This arc is universal; you don’t have to be a victim of war or genocide to exhibit this same courage and transformation in your own life. To fully realize our humanity, we must all find the courage to risk or sacrifice the things most important to us — even our own lives if necessary — for the sake of the greater good. That’s the theme of the film.
9. What are the successful ANTECEDENTS for your story?
At some point, with every writer or producer I ever coach, I ask the question, “What two or three recent books or movies can you point to and say, ‘Because that made money, mine will make money.’” Far too frequently, writers have no idea what to answer. And until they can, it will be almost impossible for them to sell their stories.
Mentioning successful stories that are similar in genre, tone, plot and/or demographic give buyers a much clearer picture of your own story’s commercial potential. These reference points put buyers in a positive mindset. Subconsciously they’re thinking, “Yeah, I want a hit like that.”
I once heard a pitch for a movie I thought had a lot of possibilities. “That could really be hilarious,” I said. The writer looked at me like I’d just giggled during an execution, and revealed that the story was supposed to be a serious drama. Not surprisingly, the company I worked for didn’t option the script.
This may speak more to my twisted sensibilities than to the quality of the project. Nonetheless, a couple of antecedents would have prevented the misunderstanding, and enabled me to consider the writer’s story on its own terms.
Antecedents also give buyers a clearer sense of your story’s emotional elements. So does having a couple stars in mind who could play your hero, in case a buyer asks you for casting possibilities. If you convey the idea that your movie shares common elements with The Ring, Dawn of the Dead and Saw, then they immediately understand that your script is for a moderately budgeted movie that will scare the crap out of people — and make truckloads of money doing it.
Movie financiers and publishers want to do everything they can to insure a profit on their investment. They do that by replicating success. As soon as they begin listening to your pitch, they’re thinking about what other movies or novels have made money by following the same path that you’re suggesting.
You want to do that work for them, by making it clear that yours is the next in a line of similar movies or novels that have turned into cash machines.
Sometimes writers, groping for even a single successful precedent for their story, will answer, “There aren’t really any antecedents for my project. I want it to be completely original.”
Wrong answer.
Hollywood isn’t looking for total originality. Neither is Random House. They’re looking for movies and books they know how to market. Certainly you want your story to be unique and interesting; buyers aren’t really just looking for clones of other best sellers and blockbusters. But if you can’t point to at least a couple recent hits that verify your story’s commercial potential, you’re gonna have a tough sell.
10. What is your PASSION for this story?
What do you love about this story? What grabs you emotionally? What made you want to commit at least a year of your life — probably a lot more — to writing and selling this? What makes it a movie you’d want to see? What makes this a great movie, or a great novel (not just an interesting story)? Why is it a movie that has to be made, or a book that must be published?
Your passion is not so much something you’ll announce during a pitch; it’s an attitude you’ll convey with everything you say to the buyer. Passion is contagious, and your excitement, focus and tone of voice must all convey your enthusiasm for your story.
So there you have it — the ten most important elements of a novel or screenplay. But just to beat you over the head with Rule #1: Don’t try to tell your story. A pitch — even a 60-second one — is not a race to see how many of these you can convey in a minute. Using the methods I’ll outline in the next chapter, you will select only the ones which convey the essence of your story to buyers, the ones that will get them emotionally involved enough that they’ll start to share your passion for it. When you do that, they’ll demand to read it.
Once you’ve reviewed your story and defined the ten key elements, you must decide which of those elements you’ll reveal in just 60 seconds, and how you’ll do so in the most captivating way possible.
Selecting Your Key Story Components
The specific story elements you choose depend entirely on the nature of your screenplay or novel. If you’ve written a big action script, the outer motivation and outer conflict are far more important than the character arc or the social issues you explore. But character arc is an essential component of any film or novel where the conflict comes from within the characters, and doesn’t require a villain or a ticking clock.
Both Armageddon and The Squid and the Whale portray parent/child conflicts. But if you were pitching the action movie, would it really matter that we hear about the hero’s antagonism toward his daughter’s boyfriend, as long as you tell us that a meteor is about to destroy the entire planet? Conversely, if you omitted the complex themes and characters when pitching the latter film, what would that leave you to talk about?
Given that Road to Perdition is about a hired killer, it would seem crucial to reveal why readers or audiences will empathize with its hero, just as the social issues raised by Remember the Titans would be essential to any description of that screenplay.
Even though the list contains ten elements from which to choose, there are four that I consider almost essential to any good pitch: hero, outer motivation, conflict, and passion.
Whatever your story is about, whatever the genre, theme or emotional impact, the first thing a buyer — or reader — wants to know is: What are we rooting for? Without some sense of who the protagonist is and what desire drives the story forward, it’s hard to even see it as a story.
