How-To H’wood: Dark Arts of Film Pitching
Great stories aren’t enough. Fear, charm and manipulation decide what gets made
Welcome back to How-To Hollywood, an ongoing series where I solve the great issues surrounding the most labyrinthine and treacherous of industries. Previous how-tos include how to survive on location, ask a favor, make a friend and go to lunch.
Of all the necessary tasks in Hollywood, pitching is perhaps the most dreaded yet unavoidable.
Everybody pitches someone. Writers pitch producers, producers pitch billionaires, directors pitch actors, everyone pitches studios.
The literature on “How to Improve Your Pitch” is as vast and deep as the Santa Monica Bay itself. Google “How to Pitch a Screenplay,” and you’ll find books, blog posts, podcasts, TikTok videos, webisodes, MasterClasses, microdramas and of course, AI summaries devoted to the topic.
The various tracts no doubt offer invaluable advice on how to shape your story and your storytelling for maximum effect when facing the ultimate jury of green-light-wielding studio executives. And a studio executive has a studio chief and ultimately, shareholders to bring on board. What they don’t tell you is how to survive the meeting. The pre-pitch banter is important warm-up time, but let it run on too long, and it signals you are too available, thus too little in demand elsewhere. How do you get through those tense, awful moments when your fate hangs in the balance?
While maximizing your mid-act climaxes and bringing to life the quirks of your protagonist is all well and good, this isn’t a debate at the Oxford Union. You don’t get points for arguing in intellectual circles around your opponent. This is Hollywood, where the earth belongs to those who most effectively wield fear.
When you go to pitch, you enter the arena, and storytelling is the shadow play. The real action lies in the game of manipulation underneath. Having a good arc is terrific; knowing how to use charm, aggression, menace and seduction are the tools that will get your pitch a greenlight, get a star to sign on or get a dentist from Detroit to write a check.
Manipulation, however, is a subtle and fluid art. More important than the big sweeping rules are the myriad of signposts and maneuvers to keep in your arsenal that will bend your targets to your will.
More important than someone liking your script is them fearing that someone else will like it if they pass.
“There’s no way I can hear a pitch right now.”
Looking at Robert Altman’s The Player — and especially that scene above where screenwriters played by Richard E. Grant and Dean Stockwell, pitch Tim Robbins’ desperate studio executive on their self-mythologized hot project — you can feel like everything is as it’s always been. Studios are eternally on the hunt for the next hot thing, and pitches can be where they find it.
Here then are 22 maxims and bits of wisdom for surviving and thriving in the pitching arena, which happens every step of the way in a movie getting made (writers pitching directors, directors pitching talent, producers pitching studios and so on), in the words of those who have fought and often died there:
