October 25 – The Answer Is: You Don’t Know!
With no cash in my wallet and four consecutive days of 50-mile round-trip commutes ahead of me, I had to stop by my local Bank of America ATM as well as my local Chevron before setting out on the Commute of Death. I’m not kidding, the morning southbound commute from the Valley into L.A. proper is automotive purgatory. You’ve got two choices: the 405 freeway or Sepulveda Blvd., both of which take you south through the Sepulveda Pass. Listening to the traffic report on the radio while I slogged west on Sherman Way, I heard that there’d been an accident on the 405 and that Sepulveda Blvd. was the best bet. So of course it was a no brainer: take Sepulveda Blvd. out of the Valley. Unfortunately, the rest of planet Earth beat me to that punch. I shit you not. It took me upward of an hour to get out of the Valley. We’re talking a total distance of, I dunno, six or seven miles? I’m not exaggerating at all. It’s about six or seven miles from my apartment to the other side of the Hill, and it took me a frickin’ hour. Luckily things cleared up at Wilshire. I hopped onto the 405 from there and was at the Marriott in no time. Total commute time: 90 minutes (to go 25 miles). But even while sitting in the parking lot formerly known as Sepulveda Blvd., I reminded myself to stop being such a whiner. As I saw the previous night with Namiko, the dame from Sega, there were people at this Expo who’d spent fortunes to get here.
I was only 15 or so minutes late for the first seminar. This being Thursday, and my pitches not starting until the next day, I decided to take as many seminars on pitching as I could. I hadn’t pitched either jack or shit in nearly a decade, so suffice it to say I needed as much refreshing as possible.
Before I get to my first seminar of the day, I should emphasize that by far one of the biggest strengths of the Screenwriting Expo was that they offered seminars on just about every facet of writing you could possibly dream up. Here, check out this sampling of some of the seminars offered over the four days:
Legal and Business Aspects of Writing for Film and TV by Paul S. Levine
Secrets of Animated Movies and TV Shows by Ken Rotcop
Writing the Thriller by Ken Dancyger
The TV Freelancer: Pitching For TV by Brian Herskowitz
Beyond the Chick Flick: Writing The Female Driven Screenplay by Pilar Alessandra
Okay, Fasten Your Seat Belts: Writing the Action Sequence by Syd Field
Madness at the Movies I: Serial Killers, Psychopaths, Sociopaths by Howard M. Gluss, PhD
Effective Use of Flashbacks and Voiceovers by Joel Haber
Legal Primer: Overview of Entertainment Law by Paul S. Levine
Short Films: A Short Way To Success by James Hughes
The Gorgon in the Mirror: The How & Why of Horror by Steven Barnes
From Idea to Animated Series by Jean Ann Wright
Alpha Babes by Pamela Jaye Smith
TV Story Structure by Ellen Sandler
Comic Book Writing 101 by Sean J. Jordan & Matthew Hansen
Screenwriting for Tired Parents by Pilar Alessandra
See what I’m saying? Unless you’re strictly into prose or poetry, you will find something here for you.
My first seminar was entitled Pitches/Loglines/Treatments by a chap called Dalessandro, James Dalessandro. James was a terrific speaker, a very lively, animated little gray-haired guy who was clearly passionate about all things cinematic. Being a few minutes late meant that not only were all the chairs taken, but so was most of the floor space. I found a small spot on the carpet to the side of the class from which I could just catch James’s little head sticking up above the podium. The 90 minutes flew by, and James offered us hopefuls a bunch of gems about how best to engage a pitchee. “We’re in the exaggeration business,” he said at one point. Not only when we pitch, but when we’re writing movies in general, crank it up. Raise the stakes. He also said that, when pitching, it’s ideal to connect your flick to something that’s well known. So your idea should be original, but familiar. He gave examples by pitching movies he himself was working on. I don't remember all the details of his projects, but I can easily remember the way he pitched them. “MASH on steroids.” “Cuckoo’s Nest for the younger set.”
He also advised us to use as many descriptive words as possible in a pitch. Nobody should ever walk. They should hurry, stumble, lumber, limp, etc. You get the idea. “Keep it simple, but not simplistic,” he said. “Don’t get bogged down in minutiae. This is not the stuff of high drama.” In general, try to make your story stand out. "No one wants another movie where the hero looks like Richard Gere,” he said.
One last golden piece of advice James offered was about backstory: Avoid it like the plague. That, he said, explained the failure of Hannibal Raising. “Backstory is the boobie prize of the movie business,” he said. “No one gives a shit.”
Ol’ James at one point said he knew producers who rarely bought his projects, but they always invited him back because they loved hearing him pitch. After being entranced by him for an hour and a half, I believe it.
My next seminar was called What Not to Do in a Pitch by Robert Ward. The unintentionally hilarious thing about this class was that poor Bob had no idea how the Expo pitches were supposed to work. He told us things like not to pitch any of our completed scripts; just pitch ideas. If we had a script, we should just give it to our agent and let them deal with selling it. ‘Course, as we found out midway through the seminar with a show of hands, maybe all of two people out of the several dozen in the room had an agent. He also didn’t seem to get that the vast majority of the peeps we were pitching to were from production companies, not literary agencies, and that our pitch could go no longer than five minutes.
