by Steve Boman
The ramp. We segue into our pitch with a story or anecdote that is personal and timely.
The overview. A concise summation of what the film or series is but including nuts and bolts details.
The structure. A brief summation of what happens.
The characters. A tight and tidy rundown of the main characters.
The plot. Of the series’ pilot episode or of the film.
Callaway also says for a television series, we need to have a season arc thought out … and be ready to talk about other sample episodes. That way we’ll have an answer if an executive says, “Love it, but what would episode six look like?”
Callaway also gives us his Most Important Rule: Take the bottle of water.
“When you go do a pitch, you’ll almost always be offered a bottle of water. Always take it. Always,” Callaway says. “One, you can use something to drink during your pitch. You don’t want to get dry mouth when you’re talking. That’s bad. You can also use a drink of water for dramatic effect or to buy some time if you momentarily lose your train of thought. Then you’ll really appreciate having that water bottle in front of you. But the most important reason you’ll want to take that bottle of water is because you’ll at least get something for your pitch. Most pitches won’t get you a dime, but when you walk out into the street after a meeting, you can say, ‘At least I got a free bottle of water!’”
The class laughs hard at the line. Callaway’s candor is refreshing.
He gives another basic piece of advice: keep the attention of the people in the room. If an executive starts looking at her phone or drifting away, do something dramatic. Up the energy level. Clap your hands to emphasize a point. Do whatever it takes to get the attention back on your pitch.
Callaway explains he’s done dozens upon dozens of pitches for major studios. He tells some horror stories about pitches gone wrong—executives who take calls in the middle of a pitch, executives who spend the pitch reading messages on their smartphones, executives who close their eyes and appear to be asleep during a pitch, an executive who started having a seizure during a pitch.
Callaway warns us that studio executives hear pitches all day long, day after day. He says the sad fact is great material can be overlooked if the pitching is poor. So Callaway wants us to memorize our material and practice, practice, practice. He sounds like a 1950s basketball coach. He’s all about the fundamentals, about not making simple mistakes. If we’re pitching a comedy series featuring animated animals, say right up front: This is a comedy, an animated comedy series featuring talking animals in the spirit of Bugs Bunny. Overlook these simple facts, he says, and at the end of a pitch, the executives might be thinking you’re pitching a serious animal documentary for the Nature Channel.
His advice is spot-on for film school. I’d already heard classmates’ story ideas that lost me from the opening sentence.
To build authenticity, Callaway has the pitcher leave the classroom and then reenter to duplicate the dynamics of a real pitch session, where an executive is already in an office.
When we start pitching, it’s sweet and funny. We’re performing in front of other writers and, trust me, most writers are not born performers. Many of the students speak too quietly, and Callaway gently reminds them to speak up. Many are visibly flushed and nervous. I wonder what an energetic stand-up comic like Breitmayer would do in a class like this.
Just as we did when we were directors in 507 screenings, we take a hot seat in the middle of the room. This chair faces Callaway. The rest of the class is in a U-shape behind the hot seat. Callaway sits at his desk, his iPhone timer running.
When each of us is finished with our pitch, Callaway gives his feedback, along with any from students who want to talk.
Our first practice pitches are medium in length. When it’s my turn to go, I ramp into my pitch with a story I read in that day’s Los Angeles Times about gang violence in the city, and I talk about how there is a thin line between civilization and anarchy. “My film is about one man’s battle to hold that line. It’s set in a not-too-distant future when civilization is crumbling. This story is about a young cop who faces a gang that drove over his wife and child and burned his best friend. The name of my film is MAD MAX.”
When I mention the name of the film, Callaway smiles and nods. When I finish, I get what may be a backhanded compliment. “You chose a great, great film. It’s hard to go wrong with MAD MAX,” Callaway says.
I think, Okay, we like the same film. Does that mean I had a good pitch? He explains I could use more energy, but all in all, it was a decent job. One of the students pipes in. He says my delivery is too mellow: “It’s a little too much like a smooth jazz radio announcer.” I rub my forehead when I hear this. I’m going to have to lose my public radio voice for pitching.
