How to Make a Successful Pitch

In my years working in television I heard thousands of pitches, and as head of development for production companies I made a few, too. I'm often asked, "what are executives looking for when you pitch them? In my experience they are looking for two things: 1. They want to be thrilled 2. They want to believe you can do it. Let's talk about that in detail. 1. Film studio and network executives hear hundreds if not thousands of pitches a year. They hear them in their offices, of course, but also everywhere they go. I once got pitched by a caddy at the Bel Air golf course who was also a screenwriter. Most of the time, they say 'no.' But the reason they got in the business, the reason they have their current job, is because they want to be part of creating something wonderful. Nothing excites an executive more than a great story - something that they can be a part of and that might make their reputation. They want to be thrilled by a pitch -- but they rarely are. 2. However, even a great story is not enough. As I've written in previous posts, an idea is only as good as its execution. For example, it's one thing to go into a network and pitch the idea of starring Bill Cosby in a sitcom where he plays a doctor. It's a very different meeting if, like Carsey-Werner productions, you walk in with Bill Cosby himself. (see my earlier post, turn your idea into a property). Even with Bill Cosby, the two networks at the time with the biggest audience turned down the pitch for The Cosby Show, which made NBC, the network that said yes, the #1 network during the 1980s. That's why it's important to create a track record in the entertainment business before you pitch. Unless they feel comfortable with the second point, it doesn't matter how great your idea is. If you're already a producer or can show a video of your work, that will help prove it. If you haven't produced anything, try to partner with a production company that has produced shows. Pitching and picking shows remain an art, not a science. If it were a science, no show or movie would fail. However, If you keep these two points in mind -- 1. Thrill them; 2. Prove you can do it -- you'll have a much better chance.

Hunger Games: Catching Fire -- How to Make a Blockbuster

The second film in the Hunger Games series, Hunger Games: Catching Fire, is likely to gross over $500 million worldwide by the end of the Thanksgiving weekend. That's after a record pre-Thanksgiving opening day gross and a Thanksgiving Day record box office gross. It's likely that after just it's second weekend the film will be the fourth best-grossing film in the U.S. for 2013, and there's a good chance that by the end of the year the film will be the top grossing film of 2013. Remember this is only the second film of what will be four movies in the series. I hope whoever optioned the books for Lionsgate got a well deserved promotion. It's no wonder that the only growing section in most bookstores is teen fantasy adventure. It's not just the Hunger Games -- the Harry Potter and Twilight series also made billions of dollars for their movie studios and publishers. Some of these series, like the Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series, have not been nearly as financially successful. The latest film in the series, "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters" has grossed just under $200 million worldwide. We've now seen enough successes amongst these types of films to identify certain common principles of their creation. 1. Start with a popular book series: Harry Potter, Twilight, and the Hunger Games all sold tremendously well as books. The Potter books started the practice of having parties in bookstores the night before their release. The first two Potter films were not critical triumphs, but the series had so many built-in fans they were financial successes. 2. Cast good young actors as the leads, but not stars. Jennifer Lawrence got great critical acclaim for her role in the independent film "Winter's Bone," but she was not a star when cast as Caitness. Similarly, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson had some experience, but were just about complete unknowns when they got cast as Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Let the audience create the stars. 3. Surround the young stars with the best possible adult actors: Catching Fire added Phillip Seymour Hoffman to a cast that already included Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Lenny Kravitz, and a host of other fine character actors. The adult Potter cast was a who's who of great English actors. Don't cast stars who will draw the focus from the young leads, but rather will help make the world believable. 4. Don't try to recreate the book on the screen. Aim for the essence of the book and some key plot points, but recognize that movies are a different medium. The Hunger Games films did that successfully by compressing the action that took months into a few days. 5. Include a strong heroine. Of course, Caitness fills that bill, but so does Hermione in the Potter books and Bella in Twilight. Your target audience should be first -- the target audience for the books, and second, their parents. If you can capture both the fans of the books and their families, you have a blockbuster. 6 Don't be afraid of including adult themes. The Hunger Games, for all of its love triangles and plucky heroines, is actually the story of a political revolution against tyranny. The Potter books are about the importance of self sacrifice for the greater good. Those themes make the action more compelling and help the films appeal to adults. 7. Keep the stakes high; make the antagonists strong. President Snow appears invincible at the beginning of Hunger Games; Voldemort is the most powerful evil wizard in the world. There's no challenge if the bad guys are easy to overcome. Most important, if you are the author or filmmaker, you have to care about the characters and the story. The Hunger Games series started because Suzanne Collins had a story she wanted to tell. JK Rowling hoped her first Harry Potter book would find an audience; by her own admission she didn't expect it the franchise would grow to its current size. The story and the characters kept her writing every day while she was on the dole in Great Britain. The first step to success is a burning desire to tell your story, and to make it as compelling as possible.