In other words, Bob’s seminar completely contradicted ol’ James Dalessandro’s. James told us only to pitch our film if the script was complete, and to keep the pitch short. If we needed the whole five minutes, great, but if we used less time, even better. I mean, after listening to these two cats, it was like, “Great! NOW what do I do?”
When he figured out that most of us didn’t have an agent, he did have some encouraging words for us, some of them a bit too encouraging. “If you’re looking for an agent, you’re in the right town,” he said. Then he went on to say that we can look in the phone book for agents. And then we can just call them and pitch to them over the phone. With all due respect to Bob, uh, I don’t think so. Where in the phone book are literary agents listed? Secondly, they HATE when people cold-call them and pitch over the phone. It’s so taboo. You send them a short query they can read on their own time. That’s what every established writer, and agent for that friggin’ matter, says. I mean really. Look them up in the phone book and give them a ring-a-ding-ding? Jesus!
Again, I don’t blame Bob. He just wasn’t prepped very well on the audience he would be addressing. And to his credit, he did offer up a few gems about pitching that everyone should know, even if some of them are kind of obvious. One was not to quote dialogue from the script unless it was absolutely essential. Another was not to be too shy or meek or humble. You’ve got to be confident. “I don’t care if you’re a nervous wreck,” he said. “Just don’t show it.” As for conveying the emotion of the story, that’s probably the most important yet most difficult part of pitching. When pitching, we shouldn’t have to nail every obvious emotion. Instead, similar to what James told us earlier, we should convey the emotion via descriptive verbs. If we’re pitching a comedy script for instance (which I was planning to do), we should try to convey the comedy through our choice of words. Ideally we shouldn’t have to say to the pitchee, “And my movie’s really funny!”
And finally, Bob advised us not to ask the pitchee anything. Any questions asked during the pitch should come from the other side of the table. That means they’re interested in your script.
After Bob’s class, it was 12:30 p.m. The next session didn’t start for an hour. This gets me to perhaps my favorite little thing about the Expo, and really shows how it’s the little things that make an experience that much better. Every day at this time, the Expo peeps had the Marriott provide us with free boxed lunches and free sodas. These lunches were nothing to sniff at. The main attraction of each was a good-sized sandwich. The kind of sandwich was labeled on the box. You had turkey, chicken, ham, beef, tuna, and vegetarian. And besides that, the box would include bags of chips, an apple, a giant chocolate chip or oatmeal cookie, a small container of macaroni salad or what have you. More than enough to leave you stuffed and happy until the networking party that night, which would have even more free food.
Another cool thing about the Expo were the guest speakers for the 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. time slot. There were plenty of other seminars to attend during this time if you couldn’t get into the guest speaker event, but if you had a gold pass, sold-out signs were immaterial. On this day, the speaker was a guy named Scott Lew. Never heard of him? I hadn’t either, but I don’t think they invited him because of his blinding star wattage. I’ll explain more about that in a sec.
As with all the guest speakers, the introduction was made by the CEO of Creative Screenwriting, chap called Donovan, Bill Donovan. Slight, middle aged, and sleep deprived, Bill introduced himself by saying that whatever was going right with the Expo was due to his trench-toiling staff, and whatever was going wrong was due solely to him.
The point of inviting this guy Scott Lew to talk to us today was to impress upon us the importance of perseverance, something Bill said he himself did not have as a young screenwriting hopeful all those eons ago. Yes, you read that right. Bill was at one time an aspiring screenwriter who gave up on his dreams and eventually became CEO of a screenwriting magazine. He said all this with a rather dour countenance and sad eyes that looked all the sadder through his thick glasses. And now welcome Scott Lew!
Rolling up the ramp to the stage in a motorized wheelchair, puffing away every few seconds on a tube connected to an oxygen tank strapped to the wheelchair’s back, came the balding, chunky, thirty-seven-year-old Scott. He graduated from USC film school back in ’93 and eventually broke into the industry in ’97. He landed work on a lot of big films in the late nineties and early aughts, such as American Beauty. And then, in 2003, only thirty-three and with so much going for him, he was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
A female journalist from Creative Screenwriting whose name escapes me sat up on the stage with him and asked him questions about his adventures in the movie industry, especially since his diagnosis. The truth is I didn’t understand much of what Scott said. The lapel mike was fixed sort of awkwardly on his shirt, and he literally couldn’t say more than half a sentence or so without taking in air from the tube. Here’s what I did glean. In spite of his illness, ol’ Scott has managed to write and direct his very first feature film, which he just wrapped earlier this year. It’s a comedy entitled Bickford Shmeckler's Cool Ideas. The gist of the plot is about this college student genius named Bickford, played by that kid Patrick Fugit from Almost Famous, who has this journal he uses to jot down all of his “cool ideas.” It’s stolen, and then he has to scour the campus to find out who took it and why. It has a pretty decent cast. Besides Patrick, you’ve got Olivia Wilde, Matthew Lillard, Cheryl Hines, and none other than John Cho. That’s right. Harold from Harold & Kumar. On top of that, since wrapping Bickford Shmeckler, Scott was the subject of a documentary called Living with Lew.
I suppose the point of the whole thing was pretty obvious, right? If this guy, riddled with one of the most terrifying illnesses ever known to man, can get his shit together and write and direct his own feature film, then what excuse do the rest of us have for not toughing it out?
