INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I was in the process of completing this book, this year’s Academy Awards ceremony was held, and I realized how much an acknowledgments page is like an Oscar speech. You’re trying to thank everyone who contributed to the work you did. But then you think, “Well, if I thank them, I better thank these other people, too, or they’ll think they don’t mean as much to me.” And pretty soon you’re just worried about who you might forget to mention.
At least I have more than two minutes, or whatever absurd amount of time the Academy gives the winners. Not the stars, of course; they can prattle on as long as they want. But it’s all the time the lowly screenwriters ever get, before that awful orchestra starts to play them off.
So I want to thank, certainly, the people that truly helped bring this book to completion. But even more than that, I want to thank some people whose contributions to my career, or to my life, make what I do — including writing this book — so rewarding, and so much fun.
Starting with my assistant, Ginger Earle, who did research, and transcribing, and whatever else I needed day after day. She was the first person to read the manuscript of this book, and she did what only the best editors do — she told me when something excited her or made her laugh, not just what didn’t work.
Huge thanks, of course, to Michael Wiese and Ken Lee at Michael Wiese Productions, who took a big chance when they agreed to publish this book, based only on my assurances that it was a good idea. From the moment I contacted them, they’ve made me feel welcome and special. And to my editor, Paul Norlen, and to Gina Mansfield, who created the book’s layout, thanks for making the words flow and the pages look great.
Thanks to Esther Newberg, my terrific agent at ICM, and to her assistant, Christine Earle, who is always helpful and supportive, even with all my panicky calls asking why lawyers take so long getting contracts written.
To all the generous writers and agents and executives in Chapter 12, who offered their comments and suggestions about pitching, thank you from a very grateful author, and from all of the readers who will be enlightened and empowered by your insights. And to my clients and associates and friends as well, who provided all those back- and inside-cover quotes that make me sound way smarter and more special than I really am.
Again and again I feel deeply appreciated and honored by the sponsors and organizations who invite me to speak, especially John Johnson and the American Screenwriters Association; Erik Bauer and the Screenwriting EXPO; and Derek Christopher and TV/Film Seminars and Workshops. And without the wisdom, trust and commitment of my consulting clients and seminar participants, I simply wouldn’t have anything to say in this book — or any desire to say it. I’m one of the lucky, lucky few in this world who get to make a living doing what they love. It’s all of you I have to thank for that.
And without playing favorites, I have to add a special acknowledgment to six terrific writers and filmmakers I’ve been working with — and friends with — for a long, rewarding time: Grace Boyett; Diane Cairns; Robert Celestino; Teresa Cutler; Heather Hale; and Roger Stone. Thanks, and hang in there — we’re all gonna be rich soon.
Most of the people I’m about to mention were also acknowledged in my previous book. Since that was written more than fifteen years ago, you can see how blessed I’ve been to have these people in my life. So continued love and thanks to my brother Jim and his new bride Jennifer (who likes movies as long as they aren’t violent or gross or scary or upsetting); and to Bruce Derman, Eric Edson, Dianne Haak, Mitchell Group and Paul Margolis, not only for your treasured friendship, but for years of great conversations about movies.
And deep appreciation to Cisci Deschaine, Heidi Wall Roberts, Donna Jason, Justine Dantzer, John Lofgren, and Nancy Lynn Newman (who I have to include just so I can spell her name right this time), who almost never talk about movies, but with whom I can talk about anything else, and who are always there with love and support and laughter.
As always, thanks to my friends in Oregon, Charles Moreland, Jim and Nancy Hicks, John and Teresa Hudkins, and Bill and Wendy Trezise. I was dragging those four guys to movies at the Elsinore Theater all the way back in the seventh grade (which, if anyone in Hollywood asks, was about fifteen years ago). They’ve been my best friends ever since.
Finally, and most of all, love and thanks to my wife Vicki, who never stops believing in me, never stops encouraging me to write, and who is still my favorite person in the world to sneak away with on a Friday afternoon to see a movie.
INTRODUCTION
Selling a screenplay or a novel is simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple.
Step number one: Write a great story.
Step number two: Get lots and lots of people to read it.
My previous book, Writing Screenplays That Sell, as well as hundreds of lectures, dozens of articles, a bunch of CDs and DVDs, and thousands of hours I’ve spent coaching writers and filmmakers, have mostly been about step one.
This book is about step two.
You can have the greatest, most commercial, most brilliantly written screenplay or manuscript since The Godfather, but if you don’t get dozens of agents, managers, producers, editors and executives in the film or publishing industries to read it, it’ll never get produced, and you’ll never reach the wide audience you long for.
So how do you do that? How do you somehow persuade all those powerful people that your work is worth their time? That it is more likely to make them money, or fulfill their passion for storytelling, than the scores of other scripts and book proposals they already have to read? And how do you accomplish this seemingly impossible task when you have at best only a minute or two of their time before they hang up, turn away or move on to the next hopeful writer knocking on their door?
