The Art of Pitching

Your pitch can make or break your TV series.

You have a great idea for a movie or television series? That was easy. The hard part is pitching your idea. The art of pitching is a necessary skill one must develop if he or she wants to survive in Hollywood. Most executives have a very short attention span meaning you have only a minute or two before the executive loses interest. This is why the art of pitching is also known as “the currency of Hollywood”.

How do you start out a pitch? Start out with your hook. What will cause the viewer to be interested in your show?  It needs to contain the “what if” question. Most pitches consist of one sentence, and no more than two sentences. The pitch for The Bourne Identity was “a man with amnesia discovers he is a governmental assassin who has been targeted for death by the organization that employs him”.  This is not as easy as it sounds. Summarizing your movie or television series idea in a few sentences can be extremely difficult even for most professional writers. Most expert pitches are revised several times before they are pitched to executives.

Screenwriter Blake Snyder recommended walking up to strangers and pitching to them your idea. He said to repeat this over and over until you have perfected the pitch. This method will help in three ways. First, it will help you to prefect your pitch. Second, you will know what works and what does not work. Lastly, it will give you the confidence to pitch in front of executives.

No matter what method you use to perfect your pitch, you need the executives to take interest in order to start the process of bringing your idea to the big or small screen. Thus, the pitch is the Hollywood currency you need to survive in this industry.