And so it begins.
Today was the first day of a weekend-long event called The Great American PitchFest. I have to admit I've been anticipating this event since March (when I signed up for it) with a mixture of giddy excitement and bone-chilling dread. The whole giddy part comes from the fact that it will provide me an opportunity to pitch one or more of my screenplays to producers, agents, and managers and possibly submit material to them depending on their feedback. The bone chill comes from the fact that...it will provide me with an opportunity to pitch one or more of my screenplays to producers, agents, and managers and possibly submit material to them depending on their feedback. No, really. After the Screenwriting Expo last fall (which I wrote five posts about, mind you....in nauseating detail), I've looked at pitching as speed dating for screenwriters. You sit across the table from someone whose interest you desperately need, and you've only got five minutes to get it. Also like speed dating, when you step in for the first pitch, you're a mountain of nerves, but after the second or third, you really start to like it. Speaking of the Expo, that's how I heard of the PitchFest. I was sitting outside the Marriott LAX (one of the two Expo venues), chatting with fellow attendees, and one of them told me about this whole PitchFest thing that happens in Burbank every June. It remained stuck in my mind from then on, until I finally used some of my tax refund to cough up the $300 registration fee.
Another source of bone chill for the PitchFest, as with the Expo, is that I know I'll have to force myself to attend these networking shindigs they put on every night. At the Expo, this was in the form of huge parties they'd put on in the downstairs ballroom, with buffets on both sides of the room and a four-sided cash bar in the middle of the room. Both tonight and tomorrow night, according to their schedule, they have networking events. Having just gotten back from tonight's thing, I can say the difference was that there was far less in the way of both food and humans. More on that in a bit.
Oh, and one last reason I was dreading this God damned event is that it's coming so soon on the heels of my Reno trip, which was a frickin' awesome trip, don't get me wrong, but which has also left me literally sick and exhausted. For a nanosecond yesterday I seriously considered sitting this whole thing out and staying in my apartment all weekend to sneeze and cough, but I quickly put the kibosh on that cop-out plan when I remembered that my $300 was nonrefundable.
Even with the world's worst cold raging through my upper respiratory system, I had no excuse to play hooky. This event isn't within a light year of being as demanding on my time and energy, not to speak of money, as the Expo was. For starters, the Expo was held at the Marriott at LAX. If you're at all familiar with the L.A. area, then you'll know that LAX may as well be on Saturn when you live in the Valley. The drive down the 405 is downright black hole-ian. It takes forever, and when you scream in despair, no one hears you. The PitchFest, in stark contrast, is taking place at the Marriott at Burbank Airport, which is only five miles from my apartment and doesn't require my getting on a freeway. Not only that, Burbank Airport is literally a block away from where I work at Yahoo!. So I don't even have to worry about the hotel's parking, which I hear is a dozen dollars or more per day. I can park for free at work like I normally do and saunter on over, tryin' not to look too smug (don't worry, my death cold wouldn't allow that). Secondly, the PitchFest is only three days: Friday to Sunday. The Expo started with a networking party on a Wednesday night, and then went all day, from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. if you included the networking parties, Thursday through Sunday. In other words, it was four and a half days of nonstop action that left you utterly spent, both spiritually and financially. Also, I knew the first day of the PitchFest wouldn't be too demanding. As I'll go into more detail below, today consisted of a half-hour one-on-one with a script consultant, followed by one class this evening that provided a general overview of the weekend, and finally the networking party. Actually they had other stuff going on in the form of seminars and screenwriting classes, but it's stuff that really caters to beginners. I've been through too many workshops already (including USC's masters of creative writing program) to need those anymore. It wasn't worth taking time off today from work. Indeed, the only long day in these three days is going to be tomorrow, when I'll basically sit through five or six 90-minute seminars from 9 a.m. until 7 p.m., followed by yet another networking thing at 8ish. Sunday is going to be nothing but pitching, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a lunch break between. So that's not bad. You see, the way the Expo worked was to have the pitching and the seminars all jumbled together every day. So depending on who you wanted to pitch to, you could have a day of no pitching and just tons of seminars, or you could have a little of each, or you could have mostly pitching. The PitchFest keeps the whole seminar and pitch thing divided into separate days. I like that idea. That way, Sunday all I have to worry about is pitching my material. That's it. And tomorrow, all I have to do is take my notebook and soak up as much wisdom as I can from all the consultants and filmmakers who'll be speaking.
