PITCHING -- TO STUDIO EXECUTIVES, NOT BATTERS

Imagine you're in need of a driver. Someone to take your precious child to and from school every day. You're going to pay them a fortune and hand over the keys to your brand new Bugatti Veyron. So you start to interview prospective candidates. Instead of having them take you for a drive and seeing their skills for yourself, though, you chose to let them tell you what kind of driver they would be. They crack jokes, make you laugh, and command the room. So you hire them on the spot without so much as looking at their driver's license. That is exactly how pitching works in Hollywood. Want to know one of the reasons movies can be so awful? Because most writers are hired by how they talk --- not how they write.

What is pitching? Well, if a studio needs a writer for an idea they have or they are looking for new projects, they have writers come in and "pitch" their "take" on the project. It's as simple as it sounds. The writer sits (or stands or dances) in a room with some executives and tells a story. If the executives like the story, they then hire the writer to write a script.

Let's break this down. Writers, by nature, are geeks. I'm one. You're one. We were (and sometimes still are) the shy, dreamy ones sitting in the back of the classroom hoping no one calls on them and asks them to actually speak. That's why writers write. There's a big strange world in their heads that can only be adequately expressed through the written word.

So, let's take that wilting flower and put them under a sun lamp in the desert --- in a studio executives office --- and make them act out a story. Guess what? Writers aren't actors for a reason. We write. Wait, let me say it again. We're writers.

When suddenly forced to become actors, some writers do all right. They rise to the occasion and sell pitches. I've done it. It's painful and frightening and totally inorganic to the process of writing, but it can be done. Some really good writers are really good at pitching. The majority of pitches sold, however, aren't from good writers. They are from good pitchers. Believe it or not, there is a difference.

Inevitably, the studios end up with a script that is in desperate need of extensive re-writing because it was written by "pitcher", not a "writer", and then they start the process all over again by having more "writers" come in to "pitch" to re-write the script that they bought from the "pitcher" they really hoped was a "writer" but didn't know because they never read what the "writer" wrote.

Crazy, right? It really is. It's like death and taxes, though. There's no escaping it and it will never go away. Why? Because studio executives don't have time to read and reading takes a lot of time. Of course, they do read. They read projects that are already in development. But by then it's too late. Caveat emptor and all that.

In a future post I'll tell you about how to pitch. Or at least I'll tell you what everyone else says because I wouldn't say I'm an expert. I'm a writer after all.