Artists are Never Out of Work

It's not surprising that the Great Recession and slow economic growth have made Americans obsessed with job security. It seems that parents and college age students pay more attention to college majors and job placement rates than ever before. In response to this concern, colleges are creating more specific majors to meet the demand for job related skills. Yet people still struggle to get hired. When companies run into financial trouble, like the Tribune company did recently, they lay off or fire their workers. Sometimes they lay them off even if they're not in financial trouble. After all, if you can run a business more efficiently, you should. If that means restructuring to eliminate positions, that's what a business owner should do. That's capitalism. No jobs immune from economic problems. That is, except for artists. If you're a writer, filmmaker, musician, designer, painter, or poet, you're never out of work, as long as you keep creating. You may not always be paid, but you can always work on your art. What's more, you never know when your work will spark enough of an audience interest to support you. The stories of artists who jumped from poverty to affluence are legion -- JK Rowling was living on the dole in England while writing the first Harry Potter book; the Beatles barely got enough to eat during their gigs in Hamburg, and Robert Townsend financed his breakthrough film, "The Hollywood Shuffle," by signing up for dozens of credit cards. It's important to believe in yourself while you're finding your voice and creating your content. If you want to tell your stories, paint your pictures, or create any content at all, you have to be in for the long haul. History is full of big companies that went out of business when technology changed. We no longer have blacksmith shops, buggy whip companies, and pretty soon we may not have any printed newspapers. The skills you learn as an artist -- the ability to create and finish a project, analyze and improve it, and create products that move people -- are always in demand. What's more,great art lasts forever. We're still reading the Illiad, performing Shakespeare's plays, and enjoying Monet's paintings. What legacy do you want to leave? Artists are never out of work, as long as they keep working.

Kill Your Darlings: Indie and Hollywood Philosphy

"In writing, you have to kill all your darlings." - William Faulkner This quote from Faulkner refers to revising your writing to remove material you loved, if it makes the piece stronger. It's also the title of a recently released indie movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as the young Allen Ginsburg, the Beat poet who wrote “Howl” and other iconic works. The film is a portrait of the artist as a young man, based on the true story of Ginsburg’s formative years at Columbia University, where he first met Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. According to the script Ginsburg and the young beats came under the spell of the charismatic Lucien Carr, who encouraged them to create a New Vision. The movie features a lot of hanging out in New York jazz bars during World War II as they develop new forms of self-expression. It also depicts benzedrine and other drug use, and Allen Ginsburg explicity exploring his sexuality. There isn't much great poetry in the film; the film ends with Ginsburg starting to write poems in his personal style. Clearly, this film is not aiming at a mass audience, despite Radcliffe's star power. The cast is uniformly excellent, and includes a post-Dexter Michael C. Hall and the immensely talented Jennifer Jason Leigh as Ginsburg’s institutionalized mother. This makes the second film about Allen Ginsburg released in three years (“Howl” was the other) in a period where we’ve seen no films about George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. To be fair, we have seen two films about Lincoln – Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and of course, “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.” I’m surprised the film got made at all – it’s a downbeat story about a literary figure whose most famous poem, “Howl,” debuted over 50 years ago. On the other hand, the Beats appear to fascinate some filmmakers, despite their spotty box office record – the recent movie version of Kerouac’s “On the Road” lost money, as did the most recent film about William Burroughs that starred Johnny Depp. The fact that it got made says a lot about the type of projects that attract actors. Radcliffe said he was attracted by the high quality of the script. Remember that many actors see themselves as serious artists. Appearing in indie movies with meaty roles provides them opportunities to demonstrate their acting ability. These types of roles can also win Academy Awards that you can’t get for big budget sci-fi sequels. The fact that films like “Kill Your Darlings” continue to get made should provide inspiration to content creators everywhere. Don’t give up on your passion project. If your script gets into the right hands, you might capture a star. Just understand that you could be in this for the long haul. It can take years, sometimes. Finally, be ruthless when revising your work. Faulkner’s advice for writers keeps being repeated because it’s often true. It’s often the work that’s most precious to you that requires the most revising. Take it to heart.