Now thoroughly sober, I set out for my afternoon seminars. As with the morning ones, I decided to attend seminars that had to do with pitching. The two I picked were both taught by a literary agent named Victoria Wisdom. The first was called How to Pitch for a Sale, followed by Selling a Spec Script. With her brunette hair bound up in a messy bun and wearing a black shirt and black slacks, ol’ Vic was a terrific speaker. She emphasized the importance of understanding thoroughly the business side of movies so as to be just as well versed in the lingo as the pitchee across the table. She started out both seminars by throwing out business-type questions at the audience: “What do you think is the average cost of a feature film?”, “What movie genre makes the most money on average?”, “Which demographic has the highest movie attendance rate?”, and so on. After each question, a few brave souls would throw out answers that turned out to be nowhere near the right one. And just before giving us the answer, that witty Victoria would say: “So the answer is: You don’t know, right? You have no idea how much it costs to make a film, do you?” I know I'm making her sound harsh, but she was really a funny gal. She knew how to educate us in a witty, no-bullshit kind of way. And I do mean witty. She killed me at times. Oh, and by the way, the answers to the above questions are: $100.5 million (as of January 2007), action movies, and 16-24-year-old males. She also went on to say that after action movies, comedies are the second most successful genre, followed by thrillers (this includes horror), and dramas.
Of all the great gems she gave us, perhaps the most priceless one was never, ever, ever send a one-page query letter through the mail to a literary agent. She says that on some days she can hear her assistants peeling the stamps off the query letters that come in and then toss the letter itself, unopened, into the recycling can. The best way to query an agent, Victoria said, was through a two-sentence e-mail. The subject line should say something like “Available Spec.” The first sentence in the e-mail body should be the script’s logline. The second sentence should be: “Would you like to read?” And that’s it. As an example, she offered up the case of a poor soul who attended one of her seminars and asked her why, after sending out query letters for something like five years for the same script, he was getting no response. And she basically told him what she was now telling us. Don’t send traditional one-page queries, do it the really short e-mail way. So the guy tried it. He shot e-mails to 10 agents…..and all 10 asked to read his script.
As for pitching, she said one way to think about it was to look at movie posters which, besides the title, usually have a tagline or something. Examples she cited were Wedding Crashers (Hide the Bridesmaids) and Gladiator (A Hero Shall Rise). Of course, those don’t quite cut it as pitches in and of themselves, but the point of course is to train ourselves to keep our pitches simple. “Simple, but not simplistic,” she said, echoing James Dalessandro. She also offered up her own little pitches of other popular films, not taglines from the poster, but just how she would pitch their plots very simply. Examples include The Bourne Identity (James Bond with amnesia), Walk the Line (white Ray), and Lethal Weapon (Dragnet with two Stooges). You see what I mean? Simple, not simplistic. To refine our art of pitching (and it is an art), it’s good practice to boil movies down like that. Of course, for our purposes, since we would have five minutes for our pitches, we couldn’t quite keep it that simple. It’s a good place to start, but then we should try to expand it a bit. As an example, she offered up a more expanded pitch for Beverly Hills Cop: “When a Motown cop’s childhood friend is murdered by a Beverly Hills drug smuggler, he sets the Rodeo Drive art world on its ear and teaches the local cops a thing or two about Detroit detective work.” See that? Still pretty simple, but it gives you a good idea of what the movie’s about.
Echoing James Dalessandro yet again, Victoria advised us to reference a well known movie in our pitch while trying to convince the pitchee that our idea was still unique. Fresh yet familiar, in other words. Again, what’s The Bourne Identity? It’s James Bond……with amnesia. She also took the whole pitch process a step further by providing us a structure to help us craft our pitches: Antagonist, protagonist, agenda, obstacle. The pitch should ideally convey those four things in that order. The Beverly Hills Cop example above is sort of an example of that.
The second class she taught overlapped with the first in terms of her emphasizing that we should really nail down the business side of movies. “Think like a pro so you can talk like a pro,” she said at one point. She also went further with that whole thing about being familiar with other movies that are like yours. Ideally you should be able to tick off half a dozen to a dozen other films that are similar to yours in genre and theme. “Referencing your movie is dire,” she said at one point.
Screenwriters should be able to spot trends as well as any marketer. “Don’t fight City Hall,” she said. “Spot the trends.” To that end, she said we should be reading the box office reports every Monday, keep track of what’s in production using the production charts that are published every week, use the box office reports to see if movies are making a profit, keep tabs on the per-screen average of movies, stuff like that. The second weekend of any film is called the Drop because typically it’s a far lower dollar amount than the first weekend. Victoria said that if a movie “only” experiences something like a 20% drop in ticket sales from the first to second weekend, that’s not so bad. That means the movie “has legs.” She also cited such sources as Variety, Hollywood Reporter, MCN.com, and a writer named David Wells, all for keeping tabs on the goings on in Wonderland.
When we have a script we feel is readable, Victoria said, the first person we should pursue is an agent. Of course she would say that, wouldn’t she? Being an agent herself? Still, as someone who writes novels as well as screenplays, I’d guess she’s probably on the money. Without an agent on your side, I’ve learned, it’s extremely difficult to get past the proverbial gatekeepers. Notice how I’m still outside the gates? A screenwriter should ideally have three people in their corner: an agent, a manager, and an entertainment attorney. It may be a good idea to pursue the manager while pursuing an agent, she said, just so long as we really do pursue an agent first and foremost. The main reason, as she explained it, was that as soon as you secure an agent, you’ll have an entertainment attorney in about five seconds. Not that I needed more motivation to find an agent, but now I’m even more anxious to do so just so I can test that theory.
