On Pitching

From time to time I am giving lectures on pitching a story. I think I can stop that now, because most of the things you need to know are being said in this video. Writer and director Tony Gilroy hears a few loglines and gives his opinion on the storylines.

Footnote: Please let us not forget that making a movie is ALWAYS a very expensive and time consuming process, if you do it in a professional way and without exploiting yourself end everyone around you. If you want to sell a screenplay, you have to do your homework, step into the shoes of a producer for a  moment and try to see your script through their eyes. And for me this is what the video is about.

These are the most important points for me:

• The high costs of a movie can almost always be predicted after reading only the logline.
• The risk of gathering money for an expensive movie that is not adapted from a well known prior material is very high. If on top of that the script comes from an unknown writer, producers will probably stay away from the project.
• A story that matches in tone and in some fragments of the story to well known other movies has a big chance of getting made. But the downside is that there is a huge competition in the market for such projects. You have to find the right amount of originality for these stories.
• Is the script castable?
• You need a really good title.
• If the basic concept and the concept of ideas is so complicated that you can hardly get it in the logline, the pitch will most likely fail. (Which sounds reasonable, because how will you sell it to the audience then?)
• What is the tone?

Before all of the European Arthouse film lovers start complaining in my comments, let me add something: Of course you can break those rules. Of course there are dozens of great movies which are successful nevertheless. And of course there are many movies of high artistic value, that are excellent and compelling just because they don’t stick to any rules. But the vast majority of movies is made to find an audience beyond the film festival circuit.

And if someone says “But if I stick to those rules the result will be the same old mediocre recycled stories again and again!” – let me tell you something about my approach to my work: I personally love constraints. Because they are a challenge – how can I bend the “corset” from the inside and create something new withing these constraints? I think, if with every new project that sits on my table literally everything would be possible, I would have quit my job a long time ago, because there is no challenge and I would be bored to hell. But maybe this is just me.

(Video link via Go Into The Story)