The 60-Second Pitch
This book is about selling. But despite the catchy title, it’s not really about selling your screenplay or novel. It’s about selling someone the opportunity to read your story. This book will teach you how to convince potential agents and buyers to spend their most valuable asset — their time — in exchange for the personal and financial riches your story will bring.
In other words, this book is about a certain kind of sales pitch, what I term the 60-second pitch — sometimes known as the telephone pitch, or the elevator pitch, or the pitch fest pitch. Because it’s a pitch you have less than two minutes to deliver.
A 60-second pitch should not to be confused with a pitch meeting. In a pitch meeting, a writer (usually a screenwriter; pitch meetings are rare in the publishing world) has been invited to come to an agent or executive’s office and outline a story in detail. The meeting can last from 15 to 45 minutes or more, and often includes a whole conference table full of people. The writer’s goal is usually to secure a development deal, and to get paid for turning a story into a complete screenplay.
Pitch meetings and development deals usually occur after a writer’s career is established, or at least after the person receiving the pitch has read other samples of the writer’s work, or is familiar with what the writer has had produced or published. For that to have happened, the writer must have persuaded lots of people to read her earlier work. And she did that by using some form of the 60-second pitch.
I’ll discuss pitch meetings in some detail in Chapter 10, and reveal how the techniques of the 60-second pitch can be applied to a longer presentation. But if you’re a writer still trying to launch your career — still looking for representation or a first option or sale — the opportunities for pitch meetings will be pretty rare. The opportunities that demand that you master the 60-second pitch, however, will form the backbone of your entire marketing campaign.
If you’re not a novelist or screenwriter, but are a reader, assistant or intern hoping to move up the ladder to become an agent, development executive, editor or producer, the ability to pitch a story quickly, concisely and powerfully will do more to advance your career th
an almost any other skill you can master.
The Cardinal Rule of Pitching
If you’re standing in the aisle at Barnes and Noble or Borders, or if you’re reading this page on Amazon.com (where they let you look at a few pages to lure you into placing an order), I’m going to give you the most important principle of the entire book right now, for free. You don’t even have to buy the book.
Without question, the single biggest mistake writers make in pitching their work is this: They try to tell their story.
Let’s say you’ve signed up for the Pitch Xchange at the Screenwriting EXPO, or for a one-on-one session with an agent at a writers conference or book fair.
You’ve got maybe five minutes sitting across from this buyer to get him to look at your book or screenplay. So talking as fast as you can, you launch into the opening scene, then go on to detail, step by step, the plot of your story.
Here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll barely be into Act 2 (or Chapter 2) when the friendly hall monitor will come over to announce that you have 30 seconds left. So you’ll quickly try to penetrate the glazed expression on the buyer’s face, summarize the ending, and get him to say yes.
He won’t.
If you’ve got a story that can be told in five minutes, you’ve got a story for a five-minute movie. There’s simply no way you can do justice to the plot of a novel or feature film in that amount of time. And even if you could, you’ve left no time for the buyer to react to your story by asking questions or giving suggestions or expressing his interest.
Or let’s say you’ve managed to get a potential agent on the phone, and she’s willing to hear your pitch. Literary agents have phone lists that average at least a hundred calls a day. They simply don’t have time to listen to you detail all the elements of your story. They want to know in an instant if this story will be worth their time (or more accurately, worth the time of the reader they’ll pay to do coverage on it).
So what can you do if you don’t tell her your story?
Simply put, you get her to read your screenplay or manuscript by getting her to feel something positive about it.
The Primary Objective of All Story
The goal of every screenplay, every movie, every novel, every story of any kind (and ultimately, every work of art) is identical: to elicit emotion.
We go to the movies and we read books so we can feel something positive or fulfilling, something we can’t feel as frequently or as intensely in our everyday lives. The storyteller’s job is to create that feeling for the mass audience.
When you’re pitching your story, you must provide buyers with a positive emotional experience. And you must convince them that when your movie is made, or your novel is published or your play is produced, your story will create an even stronger emotional experience for the people who buy tickets and books and DVDs.
In other words, your goal is to get your buyers to think, “This is a novel (or movie) I’d like to see,” or more important, “This is a story that will make a lot of money.”
Like it or not, the 60-second pitch is a sales pitch. Even though the immediate goal is just to get your story read, you’re ultimately asking every potential buyer to invest her time and money representing or producing or publishing your story. The only way you’ll get her to do that is if she believes the end result will be a big profit.
Even if you’re pitching to agents or executives or assistants whose own money isn’t on the line, these people know that they (or their bosses) will have to convince dozens of other powerful people that this story will make a bundle. If they don’t consistently do that with the projects they take on, they’re out of business.
