Pitch Festivus!

Pitch Festivus! This podcast is a replay of our Dec 8, 2022 Pitch Festivus event, where I was joined by Jacob Krueger Studio faculty members Steven Bagatourian, Keatyn Lee, Ron McCants, Karin Partin Wells and Jonathan Redding for a 3 hour pitching extravaganza!  The transcript includes my introductory lecture about how to pitch your screenplay or TV show from the event as well as pitching advice from each faculty members. To listen to the fabulous pitches of our competing students from the event, and learn even more about pitching from the faculty responses, please listen to the podcast.   Pitching is one my favorite parts about being a screenwriter. I love to talk about pitching because there was a time when pitching my screenplays was not my favorite thing to do.  There was a time when I had terrible social anxiety. And I was afraid to even talk to someone, much less pitch something that mattered to me.  I’m excited to talk to you about this, because now, I would pitch all day, every day if I could.  So even if you’re terrified of pitching, even if you’re an introvert, even if you don’t like selling, even if you don’t like talking about yourself, there are skills that you can develop that will allow you to succeed in pitching and to even enjoy it.  I want to start today by talking about some of those skills.    The most important thing to remember about pitching your screenplay: Pitching is Personal.  All pitching is personal. Pitching is relational. Pitching is about building relationships with people. That means the biggest mistake you can make when you’re pitching your script is to read your pitch! And the second biggest mistake you can make is to memorize it. If you read your pitch, if you memorize your pitch, you are actually sending a couple of unconscious signals to the person that you are pitching, that you don’t want to send.  The first message you’re unconsciously sending when you read or memorize your pitch: “you’re not that special.”  When you read or memorize you pitch, you’re visually showing the person that you’re pitching, “I’m doing the same thing for you that I’m doing for everybody else. You’re not special. I’m just here trying to sell you something. And when I leave here, I’m going to read this same pitch to somebody else and somebody else and somebody else.” The person you’re pitching is not consciously thinking that. But that’s the subconscious message that you’re sending the person.  Don’t read your pitch. If you came to this event planning to read your pitch, don’t worry. You know your pitch better than anybody in the world. And that means you can pitch it without reading or memorizing it. The second subconscious message that you’re inadvertently sending when you read or memorize a pitch for your movie or tv show: “I don’t know what I’m doing.”  If you wrote a screenplay, the truth is, you know that screenplay inside out.  If you wrote a screenplay, you’ve already done the hardest thing in the world.  And if you’ve written a good screenplay, you’ve done the hardest version of the hardest thing in the world.  That means you are the world’s authority on your pitch. There is literally nobody who knows your pitch better than you, because there is nobody who knows your project better than you.  So if you have something memorized, or if you read from something you’ve written down, you’re sending the message that you don’t actually know your script well enough to pitch it off-book, to just talk about it.  No matter how nervous you may be about pitching,