Okay. So today from 1:30-2 p.m. I was scheduled to meet with a script consultant. When I signed up for this a few months ago, I was given a huge long list of script consultants to choose from, with links to their bios and websites. I chose to meet with Dr. Linda Seger, as I've known for a while now that she's the one who invented this whole idea of a script consultant in the first place. What's a script consultant, you ask? It's basically someone who anatomizes your script from front to back. They're usually not part of a company, but work out of their home with their own business name. They almost always have a website listing scripts they've consulted on that ultimately saw the production light of day. Usually script consultants also write screenwriting how-to books and travel around and lecture.
So Dr. Seger, as I said above, is the Godmother of script consultants. Until she became a script consultant in 1981 when she was in her late thirties, there was no such thing. It's kind of an interesting story how she came to be a consultant. Like a lot of other things, it wasn't the dream career she'd planned on. A Colorado native, Lin scored a Bachelor's in English Lit from Colorado College before going on to earn no less than three (!) Masters degrees: Dramatic Arts, Religion and the Arts, and eventually Feminist Theology. After that second Masters, she went on to The Graduate Theological Union to get her Doctor of Theology (ThD) in theology and drama. Indeed, it was while writing her doctoral dissertation that Lin devised her own system for taking scripts apart, a system she eventually parlayed into her newfound career as a script consultant. She scored her doctorate in '76. The way she told it to me today during our one-on-one, she felt a lot of uncertainty about what to do with her life during the next five years. Finally she met with a career counselor who coaxed her into taking advantage of her script analysis skills by making a living off them. And so that's what she's been doing ever since. As you can tell, she's excelled at it. More than that, I learned at the Expo last fall that Linda Seger is no less than legendary in the movie and TV writing community. She's one of those people whose names other people say in hushed, reverent tones and what have you. Literally! She's written a ton of books, but not all of them examine dramatic writing. She's got this one called When Women Call the Shots, which admittedly has a lot to do with Hollywood but also takes a more macro view of women in business. And then she's got this other one called Jesus Rode a Donkey: Why Republicans Don't Have the Corner on Christ. Lin's site also goes on about how she's taught classes in "30 countries on 6 continents" and did the first "professional screenwriting seminar in both Moscow and Bulgaria..."
Bottom line? She's hot shit.
Working at Yahoo! as I do, right next door to the Marriott, I decided to wait a bit longer than normal to take my lunch break so I could use it for my scheduled time with Lin. I got there with a few minutes to spare, registered, and got the ol' lanyard as well as my consultation ticket to see Lin. I've actually been to the convention building several times since Yahoo! moved us to Burbank in June of '06. This is where we all walk over to have all-hands meetings twice a year or so. I have to admit it was kind of weird coming over here in a completely different context. There weren't nearly as many people here this afternoon. In fact, I heard only five hundred or so people would be attending the pitching sessions on Sunday. This is versus three thousand at the Expo last year. Even better, the organizers of the PitchFest worked it out so that there would be one company for every five attendees. One hundred companies for five hundred attendees is a far superior ratio to the Expo.