Look at any random list of movie blurbs or plot descriptions on the Internet Movie Database or the New York Times best seller list. Notice how in almost every one, the hero, and the hero’s desire, is stated or clearly implied. And keep in mind that these are themselves pitches — supplied by the distributors and publishers to get you to see the movies or buy the books.
Since your primary goal is to elicit emotion, describing the major conflict — inner or outer — is critical. Because emotion is created primarily by the conflicts the characters face. The greater the obstacles a hero must overcome, the greater our emotional involvement.
Most desires are pretty familiar: finding true love; stopping some evil force; winning a contest; getting rich. It’s the obstacles that are much more likely to be unique to your story: the people or circumstances separating the lovers; the power of the villain, opponent or force of nature; the particular treasure, contest, business deal, prize, or verdict the hero longs for.
And finally, passion is contagious. How can you expect a buyer to commit hours of his valuable time reading your work (or paying someone to read it), if you don’t seem that excited about it yourself? If you’re not absolutely convinced that your story will turn a profit at the box office or the book store, why are you wasting the buyer’s time? Producers and publishers and agents have to create or represent money-making novels and films to stay in business. So make their jobs easy for them. Pitch them a story you’re so passionate about that their resistance and skepticism will evaporate.
Many times I’ve spoken to development executives or agents who said, “This story didn’t really sound commercial at all, but the writer was so positive and passionate, I just had to see it for myself.” (You’ll hear versions of this comment repeated several times in Chapter 12.) If that passion translates to the page, those scripts and book proposals are the ones that lead to deals.
Opening Strong
Once you’ve selected the elements of your story which clearly and succinctly convey its power and commercial potential, the next step is to formulate a pitch that will r
eveal those elements to the buyer.
To begin this process, I want to share my favorite opening for a 60-second pitch. I have countless examples of clients and lecture participants getting their work read using this opening. It immediately draws the listener into your story, and immediately accesses your passion for your project.
Simply begin your pitch with this sentence: “I think the best way to tell you about my story is to tell you how I came up with this idea.” And then you do just that.
Opening this way accomplishes several things.
First, it draws buyers out of the real world and into the fictional world you’ve created. It’s the pitching equivalent of “Once upon a time …,” alerting buyers that you’re about to begin talking about the story itself, and giving them a chance to focus and to stop thinking about all the other book proposals stacked on their desks that they haven’t read, or how they’d rather be home playing with their kids.
Second, this opening is a great way to overcome your initial nervousness and awkwardness (more about that in Chapter 7). Once you’re relating what really happened when you got this idea, you’ll be remembering that experience, instead of worrying about how well you’re performing.
Finally, this one sentence gets you right into your passion. Because whatever grabbed you then — a real event, something from your past, a dream, a song, a combination of other movies — is probably still the thing you love most about the story. And as soon as you’re focused on the elements of the story that hooked you in, your enthusiasm will start to come through.
Let’s say your script is a historical piece — usually a very difficult genre to sell. But you’re a history buff (or a sports fan), and one day you read about a down-and-out, over-the-hill fighter during the Depression who fought the heavyweight champion of the world.
So you ask yourself, “Why, of all the boxing stories, of all the underdog stories, and of all the rags-to-riches stories I’ve seen, read and heard about, did this one capture my interest?”
Perhaps it was the fact that this was a true story. Perhaps it was because you love boxing, or Cinderella stories, or perhaps because this fighter became a hero for the common man, a guy who faced the same poverty and despair as most of the rest of the country, but whose integrity, determination and courage gave a whole nation inspiration and hope.
Whatever the answer, that’s what you’ve got to convey as you open your pitch. That’s where your passion lies, and that’s what will hook your listener. And at some point in the past, that’s how the movie Cinderella Man was born.
Notice something else about those last couple of paragraphs. Just saying how you came up with this particular story would convey seven of the ten key elements: hero, empathy, setup, opportunity, outer motivation, conflict, and passion. And it would have taken you less than 30 seconds.
You’d still have 30 more seconds to offer antecedents, reveal political issues the script reveals about the Depression that have direct application today, delve deeper into the arc for the hero, discuss the love story that’s an integral part of the story, or give more detailed information about the obstacles the hero faces and how he overcomes them.
Accolades
If the project you’re pitching has already proven itself in some way, you want the buyer to know that. If your screenplay or novel has placed in the top three in a writing competition, for example, or if you have elements (major director or major star) or financing attached to your script, these should be revealed at the top of the pitch.
So instead of beginning by revealing how you came up with the idea, you might start by saying, “The screenplay I want to tell you about won second place last year out of 1200 entries in the American Screenwriters Association Screenplay Competition. But I think the best way to tell you about it is to tell you how I came up with the idea….”
