Wall of Paul

For roughly a decade of my life - and God recently appeared to me in a dream to tell me I’m not getting the years back - I wrote and tried to sell screenplays to major motion picture studios. Theoretically, you do this is via “pitches” to studio development people, who reportedly like movies, but not so much that they want to risk their jobs by convincing the studio to actually make one.

These people do business in both New York and Los Angeles, and they have a lot of bottled water in a refrigerator in the other room. They will offer you some of the water. By all means, accept it, because it’s the only thing you’re likely to get out of them…unless you can figure out some reason to sue.

Generally speaking, a “pitch” is when you sit down in an office with somebody you don’t know, then try to get them interested in a story they can’t quite envision. Then they get a phone call and you have to cool it for ten minutes while they talk about something else with another person. Before the call is over, they might even shout a little. Then they get off the phone and can’t remember what you’ve said, but they don’t have time to start over again, so you pick up the story in the middle. Eventually you leave. A year later, you’re waiting for the 6 Train, and you notice the person’s name on a poster for a movie that might as well be called “Beverly Hills Fart Squad.”

I pitched scripts for 8 or 9 years - on both coasts, but mostly here in New York - and it nearly drove me out of my gourd. I suppose I had a bit of success with two or three producers, if you define success as writing un-produced screenplays for money. A great many people in the film industry define it exactly that way, which is why they have no problem whatsoever being the 11th person to rewrite that Gomer Pyle movie that Jim Carrey pretended he might attach himself to 15 years ago.

If, on the other hand, you think success means actually getting a movie made from your own screenplay, I didn’t do so well.

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The first thing you have to understand if you want to try to break into screenwriting is that people who can’t write screenplays (i.e. the people who are talking to you because they need to hire a screenwriter) are the greatest writers on earth. They have scores of remarkable narratives and provocative characters in their heads, little money-minting sugarplums just waiting to be plucked and packaged.

The problem is, they can't locate the secret brain-compartment where they've placed these brilliant ideas, so you have to make it seem like you can tell them what they would write, if only they could determine what they wish they were thinking...and if only they could write. This process is a lot like trying to sculpt Jell-O.

A great deal of “what iffing” goes on during pitches, as in your saying, “It’s a romantic comedy about a jazz critic who’s lonely because he’s a little too eccentric for most women, but finds himself falling in love with a sarcastic girl who moves in next door,” followed by the person you’re pitching the script to saying, “What if it turns out she’s a secret agent?”

My problem - and this was pivotal - was that I normally responded to these suggestions with something like, “Yeah. ‘What if?’ That’s not what happens, but, ‘What if?’” What you’re actually supposed to say is, “Hmmm. A secret agent. That’s very cool. Wow. That really opens the whole thing up. It’s sort of like ‘Annie Hall’ crossed with (name a movie that has a secret agent in it.)”

Don’t think, however, that the development person will be more interested if you follow this line of thought for the rest of the pitch. They know as well as you do that they pulled the whole secret agent thing out of thin air, or maybe they saw it in some old movie on TV over the weekend. But they have to suggest something in order to look “creative,” so they say, “What if it turns out she’s a secret agent?” They could just as easily say, “What if she’s a radioactive super hero?” or “What if I take this pen I’m holding and jab it straight into your eye?” They don’t like movies with secret agents in them anyway.

This kind of thing goes on continually, and is only the first time you’ll encounter it in your wondrous adventure as a screenwriter. If, by some act of God, you actually get hired to write a script, so many people will be tossing inane ideas your way, you’ll feel like you’re flying a jumbo jet while various passengers put their hands over your eyes and grab at the controls.

Oh, yeah— if you’re pitching directly to a producer, as opposed to a well-coiffed underling, try not to look at the wall during the pitch. Terrible things can be found on the wall. Producers aren’t allowed to admit they’ve been involved in movies that can quite accurately be described as “pieces of shit,” so they hang posters for the movies they’ve brought to fruition, regardless of how embarrassing they may be. Honest to God, sometimes it would be less awkward if they actually framed their own feces.

For instance, you might be trying to interest someone in an Altman-esque black comedy set at a church picnic in 1937, only to glance up in the middle of your pitch and see that the person you’re talking to produced “License to Drive.”

Understand that when you produce a movie, you spend a year or so of your life nurturing the product from its inception, helping to hone the screenplay, hiring the director, gathering a marketable cast, and actually filming the thing, all the while sweating a mind-numbing array of niggling details.

So if someone produced “License to Drive,” they meant to produce it. They didn’t do it by accident. And, needless to say, the phrase “Altman-esque” doesn’t carry much weight with a person who chose to conduct 1987 in close collaboration with Kirk Cameron.

If this all sounds a little discouraging, don’t you worry, you. Every development person loves you like you're Sally Field. I can count on one hand the number of pitch meetings I had, even the ones that felt like the breakup of a bad relationship, that didn’t end with the person on the other side of the desk saying, “I really want to work with you.”

It got to the point where I had to fight a smirk when they said it. "I really want to work with you" is film industry code for, “Think up something else that means a lot to you, and we’ll repeat this sad charade in the near future. After all, I have an office and stacks of bottled water. And ‘Beverly Hills Fart Squad II’ doesn’t start shooting for another five months.”

Just remember that, as you read this, there's a sparkling new poster for "The Love Guru" hanging in someone's office.

Paul Tatara