T
he semester seems to accelerate. In an eye blink, we’re done with January and into February. The flavor of film school is now so different from my first two semesters. Now I understand why they call the first year the “boot camp” year. In the first year, the learning curve is intensely steep. Everything then was new, and just when I felt comfortable with a skill or technique, I was forced to move forward. Now I’m building on my base.
I also see that film school is like shampoo. We wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat over and over but with increasing complexity as we go. First semester is solo, second semester is tandem, third and onward is larger groups. But because we’ve had a chance to do everything in the first year, when we return to it again in a more specialized form, it’s not nearly as intimidating.
My cinematography class, for example, is a joy. I was a camera ignoramus in 507, barely capable at the start of 508 … although much more comfortable with film at the end of 508. Now I’m feeling relaxed and excited about honing my techniques in cinematography. We’re shooting with sixteen-millimeter film most weeks, but we get to shoot with a studio-quality high-definition video camera on occasion, and we have a large soundstage to ourselves. Every student in our class is director for a week, and we’re to bring a scene and actors and props. Then we rotate roles. It’s great fun, and the instructor, Rob K., keeps the energy level high. The weekly class is four hours long, and in that time, we move quickly and can shoot a remarkable amount of material. Our pace is radically faster than the days of inching through group projects in 507. If we dawdle, Rob K. claps his hands and shouts, “Keep it moving. Keep it moving!”
As my confidence grows, my joy does, too. I feel free in the soundstage. It’s big enough to park a dozen cars inside or pass a football without hitting anything, and high above the floor there’s a wooden catwalk with all sorts of lights suspended in place. During class, I scamper around. On the catwalks I look down at the action on the floor and feel like I did as a little kid when I visited the lumberyard my grandpa worked at. The soundstage also looks remarkably similar to the stages at Paramount where DIRTY SEXY MONEY is being filmed. It’s fun in here, where there are no windows and it can be as dark as midnight at high noon. It feels like the real deal.
Rob K. is also a master of creating beautiful scenes with a minimum of lighting and movement. It’s all about those two for him. During one of the first classes, we quickly build a simple set: two movable walls put together in an L shape. One wall has a window, the other a door. We light the scene to mimic nighttime. It’s very moody and mysterious. Inside our little house is a chair, a table, a lamp, and a few other pieces of furniture. Rob K. picks a student to be the actor.
We shoot from “inside” our little house. The action is as simple as our set. The actor comes home, turns on a light, flips on a TV with a remote. There’s a knock at the door, causing him to turn with a startled look.
Now we don’t have a TV, but we build a lighting kit to make it appear he’s watching a TV offscreen (TVs don’t throw much light anyway). We don’t have streetlights, but we make it appear they are there. We have lights that will go on when he clicks an imaginary wall switch.
Rob K. later lectures at a national convention of cinematographers and shows them our scene. He says they’re impressed by our work and couldn’t believe we did it in three hours from start to finish with fewer than a dozen students.
When it’s my turn to direct, I shoot a short scene where a trio of beautiful actresses, dressed to the nines, blow kisses and wink at the camera. When the point of view is reversed, it turns out they’re flirting with an unshaven, potbellied film student. I’ve got an $80,000 studio-quality, high-def camera at my disposal, and my classmates build a long set of dolly tracks so the camera can glide by the women at walking speed. We build a reflector that’s as big as a camping tent to bounce additional light on the women. We shoot on a grassy area of campus near the music school, and we attract a host of spectators who are curious to know if we’re shooting a commercial. Rob K, as usual, hovers and points out ways to improve my shooting. At one point, I kneel down to add a shim to raise the metal dolly tracks (they’re like miniaturized railroad tracks) and he chides me, “You’re the director, Steve. Don’t spend your time doing that. Get someone else to do it.” So I do.