The registration was pretty painless. And then it was time to go see Linda. I have to admit to feeling a twinge of anxiety as I walked down the dark carpeted hallway to the meeting rooms they set aside for the consultants. You know all that stuff I mentioned about Linda above? That's all I knew about her. I'd never actually met her. If someone's got a firecracker CV, it can intimidate the hell out of you the first time you talk to them. I didn't even know what she looked like. Was she hot? That would only make it ten times worse! When I got to the table of volunteers outside the consultation rooms to give them my ticket, they told me I was ten minutes early. Which I was, don't get me wrong. It was 1:20 p.m. I was due to start at 1:30 p.m. Apparently someone was still with Linda. I said that was fine and that I was only early because it said on my ticket to show up at least ten minutes early. They said, "Oh really? Well, come back in ten minutes." So I went back down to the other end of the convention center, past the registration, where tomorrow all the vendors will be set up to hawk their wares. Right now the tables were there, but for the most part no one had claimed them. I think one or two early bird companies were there setting up. Otherwise, a few PitchFest volunteers had claimed one of the tables for the time being to finish putting together the booklets that would contain all the information, phonebook style, of the one hundred or so companies who'll be hearing pitches on Sunday.
Okay, back to the consultation table. I went back at precisely 1:30 p.m. They took my ticket, and into the consultation rooms I went. Actually, it was just one giant room with tables all along three of the walls. The wall that included the door I came through was table free except for the one with the water cooler on it. Sitting behind the tables, their backs to the wall and facing the center of the room, were the script consultants. Only three or four were in there when I came in. I'm guessing that tomorrow, when the PitchFest is in full swing, just about all the tables will be occupied. I'm also guessing they have at least one or two more big rooms for this same purpose, as that list of consultants e-mailed to me was quite long. Anywho, there was Linda Seger just finishing up with someone as I walked in. With short salt-and-pepper hair, the first thing that struck me about Linda was her smile. That is, she almost always had one stuck on her face. And it wasn't a phony smile either. You get good at spotting those after working on planet White Collar long enough. No, it hit me right away that Lin's one of those genuinely sweet, humble, unassuming gals, all the more welcoming considering her lofty status in the screenwriting community. She was dressed in a white button-down shirt and black slacks and had a stack of business cards propped up at her elbow.
With no more than thirty minutes, I didn't even bother bringing any of my five screenplays. What I did bring, however, were one-page synopses. You see, in Movie Land, oftentimes what a prospective script buyer likes to see before the actual script is a synopsis. That way, they can gauge the story's appeal without having to spend all the time reading the script itself. A synopsis generally comes in three sizes: one page, three pages, or eight to ten pages or so. Please don't confuse a synopsis with a treatment, which is a much more detailed prose version of a script that can sometimes be as long as the script itself. So I had a bunch of one-page synopses since, if anything, that's all these pitchees are going to want on Sunday. Who knows how many pitches each of them is going to have to listen to? The last thing they want is to leave the joint with so much paper weighing them down. Based on my experience at the Expo last fall, I knew that if my idea interested them at all, they would ask for no more than a one-pager. Of my five scripts, I had prepared one-pagers for the two I was most keen on pitching. I was also planning on doing one more before Sunday. Only problem was, both of my one-pagers were more like one-and-a-half-pagers. When an agent or producer asks for a one-pager, they mean exactly that. They will throw the thing out if my synopsis spills onto a second page. So I figured, let's see how much editorial work Lin can handle in a half-hour. Then I might be able to apply her feedback to the third one, which I had less than two days to prepare.
Turns out, Lin can do quite a bit in thirty minutes. I'd say it took maybe fifteen minutes for her to go over both one-and-a-half-pagers with her pen, trimming phrases here and there, sometimes entire sentences. The bottom line of her feedback was that I should focus on the A story. That is, don't include too many subplots. You've only got one page to work with, so just stick to the main thrust and ideally the prospective buyer will be interested enough in what's on that one page to ask either for a more detailed synopsis or, best of all, the script itself. I wasn't prepared for her lightning efficiency, so I spent the second fifteen minutes getting to know her. Her main service costs $1,500, which means she dissects the script and gives it back to me with something like fifteen pages of single-spaced notes. She offers cheaper services which accordingly include broader, less specific feedback. Since I have five scripts, she suggested I pick one and then use the feedback on that to apply to the other four scripts. In other words, whatever issues plagued one script would probably show up in my other work (e.g. too much dialogue, too much exposition, too episodic, etc.). To help decide which script I should choose, she recommended I get in touch with a script consultant named Heather Hale, who was actually in that room with another screenwriter at that moment. I remember Heather Hale from the Expo last year. She taught a seminar I took on screenwriting contests. She was quite a good speaker, I found, and as a bonus, she inadvertently gave me the idea for my fifth and newest script. Lin said most script consultants know each other, and that sometimes screenwriters like to get two and sometimes even three consultants in their corner to help make their scripts the best they can be. In my case, she was offering to put Heather as well as herself in my corner. Will I take them up on their offer? Maybe. I'm sort of dead president strapped as it is, with enough debt to last me into middle age. It's just hard for me to justify that kind of expense at this moment. Writing's such an subjective business, you know? Heck, Juno for Pete's sake, which just won a screenplay Oscar, was turned down by everyone and their cousin before it caught fire.
