Play On
I’ve seriously been re-contemplating the movie The Player, mainly because I have to pitch my final project, but also because I’m about to graduate from my writing program and enter the workforce. For those who don’t know, a “pitch” is what screenwriters, agents, and producers do to sell their ideas. It’s like a cross between an audition monologue and a ten-minute business presentation. You can use props, costumes, music, and often notes on your lap, but it all comes down to enthusiasm and what particular goods you have to offer them. The people in the room with you, however, are the gatekeepers of the industry. They can be anyone from low-level executives to studio heads.
In fact, I think one of the major components of any writing program should be learning how to pitch. It’s a vastly different practice from how people in other businesses work the room, and further separates writers from other types of careerists. Not only that, there are no inherent legal rights attached to a pitch because, at the end of the day, it’s almost completely intangible (and often spur of the moment, as in Matt Groening coming up with The Simpsons on a piece of paper after his numerous other ideas were summarily rejected by producers). A pitch is basically an idea; and you can’t copyright an idea. Meanwhile, other people can steal and take credit for them, for example, as in the movie Big Fat Liar, which is about a high schooler who finds his short story ripped off by an unscrupulous Hollywood executive. If writers were as good at pranking as that one kid, fewer real battle stories about ideas being plagiarized would exist.
I wasn’t completely aware of The Player, though, until I entered graduate school and we watched the first ten minutes in class last year. For what it’s worth, the opening features real (read: good) Hollywood screenwriters including Buck Henry (The Graduate), Patricia Resnick (9 to 5), and Joan Tewkesbury (Nashville) being prompted by their director to give fake (read: bad) pitches for movies that will never be made to actors playing studio executives. To any film or writing major, this is comparable to being shown that iconic scene in The Paper Chase where law professor John Houseman tells incumbent law students to look to their left, and then look to their right, since one of those people will not make it to the next year (and, if you’re a Mr. Show fan, the other one will end up with an apple butter farm). Everyone in that position has to see it, because it almost telegraphs, “THIS IS A GLIMPSE OF YOUR TERRIFYING POSSIBLE FUTURE.” Of course, all of this is fiction, but it’s also grounded in a pretty real world. While I don’t think Hollywood would ever screw around with The Graduate, didn’t it come kind of close with Rumor Has It? Plus any scene scored to Thomas Newman’s music has the power to make an awkward social encounter feel more like a rumble in the jungle (i.e. American Beauty).
The Player is a pitch-black, showbiz-insider comedy that nevertheless gets mostly negative user reviews on Netflix, where the users complain about how the movie is way too Inside Baseball for them to not feel outside of the joke. I would argue, though, that The Player telegraphs the same ideas we deal with in our everyday lives; it just happens to be about a weird, wonderful motion picture business that, in the movie’s worldview, places incompetent rational thinkers at the top and creative idea-makers at the bottom of its work totem pole. It isn’t meant as a knock on the Hollywood power system. It’s really a love letter to the work that writers do. The universal concepts of making embarrassing first impressions in front of big stars and power captains, being replaced by younger, better, and more attractive up-and-comers, wanting something so bad you would kill for it, and dealing with the crippling guilt of actually having done a reprehensible thing are grounded in much wider, and more personal emotions. But I’m always hesitant to recommend The Player. I’ve shown it to non-showbiz people, and they’ve responded, “Huh?”
I was completely unaware, though, that The Player is essentially Borat for screenwriters. In fact, there was no real “script”; I was only told recently that all of the dialogue was improvised by the actors! Intentionally! And those who were playing producers, executives, and studio heads, especially, were prompted by the director, Robert Altman, to come up with embarrassing and cruel things to say to the real-life (some uncredited) personalities who were being ambushed by the film crew in their day-to-day lives, from Anjelica Huston and John Cusack to Burt Reynolds and Cher. I might as well have been told that Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny didn’t exist at that point in time. It certainly re-colored my perspective on the opening scene, which was further confirmed as being improvised by the writers and by Henry himself in And Here’s the Kicker. Of course, great cringe comedy like that can’t be written beforehand…or, can it? Really, really!
I won’t spoil the ending, but it doesn’t exactly reaffirm one’s faith in the creative power of the movies. If anything, it reaffirms that writers are inherently good people who don’t actually commit murder, they just write really, really threatening letters. And it inspired the makers of Tropic Thunder to find an entirely new treasure trove of reloaded, 21st-century movie clichés! But don’t take my word for it: Here’s a fan-created music video, COPIOUS with spoilers, paying tribute to the movie! Like Rescue Me, it proves that scoring anything to The Black Keys rules. Also, it’s Lovett-heavy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXamO2WKMRk&feature=related.
(By the way, I’m a shameless Altman fangirl, and I HIGHLY recommend his follow-up to The Player, Short Cuts. If you have three hours to spare, and you like jazz, bright colors, and talky dialogue, you might not be disappointed. Then again, most people I recommended it to hated it.)
So what goes into the pitch? What gets left out? Suffice it to say, I had an epipha-what in the supermarket earlier this week when I realized that my movie isn’t the anti-Sex & the City: It’s I Love You, Man with girls. And then I had to rewrite my pitch yet again. And I rewrote it again. And I still wasn’t happy with it. And I doodled all over the notes. For the third time in two days.
