Script Pitching Do's And Don'ts
Practical Tips And Tricks To Sucessfully Pitch Your Screenplay
Oct 21, 2009
Pitching a script in Hollywood is a lot like pitching in a little league game. The pitch needs to be powerful enough for the receiver to take a swing at it. However, it must also stay far enough inside the box not to automatically be fouled and tossed out. A full inning of strikeouts can be a very useful and educational first inning. Especially when attention is paid to the players who took a swing at the project when compared to the players who stepped aside and watched it sail on by.
Approximately eighty percent of the time a pitch will end with a thank you and a handshake. On rare occasions, a playwright or a screenwriter is thrown out of the building or laughed out of the office. This reaction is most common with unsolicited scripts. Also, scripts handed to a producer or film executive while at a barber shop or grocery store tend to wind up in the trash.
Roughly fifteen percent of the time, scheduled professional pitches will result in the reviewer providing the pitcher with some form of constructive feedback. The application of these elements of feedback generally lead to a more solid script as well as a stronger, more confident pitch. One example of constructive feedback is a request for clarification of genre or target audience. Another common feedback is to show more of the character arc of the protagonist during the pitch.
7 Fatal Pitch Errors
- Script Writer lacks confidence
- Weakly defined main character
- Weakly defined genre
- Pitch is too dense in information
- Too similar to another work
- Unsolicited
- Lack of research
Corrective Actions
Practice pitches to a live audience of impartial peers. Family and coworkers generally lack the instinct to provide actual constructive feedback. Instead, the responses are typically full of empty platitudes - too much encouragement, not enough criticism. Strangers or other writers in a group environment, however, are typically capable of providing accurate feedback.
A tighter, more well defined main character, character arc, or genre can all be accomplished at either the script level or the pitch level. Ideally, the script would be gone over and the pitch polished to best portray the script in a marketable light before ever setting foot at the pitch meeting.
Imagine the marketability of the Mona Lisa if it were pitched as a painting of a woman who never smiles. While that pitch is both brief and factual, it does little to inspire an emotional response by either the receiver or the audience.
In conclusion, it can be said that beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt, the fastest way to get a script idea shot down is for it to be presented as an unsolicited work. An active option for writers who want to be noticed by the industry without waiting for a solicitation is to enter any one or several of the hundreds of writing competitions for film festivals held every year in the United States. Benefits include but are not limited to professional feedback for all appropriate entries, and winners are often presented with the opportunity to have their script evaluated for optioning by one or several of the production companies that partner with the festival.
While it remains a daunting task, pitching a screenplay through the proper channels is a useful and often times critical step in the process of taking an idea from paper to the screen.
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