A telephone pitch is very much like a TV ad for a movie that’s about to open, or for an upcoming TV episode. A 30-second TV spot doesn’t try to show every scene or character or plot element — that would be impossible. But it will reveal something funny or sexy or suspenseful from the film, in order to convince viewers watching the commercial that the movie or TV show itself will be a wonderful emotional experience.
So this book is about getting people to feel positive enough about your story that they’ll want to read it. It’s about selecting the elements of the story that will excite potential buyers, and making them eager to get their hands on your work before anybody else does. And it’s about presenting those key elements to the right people, in a manner so compelling that they can’t say no.
The 8 Steps to a Powerful Pitch
Selling your work requires both preparation and courage. But as you will learn, the better your preparation, the less courage you’ll be required to muster. If you go through the entire process I present in this book, I promise you’ll not only get your stories read, you’ll be far less intimidated by the prospect of pitching them.
If you’re a writer or filmmaker who wants to connect with an audience, who wants to touch as many people as you can with your work, you must devote time and energy to the marketing process, just as you do to your craft. You can’t remain the shy, withdrawn, introverted artist you’d probably like to be (which is why you become a writer in the first place). You’ve got to get your work read, which means you’ve got to put yourself out there in a positive, committed way and make people aware of your talent.
There are eight critical steps to creating and presenting a pitch guaranteed to get your work read. So here they are — The 8 R’s of Pitching:
Review. You must examine your story to determine its most powerful elements — the qualities you’ll reveal in your pitch. You’ll then find other films or novels similar in genre, tone or demographic to substantiate the commercial potential of your own story.
Write. (Okay, I know it doesn’t begin with an R, but it sounds like it does.) After selecting the key elements to include in your pitch, you must prepare a script of exactly what you’re going to say. You won’t follow it word for word — this would remove the spontaneity and flexibility you’ll need — but you’ll use it as a well thought-out blueprint for your presentation.
Rehearse. You must practice and practice your pitch, then rewrite it and practice it some more. You have to know your pitch so well that it becomes natural and conversational.
Research. While you’re completing your screenplay or novel and preparing your pitch, you’ll also be targeting your market. Using directories, reviews, interviews, websites, pitch fest lists and your own contacts, you will compile a list of the specific buyers — agents, editors, producers or publishers — that you’re going to pursue. Then you’ll use a variety of methods to persuade them to hear your pitch.
Rapport. As soon as you contact or meet a buyer, you must establish a personal relationship — before you begin talking about your story.
Revelation. When you finally launch your pitch, you must reveal the strongest, most emotionally involving information about yourself and your project you can, in order to convince the buyer that it’s worth reading.
Request. Once you’ve outlined your story, you have to ask the buyer to read it.
Response. An effective pitch means listening, not just talking. You must respond to the buyer’s comments, questions and requests, both to increase his interest and to strengthen your relationship with him.
The first four steps are your Preparation — Part I of this book. These occur before you make your phone call or begin your pitch session.
Part II will then guide you through your Presentation — the four remaining steps of your pitch. I’ll also show how the principles of the 60-second pitch apply to other situations: full pitch meetings; encounters where you have to pitch your story in just one or two sentences; meetings where you’re pitching someone else’s story as a development executive or an independent producer; or jobs requiring you to write coverage for screenplays or manuscripts.
Part III will offer some added goodies: pitching templates (scripted pitches for various genres or markets, which you can modify to suit a specific project), and finally, some wonderful contributions from
more than 40 successful writers, agents, attorneys, producers, editors, development executives, and publishers on what they consider to be the qualities of great (and not-so-great) pitches.
Caveats, Disclaimers, and Excuses
Finally, a couple things I should explain or warn you about before we get into the good stuff:
This book is about pitching stories in any form applicable: screenplays; novels; plays; short films; feature films looking for distribution; radio plays; school plays and operas. But instead of repeatedly saying “screenplays or novels, or book proposals or manuscripts,” I’m going to consider all those terms interchangeable. And when I say “story,” I mean a story in its written form, not just the verbalized plot of your novel or screenplay.
So if you’re a novelist and you read, “Pitching your screenplay to a producer isn’t as hard as it sounds,” translate that to mean, “Pitching your manuscript to a publisher isn’t as hard as it sounds,” which also means, “Pitching your book proposal to an agent isn’t as hard as it sounds.”
This brings up another issue: I will try my best to balance my references to both screenplays and novels. But I’ll use more movie examples than examples from literature, because it’s more likely that readers from both disciplines will have seen a particular movie than will have read a particular novel. No slight is intended, and it doesn’t mean the principles don’t apply equally.
Often I will use examples that are both novels and films, so the principle presented is true for both. And whenever there’s a difference between the approaches for novelists and those for screenwriters, I’ll say so. I promise.
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