One last thing she talked about was the synopsis. When an agent asks for a synopsis of your script, be sure you know what kind they want. There are generally three kinds. The one-page synopsis (known as the one-pager) breaks the three acts down to three paragraphs. The three-page synopsis devotes one full page to each act. And then finally you have the full synopsis that can be as long as you want……as long as it’s no more than eight pages.
It was 6:30 p.m. when Vic’s second class was over. I had an hour to kill before the networking party kicked off. One of my favorite things about the Marriott LAX is that right outside the front entrance, before you get to the taxi and valet stands, you have this sort of patio with cushioned chairs and loveseats and, of course, ash trays. I’m not a smoker, but with the weather as nice as it is in this town, it’s still nice to go out there on breaks and just sit and read or chat and meet people. After Vic’s two classes, I grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper from the gift shop near the lobby and sat outside and just sort of stared into space, mentally digesting the massive gobs of information I’d taken in that day.
I’d only been sitting out there a few minutes when a middle-aged Hispanic couple came out. The guy sat next to me on the loveseat while the wife went and stood by the walkway leading down to the taxi stand, as if she were waiting for someone to pull up. I offered to get up so they could sit together, but the guy was like, “Nah. She doesn’t like being around me when I smoke.” So he lit up and we got to chatting. His name was Luis. Fifty-seven and originally from Mexico, Luis was now living in McLean, Virginia where he works as an attorney in Washington, D.C. for a firm specializing in wrongful injury and death. I told him I was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Jersey. His firm, he said, has offices all over the place, including San Diego. He’d flown out here to help his firm represent the widows of the two men killed in that blazing inferno that engulfed that tunnel on Interstate 5 just a few days earlier. Maybe you heard about it, even if you’re not a local Angelino. It made national news. Anyway, so Luis was actually only representing one of the widows now, because the family of the second widow had persuaded her to seek representation elsewhere.
Eventually he asked me what I was doing here, and I told him about the Expo. That led him to an anecdote of when he met Val Kilmer in a bar in Taos, New Mexico, when Val was there filming Thunderheart back in the ‘90s. But it wasn’t Val he hit it off with, it was an agent or something who was in the same bar on another occasion. This agent and Luis talked for a good deal, and the agent convinced Luis to write his memoirs.
And so, Luis said, when not representing that I-5 widow, he was slowly but surely plugging away on his memoirs. As he told it, he’d churned out over 600 pages so far and was up to age 42 (the early ‘90s, around the time he’d’ve met this agent who persuaded him to write this thing in the first place). From what he told me, it sounds like Luis’s memoirs could be a real page turner. Born in Mexico in 1950, he came to the States at 16 and found work in a tortilla factory in East L.A. But then almost right away he was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. After surviving that in one piece, he came back and found work in lettuce fields in Salinas. He decided on a career in law and order, landed a gig as a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Barbara, and eventually found his way to the D.C. area where he worked for 10 years as a P.I. for the very firm for which he was now working as a partner.
At that point he was growing a bit impatient because, as I sort of figured by how his wife seemed to be waiting, they were indeed expecting their son, a psychologist, to be pulling up in his rented SUV at any moment. The son had called Luis while he’d been talking to me just to say his plane had landed and he’d be at the hotel shortly. No matter, it was now past 7:30 p.m., and I had to get back downstairs to that networking party.
Tonight’s party had been advertised as featuring magicians from The Magic Castle. I forgot about that the moment I walked into the giant ballroom and had visions of the previous night’s pre-Expo pool party. Here we go again, right? The awkwardness, the walking around along the fringes, nursing my overpriced Sam Adams (really, I could've taken that same six-fifty and gotten a six-pack of Stella Artois from Ralphs!), and trying desperately to find fellow loners with whom I could break the ice. Almost everyone was in groups, either sitting at round tables or standing around those tall, smaller tables. How did everyone become so chummy so God damned fast?
I actually did run into Namiko again. And I also met two new peeps. One was a guy from Jersey named Rich. We hit it off right away after I told him I grew up in Jersey. He graduated from Rutgers in the spring of ’06 and, like me, was interested in both screenplays and novels, and has written one of each. He writes freelance for magazines and supplements that with substitute teaching. And also like me, Rich is a recovering video game geek. Suffice it to say we got along famously and are still in touch. The second guy was a dude from Atlanta named Theo. He was there to find a buyer for a pilot he’d written. Out of respect for him, I won’t divulge the premise, but I will say it's pure platinum and would be perfect for Showtime or F/X. As with Rich, I’m still in touch with Theo.
When the magicians finally came on at nine, I could not have been less interested. Most people seemed to share my indifference. They were all engrossed in conversation and nursing a healthy buzz. I, meanwhile, was pooped, and felt all the more so at the prospect of three more full days of action ahead of me. After saying “Ciao” to Namiko, Rich, and Theo, I went to that parking garage next door, paid the $10.50, and got back to the Valley just in time to catch the first part of Letterman before conking out with the TV on.