I rehearsed. I read aloud from the notes. I read it without the notes. I read it to Peanut Butter Jelly Brian (my favorite stuffed toy). I heard a lot of knocking in the hallway, felt awkward, up and quit, and ran to the coffee shop. I still have not timed my pitch. I came back from the gym around 6:00 and noticed the microwave timer was set for ten minutes. I had not pressed START.
I did laundry. Washed delicates. More than usual. I wrote query letters to agents, managers, and production companies promoting this screenplay. I Googled writers and representation similar to my own, noticed the names of people I had started out with in this business as clients, tried not to feel jealous and depressed, and finally felt really jealous and depressed. I spent two hours refining the logline (a one-sentence description) of the same script. I wondered if my plot points and comic setpieces were all that. And then I realized that I should have used that time to work on the pitch.
It’s been three days since I started writing out the pitch, and I still don’t know what the pitch is. I might have even considered changing the title to Habeas Corpus (the fake movie that ultimately gets made in The Player) for shits and giggles just to see if anyone would notice on Tuesday.
Finally, I did something I hadn’t done in maybe ten years. I bought a skirt. I seriously contemplated wearing it on the day of my pitch so people could be distracted from what I say.
And I still haven’t pressed START.
Writing is a pretty idiosyncratic business, built on a mass of contradictions and dependent on a skill set most professions wouldn’t even register as minor requirements. We have to be aggressive self-promoters and networkers who can back up their own individual sense of raw talent. In this business, any sense of entitlement goes out the door. We have to be nice, but also willing to agree, compromise, and deal. Some insiders call entertainment “the business of failure” and, while I don’t necessarily believe it, I can see the working precedent. Doctors, who deal with life and death on a regular basis, at least seem to have more secure futures. Most of us, at this point in the game, are just trying really, really hard to get noticed.
Those threatening letters don’t sound as bad now. Just kidding, but you know the point I’m trying to convey. Does pursuing a career as a writer seem ridiculous? Maybe, but then you take a look at the pitching process, and realize that it’s our way of getting in a position where we can put food on the table. Writing can be maddening. It often leads to procrastination, which can lead to, well, not writing. Without the script, there’s no pitch, and, without the pitch, there’s no way a producer can even hire us. It’s a job interview, except no one asks us questions before we speak.
There are entire classes, seminars, and courses devoted to pitching, not to mention conventions, books, and DVDs by writing gurus who specialize in the art of the pitch, rather than actually writing a script. As a point of comparison, I used to be a singer, and I can barely think of more than one or two voice or music classes for each respective genre. Would any facet of the artist’s profession seem as worthy of such undivided attention if there weren’t so many particular rules?
And then there’s the criticism. Writers need to be able to take hints, and always deal with high stakes when it comes to plot structure. But artists sometimes can’t take criticism lightly. Even when we rehearse pitches in class, there are lots of complaints for every compliment, whether it’s “It was too long,” or “You took too much time to get to the story,” or “You left out details.” A friend of mine pitched to a Hollywood producer cold as part of a workshop. It was an idea he recently came up with, rather than a full final draft script he had already written. And he bombed.
Indeed, this is why some writers make their own films by going the indie film route, or want to win contests, or participate in workshops. Because the big pitch happens after the fact; but then, there are more people on higher levels to pitch to, just like the proverbial chicken and the egg.
So, I rehearsed. Each time, I came up short by about one or two minutes. I think I speak too fast but, at the same time, I want to convey a sense of enthusiasm for what I’m actually pitching. If I didn’t love it in the first place, I wouldn’t have written it. So, I struggled to make eye contact with the mirror, sit up straight, and not over-rely on notes. Drunk, screaming teenagers having Memorial Day weekend parties out in the hallway certainly didn’t help my self-conscious nerves.
But it felt…calming. I remember preparing audition songs and monologues and being too nerve-wracked to perform, to the point where it always felt like an out-of-body experience. I started to hate performing, and knew that I would have to do it again no matter how tenacious I was toward quitting. I never really talk about it, but I also developed about a decade of secret stage fright toward singing in public, knowing that I wanted to do it again, despite how much I talked down to myself about my singing.
I can live without doing another audition monologue for the rest of my life, but my anxiety from singing in public has never totally vanished with age. I just hadn’t completely given up on ending the fear. A pitch may be a monologue, but it feels more like an audition song. Like, if you miss one note, you feel like you’re being judged. How different is pitching a screenplay from auditioning for a musical? You may write these words first, but the stakes feel the same as any fictional plot. The inherent feeling of dread creeps in somehow. The nerves tend to take control, and the final product feels wrong. And, if you’re a non-singer, it can feel a million times worse.
So, it was extremely telling this week when, on two separate occasions, people caught me singing: A person I knew, and a complete stranger who was coming to inspect my apartment. I didn’t blush or choke on my words like the last time (see: “A Character Actress…”). I…sang and didn’t even feel ashamed at the sound of my own voice. I didn’t care how other people thought of it. In the past, you would think I had arrived naked and pissed on the floor from how I reacted.
I say, screw it! If my pitch is too short, then I am fully prepared to stall them and sing a few bars.
What do you think?