I noted that FTXEvents is putting on Pitchmarket 2010 over the March 6-7 weekend. I looked over the roster of “decision makers” and figured that maybe it was time for me to throw out some more pitches.

While there isn’t a great track record (or any record?) for writers getting hauled up from the huddled masses at any of these events- it is a chance to meet people that are hard to get to outside of these things.

Keep in mind that most of the people coming to these events are a little lower on the totem pole than they are made out to be. That isn’t to say they are not moving up, just that it is often considered a way to give baby agents and assistants who are about to become development executives a chance to be barraged by pitches- a sort of baptism by fire if you will. While they usually (not always mind you) do not have the power to give even a tentative “yes” to anything, they can take scripts to those who can. Also, their career trajectory is in the direction of that power and it certainly won’t hurt to get onto their radar.

Also, from what I hear; the further the pitches are from Hollywood, the better the calibre of people you will be pitching to. You see, when it is in their own city, there isn’t much of a draw for those higher up the hierarchy so they send the assistants… when they are offered plane tickets to a another city and are put up in a hotel, it suddenly becomes more attractive. This one is in my backyard… 2000 kilometres from Los Angeles.

Although the TSA seems bound and determined to make travelling by air as horrible an experience as possible- so the attraction of a plane ticket is subject to change.

All said, I certainly could use practice pitching my work and who knows, someone may love an idea so much that they have no choice but to champion it.

Are you seeing a pattern in the sessions I signed up for? Look closely now, it is a subtle one… it is an emphasis on pushing past the writing part. Like Mr. Stefanik said, 70,000 scripts are written every year- and even if that is an exaggeration, and even if most are pretty crappy… that is still a lot of straw to hide your needle. Producing something yourself is one way to stand out from the crowd. On top of that it will make you a better writer. When you have to take your words and shoot them, you yourself will find a lot of the problems in your script that would glare out at those who have made a film. Your next film will be all the better for it, I know mine will be.
It is one when a teacher or book tells you that something should be avoided when writing a script, it is another thing entirely to be sitting on set at three in the morning with a cast and crew waiting for you to fix that “something” you should have avoided. You won’t make that mistake again.
Now on to the session in question – to which I was eight minutes late. Bad form Mr. Johnson.
Marc and Elaine Zicree have a website for their own projects and another at Supermentors for their consulting services. In this session, Marc does most of the talking and he starts us off with an example of how to do it right. The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne was a shoe string self starter where Gavin Scott got $40 million dollars after showing the demo tape that they had shot.
He talked about Chis (Wyatt I’m guessing), a friend of his, who originated Napoleon Dynamite as a short film which he used to raise $350,000 to make the feature which went on to make over $100 million. While there is no arguing with the bottom line, I gotta say that I wasn’t particularly a fan of this film. A few jokes worked for me but most of it fell pretty flat. It would probably be a lot funnier if I had watched it while wasted but that doesn’t interest me. I would like to see the short though, just to see what talked people out of $350,000.
He then went into an example of how to do it wrong. A friend of his had made a short that got a lot of favorable coverage on the festival circuit. They had wanted to get some interest and use it to develop the short into a feature. They got the interest but didn’t have a full script ready for the push to the feature. The mistake was starting to push the short before they were ready to take advantage of any interest.
He also said that the time has past where people are impressed with you just for having done something, it has to be done well.
I feel that I didn’t give my actors enough direction during my shoot and it suffered for that. Then again we may have different ideas of “done well”, he uses Startrek: New Voyages as an example. The first episode of this fan made series was downloaded six million times and the second episode was downloaded 20 million times. That is all well and good but I’ve seen the first episode and it was rather bad. The set decoration and special effects were as good as you would expect from a true fans dedicated efforts… but the content they originated was sorely lacking. The writing and acting just wasn’t good enough to get any attention if it weren’t for the Star Trek connection and the huge base of Trekkers out there.
This all adds up to the fact that “good” is a very relative assessment here and what some people see as hilarious will leave some others cold. While a technically illiterate person may see a particular special effect and find it acceptable, the guy sitting next to them who has actually done some work with special effects may find the show unwatchable. Humor is even tougher to pin down with some people thinking that My Name is Earl is nowhere near as funny as Joey… and me wondering “what kind of bad drugs did you ingest?”. So I’m thinking that whatever you do, some people will find it to be unmitigated crap while the guy down the hall might see it as untapped gold.
Another thing he had to say was that a trailer wasn’t as good a selling tool as it has been hyped to be. It may get some interest but it doesn’t show if you can tell a story or not. He suggested that you take two or three scenes from the completed script and rework them to have a beginning, middle and an end… make a short film out of it. This can be used as a selling tool, sent out to the festivals or even licensed to one of the few places that pay for short films.
But he is also adamant that the short can’t tell the whole story or people feel that they’ve seen it all and don’t have a strong desire to put money into making the full show.
He showed a bit of Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade, the short that got Billy Bob a greenlight for Sling Blade. That is all great but how many of us can get J.T. Walsh and Molly Ringwald to step up for our short film? That might give a person a slight little leg up on the competition. Yeah, maybe. (where is that sarcasm font, I know it’s here somewhere?)
He insists that it isn’t all that hard to attach a name actor and that even signings at conventions give you a chance to get the face time and talk to the people. Hand them a DVD of something that you’ve done and tell them that you would like to work with them… just make sure that it looks like Oscar bait if you want to up your odds.
I really think that James Marsters would be great as the lead in The Club, the boxing club/organized crime series I’m developing… I wonder how tough it would be to get the man’s interest? He is in Vancouver shooting on Smallville and there are rumors of him becoming a regular so he might be a “local” for another year or so. I suppose it shouldn’t do much harm to try eh?
Next up Marc showed us the long trailer/incomplete short film Grayson from John Fiorella‘s Untamed Cinema – and I actually hadn’t seen this one before. It was really well done for the limited personal resources the guy had… it was made that good because of the contacts he had and their resources. The acting was good enough and the cinematography was as good as anything from the previous Batman films. Another good fan film he didn’t show was Batman: Dead End.
The examples he showed and my work on Ragnarok… it all reinforces my thinking that it is the writing and the acting that defines success or failure. There was a few missteps I made in the writing, add that to me not give the actors good enough direction – and the show suffered for it. Since it was my first attempt and I really over-reached on it… let’s just say that my next project will be far better for the experience.
Marc Zucree has written Magic Time, a three book series about a young lawyer that he is bringing around to a television series. The lawyer is raising his twelve year old sister and at the beginning she is transformed into a magical creature and taken away from him. I gotta say that there would be some overlap between his Magic Time and my Ragnarok… what with the return of magic to the world. I knew nothing about the books or series until this session and he was working on it long before Ragnarok was developed so any overlap would be strictly due to a shared cultural mythology and coincidence. Maybe I should pitch myself to him as a staff writer? 
I was impressed enough by this session that I’m thinking that I should get Supermentors to look over my rough cut for the Ragnarok pilot and try to get an impartial critique to see if it is worth the weeks of effort it would take to polish it… or if I should just cut my losses, upload the show as is, and move on to the next project. The folks that volunteered on the shoot really deserve their copy before too much more time has passed.