With no cash in my wallet and four consecutive days of 50-mile round-trip commutes ahead of me, I had to stop by my local Bank of America ATM as well as my local Chevron before setting out on the Commute of Death. I’m not kidding, the morning southbound commute from the Valley into L.A. proper is automotive purgatory. You’ve got two choices: the 405 freeway or Sepulveda Blvd., both of which take you south through the Sepulveda Pass. Listening to the traffic report on the radio while I slogged west on Sherman Way, I heard that there’d been an accident on the 405 and that Sepulveda Blvd. was the best bet. So of course it was a no brainer: take Sepulveda Blvd. out of the Valley. Unfortunately, the rest of planet Earth beat me to that punch. I shit you not. It took me upward of an hour to get out of the Valley. We’re talking a total distance of, I dunno, six or seven miles? I’m not exaggerating at all. It’s about six or seven miles from my apartment to the other side of the Hill, and it took me a frickin’ hour. Luckily things cleared up at Wilshire. I hopped onto the 405 from there and was at the Marriott in no time. Total commute time: 90 minutes (to go 25 miles). But even while sitting in the parking lot formerly known as Sepulveda Blvd., I reminded myself to stop being such a whiner. As I saw the previous night with Namiko, the dame from Sega, there were people at this Expo who’d spent fortunes to get here.
I was only 15 or so minutes late for the first seminar. This being Thursday, and my pitches not starting until the next day, I decided to take as many seminars on pitching as I could. I hadn’t pitched either jack or shit in nearly a decade, so suffice it to say I needed as much refreshing as possible.
Before I get to my first seminar of the day, I should emphasize that by far one of the biggest strengths of the Screenwriting Expo was that they offered seminars on just about every facet of writing you could possibly dream up. Here, check out this sampling of some of the seminars offered over the four days:
Legal and Business Aspects of Writing for Film and TV by Paul S. Levine
Secrets of Animated Movies and TV Shows by Ken Rotcop
Writing the Thriller by Ken Dancyger
The TV Freelancer: Pitching For TV by Brian Herskowitz
Beyond the Chick Flick: Writing The Female Driven Screenplay by Pilar Alessandra
Okay, Fasten Your Seat Belts: Writing the Action Sequence by Syd Field
Madness at the Movies I: Serial Killers, Psychopaths, Sociopaths by Howard M. Gluss, PhD
Effective Use of Flashbacks and Voiceovers by Joel Haber
Legal Primer: Overview of Entertainment Law by Paul S. Levine
Short Films: A Short Way To Success by James Hughes
The Gorgon in the Mirror: The How & Why of Horror by Steven Barnes
From Idea to Animated Series by Jean Ann Wright
Alpha Babes by Pamela Jaye Smith
TV Story Structure by Ellen Sandler
Comic Book Writing 101 by Sean J. Jordan & Matthew Hansen
Screenwriting for Tired Parents by Pilar Alessandra
See what I’m saying? Unless you’re strictly into prose or poetry, you will find something here for you.
My first seminar was entitled Pitches/Loglines/Treatments by a chap called Dalessandro, James Dalessandro. James was a terrific speaker, a very lively, animated little gray-haired guy who was clearly passionate about all things cinematic. Being a few minutes late meant that not only were all the chairs taken, but so was most of the floor space. I found a small spot on the carpet to the side of the class from which I could just catch James’s little head sticking up above the podium. The 90 minutes flew by, and James offered us hopefuls a bunch of gems about how best to engage a pitchee. “We’re in the exaggeration business,” he said at one point. Not only when we pitch, but when we’re writing movies in general, crank it up. Raise the stakes. He also said that, when pitching, it’s ideal to connect your flick to something that’s well known. So your idea should be original, but familiar. He gave examples by pitching movies he himself was working on. I don't remember all the details of his projects, but I can easily remember the way he pitched them. “MASH on steroids.” “Cuckoo’s Nest for the younger set.”
He also advised us to use as many descriptive words as possible in a pitch. Nobody should ever walk. They should hurry, stumble, lumber, limp, etc. You get the idea. “Keep it simple, but not simplistic,” he said. “Don’t get bogged down in minutiae. This is not the stuff of high drama.” In general, try to make your story stand out. "No one wants another movie where the hero looks like Richard Gere,” he said.
One last golden piece of advice James offered was about backstory: Avoid it like the plague. That, he said, explained the failure of Hannibal Raising. “Backstory is the boobie prize of the movie business,” he said. “No one gives a shit.”
Ol’ James at one point said he knew producers who rarely bought his projects, but they always invited him back because they loved hearing him pitch. After being entranced by him for an hour and a half, I believe it.
My next seminar was called What Not to Do in a Pitch by Robert Ward. The unintentionally hilarious thing about this class was that poor Bob had no idea how the Expo pitches were supposed to work. He told us things like not to pitch any of our completed scripts; just pitch ideas. If we had a script, we should just give it to our agent and let them deal with selling it. ‘Course, as we found out midway through the seminar with a show of hands, maybe all of two people out of the several dozen in the room had an agent. He also didn’t seem to get that the vast majority of the peeps we were pitching to were from production companies, not literary agencies, and that our pitch could go no longer than five minutes.