As I go forward in Callaway’s pitching class, gain more skills in cinematography, listen to Casper lecture (I continue to keep a very low profile this time around), and learn about the details of creating a documentary, I go backward in one class: screenwriting. My instructor likes to have us rewrite. I’ve got most of CRAZYHOUSE ON SKIS written, and I’m looking forward to finishing it. My classmates are in the same boat. We’re all nearly done with a script we started the semester before. Now, with a new instructor, we start slicing bits and pieces off of our scripts. In the first week, it’s minor, just little nicks from our pages. As the weeks go on, our instructor keeps suggesting we cut more, rewrite more, delete more. “I’m a very big believer in rewriting,” she says in class. After a month, I’m rewriting my opening pages. When I bring them to class and read them, she shakes her head with a frown. She doesn’t like it. She suggests rewriting it again. Dan’s comedy gets whittled down. Thompson’s horror film gets cut. The historical action film—completed—goes through a dramatic rewrite. The instructor keeps shaking her head. “No. I don’t think so. I really think you should take another go at that,” she’ll say. It doesn’t seem to matter to whom she’s talking. So we cut and slice and pare. My screenwriting class is a four-credit monster—so it’s expensive. Nearly $6,000 for this class alone. I’m taking it because I want to get a screenwriting major, and this is the way to do it, but I’m rather discouraged by what I’m getting out of the class, and so are my fellow students.
C
allaway’s pitch class is much more satisfying. My short pitches for CRAZYHOUSE ON SKIS have gone well, and now we’re building the Big Pitch. My actual script for CRAZYHOUSE, which I’m working on in screenwriting, has shrunk from ninety pages down to forty pages, but my pitch for the story has grown to twenty minutes.
The class, like every class, settles into a rhythm. We know what to expect, who will be animated, who will be earnest. It seems to be as much stage training as writing, and our Thursday-evening class can get very long. It starts at 7 P.M. and sometimes runs almost to eleven. By ten, my eyelids start to droop and no matter how good the pitches are, I find it’s hard to keep my energy up. I almost always sit by Caraballo, and we’ll occasionally nudge each other if we sense the other falling asleep. I blame my fatigue on getting up at 6 A.M., and the fact that I have two other classes on Thursdays —my doc class and my cinematography class—that run from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. However, the truth is, it sometimes gets boring listening to the same pitches week after week. Callaway, amazingly, rarely shows signs of fatigue. He’s always sitting at his desk, surrounded by a horseshoe of students, with one student in the hot seat. He always seems focused, his eyes alert, like some beefy wingless eagle. I wonder if he ever gets tired. On some evenings, when my eyes are bloodshot and I’ve been sitting in a classroom for twelve hours, I wish he’d put his head down on his arms and call it quits for the night. But he never does. He listens, he gives advice. He is gentle on the tenderhearted students, more assertive with the tougher students.
During this time, the writers’ strike comes to an end. A handful of us students talk in the hallway before class about whether Callaway will stop teaching because of his day job at CSI: NY. When class starts, Callaway says, yes, he may have to be absent for some classes, but he fully intends to work through the rest of the semester. He says he’s enjoying teaching. I breathe a sigh of relief. It would be a rotten deal if he left. True, the class can get wearying, but I pin most of that problem on scheduling and my own inability to keep my eyes open late. I never adopt the late-to-bed schedules of my fellow students. Minneapolis is two hours ahead of Los Angeles, and in order to talk to Julie before her day gets crazy, I get up early. Also, when I fly home, it’s already almost impossible to get up when my kids get up and my body thinks it’s 4:30 A.M. If I stayed up late like most of my classmates, who seem to shut down at 2 or 3 A.M., I’d be completely out of synch with my family.
We launch into our long pitches. Twenty minutes is a long time to hold court. There are absolutely no surprises anymore. I’ve heard Caraballo’s pitch over and over and over now in ever-expanding detail. I’ve heard everyone’s pitch multiple times. Somehow, Callaway keeps his spirits up. He sits for hours, his hands under his chin, focused. Nodding slightly. And then giving feedback with his red-clay/L.A. accent.