Speaking of that, one thing I asked Linda toward the end was that, when she watches a movie, does she ever find herself sort of critiquing it on the spot? Wishing she could've consulted with whoever wrote it before it went into production? She said she does that all the time, which gave both of us a laugh. Lin goes to the movies all the time. At this point, halfway into the year, the only movie she's seen that she really liked was The Visitor. That got me all psyched 'cause I just saw The Visitor a month ago or so at my local arthouse and loved it. It's also one of my faves this year. So I've got similar taste to this legendary gal. A good sign!
So that was my thirty minutes with Dr. Linda Seger. She took her machete--I mean, pen--to my synopses, gave me some ideas about how to take advantage of her services, and that was that. In other words, my brain was chockfull of ideas as I headed back over to Yahoo!. I also felt much more confident that I could churn out that third one-pager before Sunday. Indeed, meeting with Linda made me feel more confident as a writer in general. While she was brutal marking up my synopses, she was very complimentary about my story ideas.
The next event I wanted to attend wasn't until seven o'clock tonight. I could've left Yahoo! at five if I'd wanted to, but what else was I going to do? So I sat at my desk while one by one my fellow Yahoo!s trickled out to start what would no doubt be a less stressful and hectic weekend than the one I was about to experience. It was so weird being the last one on the entire floor to leave. That never happens. Indeed, since I start earlier than most, I'm usually among the first outa there.
At seven o'clock was a class called Make the Most of Your PitchFest. It was basically an overview of what would happen on Sunday. The three speakers were the three in charge of putting this whole thing on. First you've got the gal who thought of the PitchFest a few years ago. She's a Canadian gal named Signe Olynyk. I'd say she's in her thirties or so. Her right hand is this rotund thirtysomething guy from New York named Bob Schultz. Bob's hilarious. He sort of reminded me of the young John Candy we all got to know in Stripes, not just 'cause he's huge and hilarious, but also 'cause his head's buzzed to the bone. The third person was another Canadian gal named Lorene Lacey. I recognized her name from the e-mails about setting up my appointment with Linda Seger. Her official title is Director of Writer Relations. She was also the one running the registration desk earlier today. Here's the cool thing about all three of these cats: They're all writers too. In other words, they're organizing all this stuff to help themselves as well as any fellow aspiring writers who want to take advantage. That means they can directly relate to the boat we're in.
For the first part of the ninety minutes allotted for this overview, the three of them took turns talking to us about pitching, about going through the booklet of pitchees backward and forward and figuring out ahead of time who we want to pitch to. They also told us how it would all be organized. Here's the gist of it. On Sunday, the main Academy ballroom would have a hundred or so little round tables spread out, each with a pitchee sitting on one side (someone from a production company, management firm, or literary agency). Outside the ballroom would be a hundred or so numbered lines, each corresponding to a particular company. So for instance, Lionsgate might be line number forty-eight or whatever. If you want to pitch to Lionsgate, then wait in that line, and when it's your turn to go into the ballroom, proceed to the table with the number forty-eight on it and pitch to that person. See what I mean? Simple enough. And with a ratio of five pitchers for every company, all of the lines promised to be relatively short.