In other words, Bob’s seminar completely contradicted ol’ James Dalessandro’s. James told us only to pitch our film if the script was complete, and to keep the pitch short. If we needed the whole five minutes, great, but if we used less time, even better. I mean, after listening to these two cats, it was like, “Great! NOW what do I do?”
When he figured out that most of us didn’t have an agent, he did have some encouraging words for us, some of them a bit too encouraging. “If you’re looking for an agent, you’re in the right town,” he said. Then he went on to say that we can look in the phone book for agents. And then we can just call them and pitch to them over the phone. With all due respect to Bob, uh, I don’t think so. Where in the phone book are literary agents listed? Secondly, they HATE when people cold-call them and pitch over the phone. It’s so taboo. You send them a short query they can read on their own time. That’s what every established writer, and agent for that friggin’ matter, says. I mean really. Look them up in the phone book and give them a ring-a-ding-ding? Jesus!
Again, I don’t blame Bob. He just wasn’t prepped very well on the audience he would be addressing. And to his credit, he did offer up a few gems about pitching that everyone should know, even if some of them are kind of obvious. One was not to quote dialogue from the script unless it was absolutely essential. Another was not to be too shy or meek or humble. You’ve got to be confident. “I don’t care if you’re a nervous wreck,” he said. “Just don’t show it.” As for conveying the emotion of the story, that’s probably the most important yet most difficult part of pitching. When pitching, we shouldn’t have to nail every obvious emotion. Instead, similar to what James told us earlier, we should convey the emotion via descriptive verbs. If we’re pitching a comedy script for instance (which I was planning to do), we should try to convey the comedy through our choice of words. Ideally we shouldn’t have to say to the pitchee, “And my movie’s really funny!”
And finally, Bob advised us not to ask the pitchee anything. Any questions asked during the pitch should come from the other side of the table. That means they’re interested in your script.
After Bob’s class, it was 12:30 p.m. The next session didn’t start for an hour. This gets me to perhaps my favorite little thing about the Expo, and really shows how it’s the little things that make an experience that much better. Every day at this time, the Expo peeps had the Marriott provide us with free boxed lunches and free sodas. These lunches were nothing to sniff at. The main attraction of each was a good-sized sandwich. The kind of sandwich was labeled on the box. You had turkey, chicken, ham, beef, tuna, and vegetarian. And besides that, the box would include bags of chips, an apple, a giant chocolate chip or oatmeal cookie, a small container of macaroni salad or what have you. More than enough to leave you stuffed and happy until the networking party that night, which would have even more free food.
Another cool thing about the Expo were the guest speakers for the 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. time slot. There were plenty of other seminars to attend during this time if you couldn’t get into the guest speaker event, but if you had a gold pass, sold-out signs were immaterial. On this day, the speaker was a guy named Scott Lew. Never heard of him? I hadn’t either, but I don’t think they invited him because of his blinding star wattage. I’ll explain more about that in a sec.
As with all the guest speakers, the introduction was made by the CEO of Creative Screenwriting, chap called Donovan, Bill Donovan. Slight, middle aged, and sleep deprived, Bill introduced himself by saying that whatever was going right with the Expo was due to his trench-toiling staff, and whatever was going wrong was due solely to him.
The point of inviting this guy Scott Lew to talk to us today was to impress upon us the importance of perseverance, something Bill said he himself did not have as a young screenwriting hopeful all those eons ago. Yes, you read that right. Bill was at one time an aspiring screenwriter who gave up on his dreams and eventually became CEO of a screenwriting magazine. He said all this with a rather dour countenance and sad eyes that looked all the sadder through his thick glasses. And now welcome Scott Lew!
Rolling up the ramp to the stage in a motorized wheelchair, puffing away every few seconds on a tube connected to an oxygen tank strapped to the wheelchair’s back, came the balding, chunky, thirty-seven-year-old Scott. He graduated from USC film school back in ’93 and eventually broke into the industry in ’97. He landed work on a lot of big films in the late nineties and early aughts, such as American Beauty. And then, in 2003, only thirty-three and with so much going for him, he was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
A female journalist from Creative Screenwriting whose name escapes me sat up on the stage with him and asked him questions about his adventures in the movie industry, especially since his diagnosis. The truth is I didn’t understand much of what Scott said. The lapel mike was fixed sort of awkwardly on his shirt, and he literally couldn’t say more than half a sentence or so without taking in air from the tube. Here’s what I did glean. In spite of his illness, ol’ Scott has managed to write and direct his very first feature film, which he just wrapped earlier this year. It’s a comedy entitled Bickford Shmeckler's Cool Ideas. The gist of the plot is about this college student genius named Bickford, played by that kid Patrick Fugit from Almost Famous, who has this journal he uses to jot down all of his “cool ideas.” It’s stolen, and then he has to scour the campus to find out who took it and why. It has a pretty decent cast. Besides Patrick, you’ve got Olivia Wilde, Matthew Lillard, Cheryl Hines, and none other than John Cho. That’s right. Harold from Harold & Kumar. On top of that, since wrapping Bickford Shmeckler, Scott was the subject of a documentary called Living with Lew.
I suppose the point of the whole thing was pretty obvious, right? If this guy, riddled with one of the most terrifying illnesses ever known to man, can get his shit together and write and direct his own feature film, then what excuse do the rest of us have for not toughing it out?