There are no major breakthroughs, just steady work by us in class. We all have to sit in the hot seat, and there’s a great deal of empathy for students who freeze or flub their pitches. There’s a lack of one-upmanship, perhaps because we realize we’re not competing against each other. How we do in class doesn’t matter. How we do in the real world does. I enjoy getting to know some of the writers. I rarely intersect with them in film school, and they’re in a position I very much could be in. I debated applying to the writing division, and it’s the place where I feel most at home. The writing division students, however, view me and Caraballo as odd ducks. We’re production students, the guys always carrying cameras and lugging cases of lights. Yes, I’m taking advanced screenwriting classes, but those classes are only for the handful of production students who want to be scribes as well. So far, I’ve not crossed paths with students from the writing division—until now.
During class breaks, I get questions from the writing students about the production program—they’re curious about what we do. They sometimes seem a bit envious. We get to make what we write—at least in school. They also suspect that production students have a better shot at getting paid in the near future as editors or sound people or camera assistants. That’s precisely why I went into the production division. I also find my production experience has sharpened my writing skills greatly. Writers can envision anything they want. Before I came to USC, I read a scriptwriting book that urged writers not to be constrained by physical reality, to write anything they can imagine.
It’s a liberating idea, but I’ve since learned as a production student the reality of making imagination
into a film. When I write now, I think of locations. And I think of actors and casting. How would I shoot this scene in CRAZYHOUSE? I also write scenes with a budget in mind.
Thus, a character can enter a bar and:
Work his way through a crowd of people and ask the bartender a question.
Enter a mostly empty place and ask the bartender a question.
The empty place requires fifty fewer extras, which is a whole lot cheaper. If the size of the crowd in the bar doesn’t affect the story line, then a big crowd is something that a producer would love to cut. Many of the writing students are pitching films that are very large in scope. If they were made, they’d be $150 million spectaculars. As a production student, I’m focused on how to write a $4 million film—heavy on character and acting, light on special effects. One woman in class is pitching a story about an underworld fantasy world. Very LORD OF THE RINGS-like, and one that sounds delightful, but when she pitches it, I think, “Lord, that would be expensive.”
I remind myself that MAD MAX was made for $400,000 (Australian) back in 1979 and was edited in a family bedroom. They had so few cars at their disposal the filmmakers repainted some of them and put them in different scenes. For stuntmen, they relied on Aussie biker gangs. All low budget. All successful.
So I pitch CRAZYHOUSE, and I imagine the scene: a small rundown resort in Wisconsin. A half-dozen major characters. Some of the stunts and skiing would be done by local talent. In my script, I have a broken-down professional waterskier show up at a Wisconsin resort to take a summer job running a low-budget waterski show. In the Midwest and in parts of the East, waterski shows are an odd and endearing summertime tradition. The skiers create human pyramids, do tricks, jump off ramps. They wear spangled, revealing outfits, and it’s as silly and visually compelling as ballroom dancing. It’s more cornball though, and comic. In decades past, it was a much bigger deal. Many theme parks—Cypress Gardens and Sea World among them—featured ski show spectaculars. In recent years, the number of shows has dwindled to a few holdouts in the Midwest and Florida. When I conceived my idea, I was motivated by the success of STRICTLY BALLROOM, director Baz Luhrmann’s 1992 ballroom dancing drama. At the time, ballroom dancing was a dying art form, performed mostly by aging Arthur Murray instructors. My own mom had dated an Arthur Murray instructor before she met my father and was an excellent dancer. While growing up, my siblings and I thought ballroom was for squares and fuddy-duddies. Then STRICTLY BALLROOM reignited interest in the art form. Now ballroom dancing is a prime-time television staple. I’m convinced waterski shows—funny, quirky, sexy, campy, athletic—have the same potential, at least in a film.