Lorene had the most practical advice, which I think I'll follow. She said to use little sticky notes to mark the pages that had companies I was interested in. Come pitch time on Sunday, start at the lower end or the very high numbers and then work your way toward the middle. And finally, she said that if a company likes your idea before you're done with a pitch, stop right there. Give them the one-pager or what have you and get outa there. It's such a fickle business. Lorene's exactly right that if they like your idea, but you decide to keep pitching to them anyway, they may end up changing their mind.
In general it sounds much more promising than the Expo. That thing, man. You had three thousand hopefuls pitching...to a hundred companies. That ratio's awful! And the lines weren't that organized. In fact, what lines? When your allotted time came, you'd show up in this sort of cattle pen area with your ticket, and then make your way to a chair with your number on it, and then finally out into the giant room of death.
Signe, Bob, and Lorene only needed about half of the ninety minutes to give us their overview, tips, and pointers. The rest of the time was taken up with questions. Interestingly, I noticed there were not even two hundred people in the room. Bob mentioned at one point that five hundred would be there Sunday. And on Saturday, when they have all those free classes, they were expecting upwards of twelve hundred people. Well, where the heck were they? Were they already pitching experts? Actually, I'm not sure I needed to be in this class myself, what with the pitching experience I have courtesy of the Expo. Again, it's like speed dating. If you've done it once...
At eight-thirty we all got up and adjourned to the back third or so of the ballroom, where two cash bars were set up in addition to the buffet of cheese, veggies, and nachos with various kinds of dips. Immediately I got a flashback of the networking parties from the Expo. There I was yet again tonight, beer in hand, sipping too much to make up for the fact that I knew no one and didn't have the cajones to approach anyone out of the blue. I had my cell phone with me, though, so I took a few shots that you'll see below, in addition to the ones I took this afternoon while I was killing time waiting for Linda. After a half-hour or so, I was on my second beer when I made eye contact with another loner.
Donna is an African American from Philly who now lives in Manhattan and works on Wall Street. I'd say she's in her forties or so. It's kinda cool that she's from Philly, since I grew up less than a half-hour from there. Plus, I could tell her I went to Temple and she knew what the hell I was talking about. Better than that, though, she also went to Temple U.! Is that crazy cakes or what? She's the only one I ended up talking to tonight, and she just happens to be an alum not only of the same university, but the same school (School of Communications and Theater). Although she hid it expertly, I could tell Donna felt more out of place than I did. I was the one asking most of the questions. I mean, someone's gotta do it to keep the awkward pauses from plugging the gaps. Donna graduated from Temple U. with a degree in theater. Her thing wasn't acting, mind you, but the technical behind-the-scenes stuff. From her directness and no nonsense kind of bearing, I could tell she was of that great northeastern ilk I miss so much, those people who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty and are too practical to be phony. Don't get me wrong, Donna wasn't brusque or anything. Quite the contrary, even though she had a migraine during this whole networking thing, she smiled and laughed easily. She arrived earlier that evening on a JetBlue flight from JFK. And she actually wasn't staying at this hotel but at another one about a mile down the way. The main thing she's here to pitch is a sitcom set in a post office. She's written the pilot script and what's called the bible (outlines for the first thirteen or so episodes). Donna was also at the Expo last year but didn't have a very good experience. All she had at that point was her post office idea, and it didn't really gel with anyone she pitched to. Last year was bad in general for her because her creative juices were dry. It's only been in the last six months or so that her productivity has exploded. She's already wrapped up two scripts and is well on her way with a third. In six months.
I got a third beer at one point and offered to buy her one. That was when she told me about her migraine and said she'd better not. We ended up talking until around ten o'clock or so. I left her with my card. Okay, so I only met one person, but that automatically means it wasn't a waste of time, right? That's part of how a lot of people make it in this weird biz: Networking. Who you know can change everything. Donna came across as a very confident, got-it-together gal. If her career takes off before mine, hey, I know her now!