Now thoroughly sober, I set out for my afternoon seminars. As with the morning ones, I decided to attend seminars that had to do with pitching. The two I picked were both taught by a literary agent named Victoria Wisdom. The first was called How to Pitch for a Sale, followed by Selling a Spec Script. With her brunette hair bound up in a messy bun and wearing a black shirt and black slacks, ol’ Vic was a terrific speaker. She emphasized the importance of understanding thoroughly the business side of movies so as to be just as well versed in the lingo as the pitchee across the table. She started out both seminars by throwing out business-type questions at the audience: “What do you think is the average cost of a feature film?”, “What movie genre makes the most money on average?”, “Which demographic has the highest movie attendance rate?”, and so on. After each question, a few brave souls would throw out answers that turned out to be nowhere near the right one. And just before giving us the answer, that witty Victoria would say: “So the answer is: You don’t know, right? You have no idea how much it costs to make a film, do you?” I know I'm making her sound harsh, but she was really a funny gal. She knew how to educate us in a witty, no-bullshit kind of way. And I do mean witty. She killed me at times. Oh, and by the way, the answers to the above questions are: $100.5 million (as of January 2007), action movies, and 16-24-year-old males. She also went on to say that after action movies, comedies are the second most successful genre, followed by thrillers (this includes horror), and dramas.
Of all the great gems she gave us, perhaps the most priceless one was never, ever, ever send a one-page query letter through the mail to a literary agent. She says that on some days she can hear her assistants peeling the stamps off the query letters that come in and then toss the letter itself, unopened, into the recycling can. The best way to query an agent, Victoria said, was through a two-sentence e-mail. The subject line should say something like “Available Spec.” The first sentence in the e-mail body should be the script’s logline. The second sentence should be: “Would you like to read?” And that’s it. As an example, she offered up the case of a poor soul who attended one of her seminars and asked her why, after sending out query letters for something like five years for the same script, he was getting no response. And she basically told him what she was now telling us. Don’t send traditional one-page queries, do it the really short e-mail way. So the guy tried it. He shot e-mails to 10 agents…..and all 10 asked to read his script.
As for pitching, she said one way to think about it was to look at movie posters which, besides the title, usually have a tagline or something. Examples she cited were Wedding Crashers (Hide the Bridesmaids) and Gladiator (A Hero Shall Rise). Of course, those don’t quite cut it as pitches in and of themselves, but the point of course is to train ourselves to keep our pitches simple. “Simple, but not simplistic,” she said, echoing James Dalessandro. She also offered up her own little pitches of other popular films, not taglines from the poster, but just how she would pitch their plots very simply. Examples include The Bourne Identity (James Bond with amnesia), Walk the Line (white Ray), and Lethal Weapon (Dragnet with two Stooges). You see what I mean? Simple, not simplistic. To refine our art of pitching (and it is an art), it’s good practice to boil movies down like that. Of course, for our purposes, since we would have five minutes for our pitches, we couldn’t quite keep it that simple. It’s a good place to start, but then we should try to expand it a bit. As an example, she offered up a more expanded pitch for Beverly Hills Cop: “When a Motown cop’s childhood friend is murdered by a Beverly Hills drug smuggler, he sets the Rodeo Drive art world on its ear and teaches the local cops a thing or two about Detroit detective work.” See that? Still pretty simple, but it gives you a good idea of what the movie’s about.
Echoing James Dalessandro yet again, Victoria advised us to reference a well known movie in our pitch while trying to convince the pitchee that our idea was still unique. Fresh yet familiar, in other words. Again, what’s The Bourne Identity? It’s James Bond……with amnesia. She also took the whole pitch process a step further by providing us a structure to help us craft our pitches: Antagonist, protagonist, agenda, obstacle. The pitch should ideally convey those four things in that order. The Beverly Hills Cop example above is sort of an example of that.
The second class she taught overlapped with the first in terms of her emphasizing that we should really nail down the business side of movies. “Think like a pro so you can talk like a pro,” she said at one point. She also went further with that whole thing about being familiar with other movies that are like yours. Ideally you should be able to tick off half a dozen to a dozen other films that are similar to yours in genre and theme. “Referencing your movie is dire,” she said at one point.
Screenwriters should be able to spot trends as well as any marketer. “Don’t fight City Hall,” she said. “Spot the trends.” To that end, she said we should be reading the box office reports every Monday, keep track of what’s in production using the production charts that are published every week, use the box office reports to see if movies are making a profit, keep tabs on the per-screen average of movies, stuff like that. The second weekend of any film is called the Drop because typically it’s a far lower dollar amount than the first weekend. Victoria said that if a movie “only” experiences something like a 20% drop in ticket sales from the first to second weekend, that’s not so bad. That means the movie “has legs.” She also cited such sources as Variety, Hollywood Reporter, MCN.com, and a writer named David Wells, all for keeping tabs on the goings on in Wonderland.
When we have a script we feel is readable, Victoria said, the first person we should pursue is an agent. Of course she would say that, wouldn’t she? Being an agent herself? Still, as someone who writes novels as well as screenplays, I’d guess she’s probably on the money. Without an agent on your side, I’ve learned, it’s extremely difficult to get past the proverbial gatekeepers. Notice how I’m still outside the gates? A screenwriter should ideally have three people in their corner: an agent, a manager, and an entertainment attorney. It may be a good idea to pursue the manager while pursuing an agent, she said, just so long as we really do pursue an agent first and foremost. The main reason, as she explained it, was that as soon as you secure an agent, you’ll have an entertainment attorney in about five seconds. Not that I needed more motivation to find an agent, but now I’m even more anxious to do so just so I can test that theory.
