, there are some projects that just can’t be described well in a pitch, no? You basically have to read the script.

CS: Absolutely. When I’m going to go out to do a pitch and discuss it with my representation, the code word for that is, that’s going to depend on the execution. That’s execution driven, which means we love the good version of that script, but hate the bad version of it. Certain movies, and you know what they are, make money even if the bad version is made. They’re sort of execution-proof. But romantic comedies or family dramas, any comedy is going to depend on the execution. Are the jokes there? Is the comedic star of the day going to take the role?
So for certain things, you do have to read the script and they’re not good to pitch in an unwritten form. Those are things I’m more likely to take and write on spec myself while going out and pitching the larger, higher-concept stories.

PJ: Now, one fear I hear a lot about is having a pitch stolen – the fear a studio will steal their idea and make a lot of money out of it and cut the writer out. Is there a way you can reassure screenwriters that there is no other way of doing this?

CS: In the script world, you have to get your work out there. I believe it is a neophyte’s fear, and what is the alternative? Never to show your work to anyone? It happens a whole lot less than the neophyte believes. There are lots of ways to protect yourself and they are well known: registering your screenplay with WGA, and getting it copyrighted with Form PA at the U.S. Copyright Office. The former protects you against arbitration. But what really protects your idea is the copyright.

A lot of people have one idea and they think it’s going to be their ticket into the film industry. This is a marketplace of ideas, and if you only have one to sell, you’re going to be drowned out by the barkers shouting louder with more wares, opening larger stores with greater selection. You’re in the idea business. My best advice is just get over it.
 

CHRIS SOTH sold his first screenplay, ”Firestorm”, for $750,000, while still a graduate student in the USC screenwriting program. In 2003 Chris sold his own original pitch, MEET JANE DOE to Signpost Pictures and Mosaic Media in a low-against-mid-six figure deal, with Hopscotch Pictures attached to produce. Chris guided the script through several stages of development and the film is expected to shoot in Australia this coming year. Chris's pitch THE CITIZEN was optioned by Escape Artists (Pursuit of Happyness) with Chris attached to produce. Chris also has written for independent investors, creating such screenplays as WASTELAND, HAUNTED HIGH and STAGE ONE, gathering knowledge used to craft DEAD MAN'S HAND as the perfect independent film project. His latest screenplay, OUTRAGE, starring Michael Madsen, Natasha Lyonne and Michael Berryman, was filmed in Georgia last spring and is in consideration for The Sundance Film Festival. In 2005, Chris founded the website MillionDollarScreenwriting.com to share his screenwriting expertise with aspiring screenwriters. His companion networking website, HollywoodByPhone.com, holds interviews with agents, studio executives, managers and filmmakers every week, and through ScreenplayByPhone.com, Chris mentors screenwriters around the world. He has taught at USC and UCLA and authored over 28 screenplays as well as the internet best-selling book "Million-Dollar Screenwriting: The Mini-Movie Method" and the best-selling pitch DVD: "SOLD! How I Set Up Three Pitches in Hollywood". Chris holds an MFA with distinction in screenwriting from the University of Southern California and a BA in Dramatic Literature from Vassar College, with highest honors.

PJ McIlvaine is a produced screenwriter  whose unforgettable characters leap off the page like Superman over tall buildings and who utter only the wittiest and pithiest bon mots.  She can be reached at pmcilvaine@aol.com .