Neil Simon's Mistake

If you enjoyed the plays or movies Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, Brighton Beach Memoirs, and Biloxi Blues (among many others) you've enjoyed Neil Simon's work. He's one of the most successful and funniest modern writers. He's won several Tony and Emmy awards and was nominated for four Academy Awards, all while making millions of dollars from his writing. He became known early in his career for helping rewrite shows out of town before they premiered on Broadway. His play doctoring work was how he got the nickname of "Doc" Simon. I've been a fan of his work for many years, and had the good luck to work as an assistant on his play Actors and Actresses. As Neil Simon writes in his memoir, "Rewrites," his talent as a writer did not always translate into business. In 1965, after Barefoot in the Park and Odd Couple were big hits on Broadway, Paramount approached Simon's business manager to buy the company that held all the rights to those two plays. Paramount offered $125,000, which was a significant amount of money in those days. Simon had misgivings, but because his business manager told him it was a good deal, he ultimately decided to sell. That meant that Neil Simon, the creator and author of the play "The Odd Couple," received no money from the run of the TV series, or any ancillary revenue from DVDs and videocassettes. He receives no royalty money from stage productions of Barefoot in the Park, which is still performed all over the world. For a $125,000 fee, Simon literally gave up tens if not hundreds of millions in revenue. In his memoir Simon takes responsibility for this decision. He says, "No one forced me to make the deal. It was a judgment call, and I let the wrong person sway me in making that judgment." Of course, when he made this deal in the sixties, very few people realized the amount of money one could make from ancillary markets for content. However today we expect that the number of outlets for our content will continue to expand in ways we can't even predict now. Hence the phrase in many content contracts - "all rights in all media currently existing or that may exist, in perpetuity." Never sell all rights to your content to a third party. If your business manager tells you to sell all your rights, get a new business manager. If your content reaches a good sized audience, it may provide you with an income for many years (see my earlier post about Norman Greenbaum, who still lives off royalties from his one hit, 'Spirit in the Sky.'). Of course, like Norman Greenbaum, you should license your content to third parties for distribution and collect your fees and royalties; just don't sell all the rights. I've advised never to sign any contract without having it reviewed by a lawyer. Don't even bother having your lawyer review a contract asking you to give up all rights to your content in perpetuity. Just don't sign it. I should add that Neil Simon wrote a lot more hits, and made a great deal of money from them. Even with this success, it still bothered him that he no longer owned the rights to two of his greatest plays. Learn from Doc Simon's mistake. Own your content.

Happy Accidents

"There are no mistakes, only happy accidents," - Bob Ross When I worked at public television station WLIW, I watched Bob Ross paint every day at 2:00 PM. Every day Bob Ross started with a blank canvas, and a half hour later he created an inspiring landscape. His soothing voice combined with the sound of his brush scratching the canvas was like white noise shutting out the world. He had by far the most popular painting show on PBS; even people who didn't paint watched it. But as practiced as he was, Bob Ross was not perfect. When he did make a mistake, rather than try to cover it up, he incorporated it into his painting. He liked to say "there are no mistakes, only happy accidents." Artistic techniques -- whether it's practicing music, sketching a still life, or creating a believable acting moment -- are studied and practiced in order to enable artists to create freely and spontaneously. There are times when all artists struggle to create, and there are times when the ideas flow freely and the canvas fills up as if by magic. We never know when inspiration will strike, but we do know that we'll make the most of it if we have a solid technique and practice every day to give our inspiration the best chance to affect our work. Allow those happy accidents to happen when you're creating content. Have a vision, but don't be so rigid you ignore opportunities for inspiration. The scene where Cary Grant is chased by the crop dusting plane in "North by Northwest" was created when director Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriter Ernest Lehman were stuck for an idea. They considered several ideas for the scene, including a killer tornado (but how could they make the tornado appear on cue? Too bad they didn't see Sharknado). Finally, one of them said, "what about a crop dusting plane?" and suddenly they were developing the scene and writing notes madly. A happy accident of an idea became one of the most memorable scenes in the film. I bet you're wondering if Bob Ross' painting techniques worked for others. They absolutely did. Mario, one of our master control technicians at WLIW, also had watched Bob Ross' show for years and one day decide to try it. He would often show me slides of the magnificent landscapes he created using the Ross technique, without any formal art training. In your own work, follow Ross' advice. Don't make mistakes. Make happy accidents.

Create Entertaining Stories

In the classic movie Sullivan's Travels, written and directed by Preston Sturges, Joel McCrea plays film director John L. Sullivan, who's made a good living directing light comedies, but now wants to direct a 'significant' picture, a movie called "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" (yes, the Coen brothers knew about Sullivan's Travels when they wrote a movie by the same name.). When Sullivan actually does live on the streets and is sentenced to a chain gang, he learns how much joy his comedies gave ordinary people, and he goes back to making them. People want to be entertained. That's why they spend hundreds of dollars on concert or sports tickets, and share internet videos about kittens. If you want to market your content to a group larger than your friends and family, you must make it entertaining. That doesn't necessarily mean funny. Your goal as a story teller is to involve your audience so they want to know what happens next, and are anxious to find out. The more your content can do that -- whether it's a viral video or a popular novel -- the more people will want to experience it. How do you make something entertaining? If there was a formula that worked every time, every piece of content ever created would be popular. That being said, there are some principals I've learned over the years that I try to apply to my work: -- A satisfying story is both surprising and inevitable. The audience must be unsure of the ending, but when they get there the ending should result from the characters' personalities and interaction. -- Tell a story about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances -- whether they're trying to save the earth or save their Average Joe Gym (yes, that's a Dodgeball Reference. Wonder if they'd still have Lance Armstrong in that movie today). By the way, "people" does not necessarily mean humans -- your characters can be hobbits or Norse gods. -- Dialogue should reveal character and advance the plot. Even the most brilliant verbal repartee from Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde or Judd Apatow does that. -- Any message must grow out of the situation and characters to be effective. Otherwise, write an op ed piece or an essay for the NY Times. Of course, even if you apply these rules and work hard to make your content as strong as possible, it still may not find an audience. Forgive yourself, and move on to the next project. My message: If you liked this post, make a comment. My poetry collection, Two Car Garage, is also available on amazon.com and bn.com.