One last thing she talked about was the synopsis. When an agent asks for a synopsis of your script, be sure you know what kind they want. There are generally three kinds. The one-page synopsis (known as the one-pager) breaks the three acts down to three paragraphs. The three-page synopsis devotes one full page to each act. And then finally you have the full synopsis that can be as long as you want……as long as it’s no more than eight pages.
It was 6:30 p.m. when Vic’s second class was over. I had an hour to kill before the networking party kicked off. One of my favorite things about the Marriott LAX is that right outside the front entrance, before you get to the taxi and valet stands, you have this sort of patio with cushioned chairs and loveseats and, of course, ash trays. I’m not a smoker, but with the weather as nice as it is in this town, it’s still nice to go out there on breaks and just sit and read or chat and meet people. After Vic’s two classes, I grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper from the gift shop near the lobby and sat outside and just sort of stared into space, mentally digesting the massive gobs of information I’d taken in that day.
I’d only been sitting out there a few minutes when a middle-aged Hispanic couple came out. The guy sat next to me on the loveseat while the wife went and stood by the walkway leading down to the taxi stand, as if she were waiting for someone to pull up. I offered to get up so they could sit together, but the guy was like, “Nah. She doesn’t like being around me when I smoke.” So he lit up and we got to chatting. His name was Luis. Fifty-seven and originally from Mexico, Luis was now living in McLean, Virginia where he works as an attorney in Washington, D.C. for a firm specializing in wrongful injury and death. I told him I was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Jersey. His firm, he said, has offices all over the place, including San Diego. He’d flown out here to help his firm represent the widows of the two men killed in that blazing inferno that engulfed that tunnel on Interstate 5 just a few days earlier. Maybe you heard about it, even if you’re not a local Angelino. It made national news. Anyway, so Luis was actually only representing one of the widows now, because the family of the second widow had persuaded her to seek representation elsewhere.
Eventually he asked me what I was doing here, and I told him about the Expo. That led him to an anecdote of when he met Val Kilmer in a bar in Taos, New Mexico, when Val was there filming Thunderheart back in the ‘90s. But it wasn’t Val he hit it off with, it was an agent or something who was in the same bar on another occasion. This agent and Luis talked for a good deal, and the agent convinced Luis to write his memoirs.
And so, Luis said, when not representing that I-5 widow, he was slowly but surely plugging away on his memoirs. As he told it, he’d churned out over 600 pages so far and was up to age 42 (the early ‘90s, around the time he’d’ve met this agent who persuaded him to write this thing in the first place). From what he told me, it sounds like Luis’s memoirs could be a real page turner. Born in Mexico in 1950, he came to the States at 16 and found work in a tortilla factory in East L.A. But then almost right away he was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. After surviving that in one piece, he came back and found work in lettuce fields in Salinas. He decided on a career in law and order, landed a gig as a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Barbara, and eventually found his way to the D.C. area where he worked for 10 years as a P.I. for the very firm for which he was now working as a partner.
At that point he was growing a bit impatient because, as I sort of figured by how his wife seemed to be waiting, they were indeed expecting their son, a psychologist, to be pulling up in his rented SUV at any moment. The son had called Luis while he’d been talking to me just to say his plane had landed and he’d be at the hotel shortly. No matter, it was now past 7:30 p.m., and I had to get back downstairs to that networking party.
Tonight’s party had been advertised as featuring magicians from The Magic Castle. I forgot about that the moment I walked into the giant ballroom and had visions of the previous night’s pre-Expo pool party. Here we go again, right? The awkwardness, the walking around along the fringes, nursing my overpriced Sam Adams (really, I could've taken that same six-fifty and gotten a six-pack of Stella Artois from Ralphs!), and trying desperately to find fellow loners with whom I could break the ice. Almost everyone was in groups, either sitting at round tables or standing around those tall, smaller tables. How did everyone become so chummy so God damned fast?
I actually did run into Namiko again. And I also met two new peeps. One was a guy from Jersey named Rich. We hit it off right away after I told him I grew up in Jersey. He graduated from Rutgers in the spring of ’06 and, like me, was interested in both screenplays and novels, and has written one of each. He writes freelance for magazines and supplements that with substitute teaching. And also like me, Rich is a recovering video game geek. Suffice it to say we got along famously and are still in touch. The second guy was a dude from Atlanta named Theo. He was there to find a buyer for a pilot he’d written. Out of respect for him, I won’t divulge the premise, but I will say it's pure platinum and would be perfect for Showtime or F/X. As with Rich, I’m still in touch with Theo.
When the magicians finally came on at nine, I could not have been less interested. Most people seemed to share my indifference. They were all engrossed in conversation and nursing a healthy buzz. I, meanwhile, was pooped, and felt all the more so at the prospect of three more full days of action ahead of me. After saying “Ciao” to Namiko, Rich, and Theo, I went to that parking garage next door, paid the $10.50, and got back to the Valley just in time to catch the first part of Letterman before conking out with the TV on.
