The conflict is that he doesn’t know where the card is, he’s only ten, he has to travel across the country, he only has 15 bucks, the billionaire is reclusive, he’s about to get conned, and he’s racing against time to get this treasure back to his dying father.
The character arc isn’t really specified, although it might be implied when I say that he’s shy, and wants to show how much he loves his father. Perhaps he’s afraid he’s not good enough, or of telling his father how he feels, or of standing up for himself, and he’ll be required to face those fears as he makes this journey.
Finally, my passion should begin to emerge when I talk about my own relationship with my father. (For the record, I just made this story up once during a lecture, including the “true” part about the distant father who collected baseball cards. My dad wasn’t, and didn’t, though he did own a popcorn-and-candy store when I was little, and used to bring me baseball cards whenever he got a new shipment.)
The only key elements I omitted were issues (because I can’t see how this story reveals or examines any larger political or social situation) and antecedents.
But wait! There’s more!
Dropping In Antecedents
Once you’ve designed your “how I came up with this” revelation, and linked it to your story with a “what if?” segue, it’s easy to go back and slip in a couple antecedents. I could easily have begun the above pitch by saying, “Let me tell you how I came up with this idea. I’ve always been a huge fan of movies about that moment when a child passes into adolescence or adulthood — especially ‘odyssey’ stories like Stand By Me or adult/child relationship stories like About a Boy. Now when I was a kid, my father and I …” And then I’d continue the pitch in the same way as above.
It’s not as if either that novella and novel, or their film adaptations, have anything to do with baseball cards or dying parents. But both mix humor with seriousness, both are about preteen boys who come of age, and most of all, both were very successful.
Sometimes the phrase “I’ve always been a fan of stories like…” is all you need to reveal how you came up with your idea. It may, in fact, be all you have to offer if your script isn’t based on personal experience or on something you read or heard about. But if you’ve written a movie or novel in your favorite genre, and given it a new twist or original hook, it’s a great way to lead your buyer to the “what if?” segue.
To find antecedents for your screenplay, go to lists of recent movies that can be grouped by genre. The Internet Movie Data Base, Done Deal Pro, The Studio Report: Film Development, and Netflix all offer those kinds of groupings. So do a number of publishing and fiction writing websites (see Chapter 4). Or go to the appropriate section of your local video store or bookstore. Just be sure your antecedents are recent, similar and successful.
Adding Details
This baseball card pitch times out at about 60 seconds, so I probably wouldn’t add more details. But if you’ve conveyed the essential elements of your story and still have time, add details that reveal more about exactly what obstacles the hero will face, and how he overcomes them.
I could have added more about how our ten-year-old boy meets the con artist, how he locates the card, how he attempts to persuade the billionaire to sell it to him and how the con artist tries to steal it. The more you can draw the buyer into the story with specifics, and the more conflict you can build, the stronger the pitch will be. Just as long as you don’t exceed your 60-second limit.
Notice that I also slipped the title into the end of the pitch. It isn’t essential that you give the title at all — the buyer will see it when they get the screenplay, and they aren’t likely to remember it until then. But if it’s catchy or powerful, or if it clearly conveys some element of the plot, it’s fine to include it.
Pitching True Stories
When you’re pitching a screenplay or novel based on a true story, don’t say so at the beginning. Wait until the end of your pitch, when that final revelation will pack the greatest emotional wallop.
The general assumption in Hollywood — at least in the feature film arena — is that true stories are period pieces, or “inspirational” stories, or both, and should be relegated to the domain of the art house film or the TV movie. Of course, this bias ignores the commercial success of Remember the Titans or Erin Brockovich or Coach Carter or A Beautiful Mind or Walk the Line or King Kong, but the prejudice exists, nonetheless. (Okay, I know King Kong wasn’t a true story. But don’t you kind of wish it was?)
When the first information buyers get is that your story is true, they’re already thinking, “This is going to be a tough sell.” But imagine if you pitch the story in a way that gets them emotionally involved by using the process I’ve outlined. Then, just when the buyers are thinking your story is pretty amazing, you hit them with, “… and everything I just said really happened.”
Suppose our baseball card story were true. If the pitch began, “This is the true story of a ten-year-old boy who learns his father has cancer…,” already it sounds depressing, and ordinary, and like something you’d have seen on TV in the seventies.
But imagine the pitch is exactly what we already have, except that right at the climax we add, “And what if I told you this whole story is true, the boy did find the baseball card, and I have the rights to his story?” You’ve added one more reason for buyers to want to read it. They were already hooked, and now they get to add “based on a true story” to the opening credits.
Waiting to reveal that your story is true is especially important if you’re the hero of your own story. To reveal immediately that your novel or screenplay is based on something that happened to you personally can be a kiss of death in a pitch, because most autobiographical screenplays and manuscripts are dreadful. The writer is too close to what happened to be objective, too emotionally involved to see that the mass audience won’t have any interest, and too afraid to dig deep into the characters’ psyches for fear of getting sued, looking bad, or making loved ones look worse.