If you’re going to claim that talent or money is attached to the production, make sure it’s for real. If you can’t use the word committed, as in “Jennifer Aniston has committed to play the lead,” or “I have 2 million dollars of a total budget of 5 million committed to the project,” then just stick with revealing the story.
Statements like, “Reese Witherspoon has said she’s interested in starring” or “I have a close relationship with an investor in Florida who has said he’ll put up half the money” are all regarded as bullshit. Not because the buyer thinks you’re lying, but because empty promises and vague expressions of interest get said by friends, agents and financiers all the time, as a way of putting you off while they keep their options open, just in case you do go out and raise some serious money.
Similarly, avoid mentioning responses you’ve gotten from other people. Saying, “This got great coverage at CAA” or “The editor at HarperCollins said this was the best first novel she’d ever read” or “My mom loved it” simply weaken your pitch. If someone in power has firmly committed time or money to the project, great. Everything else is irrelevant.
Finally, don’t tell the buyer why this movie or book is going to be an instant blockbuster or bestseller. Buyers hate hearing declarations like, “This is gonna be bigger than The Wedding Crashers because it will appeal to the teen crowd and it’s twice as funny” or “Do you know that more than 1 billion men around the world shave every morning? That’s why my novel about the inventor of the safety razor is going to be huge!”
The Power of “What if …?”
Even if your story is fictional, it still might have grown out of real events you’ve read or heard about. Or maybe you came up with your idea by seeing common elements to lots of recent films, and going the opposite way, or by taking an everyday experience of your own and inflating it to make it exciting or hilarious. Then the question becomes, how do you segue from the source of the idea to the quality that makes it unique?
This is when you invoke the magical incantation “What if?”
“What if a rich young woman fell in love with a penniless stowaway on a luxury cruise ship — and it turned out to be the Titanic?”
Or, “It’s often been rumored that The Graduate was based on a real family in Pasadena. Well, what if a young woman discovered her mother and grandmother were the real life Elaine and Mrs. Robinson?” I don’t know if that’s how Ted Griffin got people to read his screenplay for Rumor Has It, but it easily could have been. (Actually, Ted Griffin can most likely get anyone to look at anything by saying, “I wrote Ocean’s 11.” But Ted Griffin’s probably not reading this book. And somewhere along the line he had to pitch his projects just like you do.)
So let’s see how you can move from the “Let me tell you how I came up with this idea …” opening, to the “What if …?” segue, to relating the key elements of your story. As an example, I’m going to use this fictional pitch for a screenplay, but which could just as easily be for a novel:
I think the best way to tell you about my story is to tell you how I came up with this idea. When I was growing up, my father and I had a pretty distant relationship. We didn’t really talk much, and we seemed to have only one thing in common — baseball cards. He’d collected them since he was a kid, and we could spend hours looking through his old shoebox full of famous New York Yankees.
So I started thinking, what if a shy, withdrawn, ten-year-old boy learned that his dad was dying. He wants to do one special thing in the time he’s got left to make his dad feel better, and also, deep down, to show him how much he loves him. And what if this kid knows there’s one thing his dad has always longed for, but has never even seen: Mickey Mantle’s rookie baseball card.
So our hero sets out on an odyssey across the country to find the owner — a reclusive billionaire — and to somehow get the owner to sell it to him for $15 — all the money he has. And on top of all that, what if he meets a con artist who agrees to help him, but who secretly plans to get the card for himself?
That’s exactly what happens in my screenplay, The Last Mickey Mantle.
Notice that I don’t ask a “what if” qu
estion and then start all over with my story. The “what if” idea is the story. More important, I don’t try to tell the story. I don’t describe a single scene, or name the characters, or tell exactly what the kid did to get the card, or how the story ends. The buyer will find these things out by asking me questions, or by reading the script.
But even without all those details, this short pitch does convey the key elements necessary to elicit emotion:
The hero is obviously the ten-year-old boy.
We feel empathy with the hero because he’s a victim of undeserved misfortune (he’s shy and withdrawn, and his father’s dying), he’s in jeopardy of losing a parent, and he’s likable (he wants to do this loving thing for his dad).
We also identify with him because there’s a kind of built-in empathy when your hero’s a child. And we assume that he’s poor (he only has $15) and that he has a distant relationship with his father (because I said I had had a distant relationship with mine).
Our hero will also put himself in danger when he goes on the trip. Even though this won’t happen until much later in the story, it will probably add to the buyer’s identification with the hero in a short pitch.
All the details of the hero’s life — his age, his personality, his father with a baseball card collection — constitute the setup.
The opportunity is learning his father is dying, which puts him into the new situation of figuring out how to react.
The outer motivation is to find the Mickey Mantle card and give it to his father. Remember those four categories of motivations that form the basis of most mass market novels and Hollywood movies? The desire in this story is to retrieve.
Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds Page 4