've been pitching. No, not lobbing the old horsehide around the backyard with my son, a la Field of Dreams. I mean trying to sell my ideas. Just last week, in fact, I was in two different network offices, subjecting myself to the nerve-wracking ritual of sitting on the couch, facing the director of drama development and his assistant or co-worker, describing a setting, sketching characters, telling a pilot story and generally doing the one thing a writer hates doing: talking out a story before he writes it.
But, in Hollywood, especially in television, you've got to talk it before you write it. Very few "spec" scripts are bought. Even writers brave enough to write TV pilots on spec usually find themselves pitching them verbally.
As I write these words, I'm waiting to hear whether one or both or neither of these ideas will proceed to the next phase—writing a script for money.
And, of course, the very fact that I'm waiting means they probably won't.
This isn't just pessimism, or some bizarre form of emotional self-protection. I'm a cheerful person. I'm also a realist. This happens to be one of the ugly truths of pitching: Your success or failure is determined before you walk in the room.
A pitcher's pre-game jitters
It's the last thing you want to hear, of course. It's bad enough that you have to do all this work, that you have to grovel to get a meeting in the first place. (I'm assuming that you aren't John Wells, Dick Wolf, David E. Kelley or any other member of the television show-runner elite who are in the exquisitely luxurious position of knowing the networks need you more than you need them.) You can't blame the networks. They have a finite number of slots to fill on their drama schedules. A slightly larger but still finite number of pilots which will be filmed in the New Year. A larger yet but still finite number of scripts to be commissioned for possible filming.
And, yet, they face an apparently infinite number of people who want to pitch ideas. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many days in "pitch season," which runs, by the way, from the post-Cannes Film Festival vacation and recovery—say, early July— to around the end of September.
Assuming you've been lucky enough to get a meeting, you have to shave, dress properly and talk your way past the guard at the gate (no matter how many times the network executive's assistant phones ahead for a drive-on pass, your name always comes out garbled. "No, there's no 7 in Cassutt.")
Then you have to find the office—sometimes a bit of a trick. And wait.
Then comes the trickiest maneuver of all. Once your exec has greeted you, and you are heading for the couch, you have to make the Segue. Sometimes writers will bring their agents along to a pitch just so the agent can take responsibility for that critical transition from small talk about the weather, about that stupid ending on Planet of the Apes, about the Dodgers, about whether or not we've ever worked on a project before, to the business. ("Well, as you know, Michael here has a terrific idea that would be just right for that 8 p.m. Saturday night slot—")
The last time I pitched I was on my own, but lucky: the exec happened to have a television playing in his office. And what was on the screen happened to have some slight relevance to the concept I was there to pitch.
Segue.
Then you're on. You, the writer, used to working alone in a room, have to become a performer. A stand-up comic, even if you're sitting down. A thespian.
Let's face it, you're auditioning.
You not only have to cover your material, you have to be aware—as aware as any actor on stage—of your audience. Is the exec laughing at the right place? Does she seem engaged—leaning forward, nodding? Wait, was that a sigh? Is he bored?
It's challenging.
Now, some writers happen to be great at public speaking ... performing ... pitching. Harlan Ellison, in my experience, is the Cy Young of pitching. (He once prerecorded his pitch, complete with music, and then, to save himself the trouble we've described above, sent in the tape. Sold the project, too.) If you're not Harlan, you need something else.
Well, there is the Perfect Pitch.
A perfect pitch is not impossible
I recently discovered that in some internet FAQ I am credited with a Perfect Pitch. Not one I sold, mind you, just one I supposedly used. I'm here to confess that it didn't originate with me ... I merely heard it, and passed it on.
But it goes exactly like this: "He's a chimp, she's the Pope ... they're cops." Ridiculous, yes. But effective. This is the shorthand of the television and film business, in which every new concept is best understood with reference to the old.
"He's human, he's an alien—they're cops." (Alien Nation.)
Gene Roddenberry. "It's Wagon Train to the stars." As I recall, that one worked. In fact, it worked so well that we remember the long-running, but now hopelessly outré, Wagon Train primarily because of its association with Star Trek.
The Perfect Pitch allows your director of drama development to relay your concept perfectly to his boss—the person who can say "yes."
Ultimately, though, even the Perfect Pitch is not as important as the pre-pitch maneuvering. The reputation you bring into that office with you.
George Lucas, for example, was not known for his ability to pitch. I have heard that his presentation for The Star Wars back around 1973 was not inspiring. But he had just directed the single most profitable motion picture in Hollywood history, American Graffiti, and the execs were predisposed to pay him to develop his next project no matter how weird it sounded.
How far can reputation take you? How can it ease the pitch process? A writer I used to know created a series for NBC that happened to become one of the season's hot new properties. Naturally, that network, and, indeed, every network, wanted the writer's next project.
So when the time came, the writer had his agent drive him over to the NBC offices on Alameda Street in Burbank. He had the agent park in a 10-minute zone in front. "Wait," he said. "This won't be long."
Ten minutes later he was back, project sold. I'm dead certain he didn't have a Perfect Pitch. From what I remember of the writer, he probably didn't even have a concept, just some vague notion that his next show would deal with, uh, lawyers. Yeah, that's it.
You can't resent a writer in that position. You just have to hope that someday it's you.
Now, excuse me, I have to resume waiting for the telephone to ring ...
Michael Cassutt is currently writing scripts for Fox TV and a couple of other places. Those were pitches that worked. His novel, Red Moon, will be reprinted in paperback by Tor in January.