But again, if you’ve hooked your buyer already, and convinced her that this is an exciting or hilarious story with real commercial potential, you can strengthen the pitch even further by ending with, “Everything I just described really happened, and I was the one it happened to.” Now the buyer assumes that your familiarity with this fascinating story makes you the perfect person to write it.
Mistakes, Blunders, and Bad Advice
Lots of people are out there giving lots of advice about how to pitch your story. Most of it’s good, some of it’s bogus, but all of it is based on the experience of the lecturer or panelist or consultant or friend who’s dishing it out. The process I offer in this book is by no means the only way to get someone to read your script. It’s just the one I’ve had the greatest success with, and the one I’ve seen work again and again with students and clients.
So I want to warn you about some techniques that are often recommended but (in my experience) are seldom effective, as well as some understandable but deadly mistakes many writers come up with all by themselves.
These are the things to avoid as you design your pitch:
Don’t lead with your title. Mentioning the title at the end of the pitch is fine, since the listener now can understand its connection to the story. But when your first words are the title, buyers not only don’t know what you’re talking about, they aren’t even fully listening yet.
Remember that your pitch follows a hundred other phone calls or (if you’re at a conference or pitch fest) dozens of other pitches. The buyer has to be drawn into your pitch with a few words that aren’t important for her to remember. This is one of the reasons the “Let me tell you how I came up with this …” opening is so effective. Nothing important is said until you have the buyer’s attention.
Titles take a moment to think about to make any sense. Even titles as powerful as Jaws or The Terminator would make buyers pause to try to create some mental image, or formulate some thoughts ab
out them. And while they’re doing that, you’re barreling ahead with important information about your story, and they’re missing it.
If your title isn’t catchy, if it doesn’t even create an immediate image, it’s just going to confuse the listener. If you began a pitch, “Brokeback Mountain is about two cowboys who fall in love while herding some sheep and…,” I guarantee the buyer wouldn’t understand or remember the title.
Don’t lead with a question. Sometimes writers think it’s cute or clever to engage buyers by asking personal questions related to their plots. “Did you ever wonder what became of the person you went to your high school prom with?” a writer asked me once in a pitch. This writer didn’t really care about the answer; he just forged ahead with his pitch: “Well, my hero did, and that’s why he set out to find her in Getting Her Back, a hilarious story about…” Meanwhile I’m not even listening, because I’m sitting there fantasizing about my prom date, thinking, “I wonder what did ever happen to Carol Schunk?”
This technique might have worked if the writer hadn’t directed the question at me: “I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but one day I started wondering whatever became of the girl I took to my high school prom. And I asked myself, ‘What if…?’ “ A pitch that began this way would have me involved immediately.
Don’t lead with a log line. A log line is a single sentence that conveys the basic plot of your story in the most succinct, powerful way. The beauty of a log line is that it encapsulates the story very quickly and tells the buyer, “This is how my story can be described in an ad, or on a bestseller list, or in TV Guide.”
It’s easy to see why this would seem like a great way to grab a buyer right out of the gate. The problem is that you haven’t yet drawn him into your story; you haven’t given him time to leave his world and enter yours before hitting him with your pitch. Once you reveal the log line, there will be little surprise or anticipation during the rest of your pitch.
My longtime friend and associate Devora Cutler-Rubenstein suggests ending the pitch with your log line — summarizing the story so the buyer is left with its essential concept and marketability.
This is a terrific idea. I really wish I’d come up with it myself.
Using this technique, our baseball card pitch could stay just as it is, but conclude with, “So my screenplay, The Last Mickey Mantle, is about a ten-year-old boy who goes on a journey to find the world’s rarest baseball card for his dying father.”
Don’t name all your characters. Identify your characters by function — boy (or “our hero”), father, billionaire, con artist — instead of giving them all names that the buyer won’t be able to keep straight or remember.
If you truly believe it makes your story stronger, go ahead and name your hero. But let the rest of the characters stay anonymous. Remember, you’ve only got 60 seconds.
Don’t use jargon. Mentioning act breaks, midpoints and heroes is fine, but don’t start tossing around terms you picked up in screenwriting books and lectures — even mine.
As you can tell, I’m a great believer in the power of principles like Opportunity and Outer Motivation and Major Setback, but don’t include those phrases in your pitch. You might sound like you’re just following some formula, or that you’re trying to seem superior, and unless the buyer is familiar with my terminology (or whoever’s you’re using), he might misunderstand what you mean.
Don’t give away the ending. Your goal is to entice the buyer to read your screenplay, in the same way a movie trailer is designed to get an audience to come see the movie. And no movie trailer would give away the ending of the story. You’re more likely to increase a buyer’s interest if you leave him hanging, wondering how your hero will ever overcome all the obstacles she faces.
Emotion grows out of conflict. So the most emotional ending to the Revelation portion of your pitch is probably the moment where the hero faces the major setback or crisis point of the story (the end of Act 2 in a screenplay), followed by the log line.
If the buyer then asks you how it ends, tell him. It shows he’s engaged, and you don’t want to be coy just to get him to read the script — it probably won’t work.
Ending the pitch at the major setback isn’t a hard and fast rule anyway. If you’re pitching a true story about a person who did the impossible, you may need to reveal what impossible thing he did, which tells the buyer that the hero is going to win in the end, and the story will probably be uplifting. It would be hard to pitch A Beautiful Mind without revealing that John Nash won the Nobel Prize in spite of his schizophrenia.
With stories like A Beautiful Mind, the emotion comes from wondering how the hero could ever have accomplished whatever he did in spite of the overwhelming odds he faced. And you’d also include the love story in your pitch, leaving the buyer wondering if John Nash was able to hold onto Alicia’s love and keep his family together.
With many biographies or true stories like Cinderella Man, you don’t have to reveal the outcome. The fact that Jim Braddock had even a shot at the heavyweight championship makes him remarkable. The reader can find out if he won by reading the screenplay.
Don’t hype your story. Let your story speak for itself, and give the buyer credit for seeing its potential. Don’t proclaim that it will make a lot of money, or that it’s hilarious, terrifying or a sure-fire Pulitzer Prize winner. And don’t say that Tom Cruise is sure to want to star in it. As soon as you declare these superlatives, the buyer will assume they’re not true.
Don’t try to tell your entire story. Wait a minute! Haven’t we heard this before?
Yes, you have, and you might hear it 602 more times before this book is over. It’s that important.
Before you ever dial an agent’s number or show up at a pitch fest, you must rehearse your pitch until it’s so familiar that it comes across as natural, passionate and spontaneous.
Actors preparing for a performance rehearse so much that they go beyond memorization. They know their parts well enough that they’re able to be in the moment on stage or in front of the camera. They’re not struggling to remember lines, they’re listening to, and engaging, the other actors they’re performing with.
This is how you’ll approach your pitch. You must be so comfortable with it that no matter what happens — nerves, interruptions or forgotten lines — you’ll be able to stay in the moment: enthusiastic about your story and fully engaged with the buyer.
Trial Runs
After you’ve designed your pitch, get whoever you can — friends, family, co-workers and writers group members — to rehearse it with you. Have them listen without interruption, and then give you whatever reactions and comments they have. Then pitch it again a couple more times, trying to incorporate their suggestions.
Here are a few ways to make these rehearsal sessions as empowering as possible:
Record them. This way you won’t have to worry about remembering what your listeners said, or what exactly you did to prompt their comments. Hearing your pitch will also force you to come up with your own ideas about how to improve it, or how better to convey the essence of your story.
If you use a digital recorder, you can upload the sessions and listen to them on your computer as you rewrite your pitch. You can also practice memorizing it by downloading the recordings onto your iPod, or burning them onto a CD, to listen to in your car.
Time it. You must hone your 60-second pitch down to … well, 60 seconds. Give your listener a stopwatch, and if it’s running long, ask for suggestions about what to trim.
Use notes. Even though you’ve memorized your pitch, don’t depend on your memory. Notes are perfectly acceptable, both at rehearsal and during the pitch itself. That way if, in the heat of pitching, you stumble or get interrupted, just a glance down at your notes will get you back on track.
A couple suggestions about notes. Use note cards, so you’re not unfolding some big piece of paper as you begin your pitch. Number them, so if you drop them and they get out of sequence,
your pitch won’t sound like a Fellini film. And write big. You don’t want to be searching through a bunch of fine print to find the place you left off.
This brings us to the most important rule of notes:
DON’T READ YOUR PITCH! Notes are fine. Reading a transcribed pitch is not. You won’t be able to look the buyer in the eye, it’ll seem like you don’t know your own story, and any sense of excitement or enthusiasm will disappear. You’ve got to commit your pitch to memory, then rehearse it enough that you can make it sound natural.
This rule holds true even if you’re on the phone — especially if you’re on the phone. A buyer can tell within ten seconds if you’re reading to her, and that’s what she’s picturing on the other end of the line, instead of the images your story should be creating.
Pitch to two people at once. This will occasionally happen at pitch fests, so you want to be prepared. You’ll also get your two listeners brainstorming together about how to improve it. And you’ll be so nervous performing for two people that your actual pitch to a producer will seem easy by comparison.
Role play. Have your rehearsal listener pretend to be a specific person you’ll be pitching to. You’ll address him as that person, acknowledge him for some specific thing he’s done, and use any other appropriate methods from Chapter 8 to create a relationship with your (mock) buyer.
Answer questions. When you’ve completed your pitch, have your trial run listeners ask whatever questions about the story they can come up with. This will prepare you for most of the questions buyers might ask, and will give you lots of experience thinking on your feet. You must be able to talk about your story naturally and confidently, not just deliver a memorized speech.
Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds Page 5