Writing Movies For Fun And Profit! (4 page)

But you will never become a great screenwriter or write a great screenplay by rewriting the same script over and over again. This brings us back to a theme we’re going to hit a lot:

Always be writing.
Always be writing
.

Always be writing
.

Always be working on a new script. There are more reasons to always be writing a new script than there are In-N-Out Burgers in the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area. (See
Chapter 22
, “Living in Los Angeles.”)

1. If your first script doesn’t sell, you NEED to have another one so that maybe
it
will sell, instead.

2. If your first script does sell, then you NEED to have another one so that maybe it will sell
too
. After a studio reads your script, whether they buy it or not, the next thing they’re going to say to you is—“So what’s next?”

3. If you’re looking for representation, they may not like the first thing you wrote; you should have more than one script.

4. If you’re looking for representation and they LOVE your first script, they need to know you’re not a one-hit wonder. An agent once told us, “I don’t represent scripts. I represent writers.” Have a bunch of scripts.

5.
THIS ONE IS THE BIG ONE
: You get better at something only by doing it over and over. Do it constantly. Do it maniacally.

If you want to be a painter, a boxer, or race professional racing midgets, the only way to get better at it is by doing it every day, for many hours a day, with great discipline, for years and years.

People make the mistake of thinking that their first script is going to be great.
It won’t be
. They think that they are born with a style and that style will be PERFECTED
before
they’ve ever even written “FADE IN.” It
won’t
be. Your style will develop. It will grow. You will get better. Your style will change.

Don’t believe us?

Try this little experiment!

(It will take you a year, maybe two—
but you HAVE to do it
.)

STEP ONE: Write a screenplay. Then read it. Then rewrite it. Keep rewriting it until it is the GREATEST SCREENPLAY IN HISTORY.

REPEAT with screenplay 2. Keep rewriting it until it is the GREATEST SCREENPLAY IN HISTORY.

REPEAT with screenplay 3.

Now—

Go back and reread SCREENPLAY 1. Go, do it. We’ll wait.

• • •

• • •

Did you go back and read your first screenplay? It
sucks
, right?

See—you’ve learned a TON by writing a bunch of screenplays!

Rule 3: You don’t become a good writer by thinking about it. You don’t get better by talking about it. You get better by writing.

If your brilliant screenplay isn’t selling—learn from your mistakes, and WRITE ANOTHER ONE.

Now—stop reading this book, and GO WRITE ON YOUR SPEC. Then come back and read the next chapter. It’s terrific!

Knowing how to
pitch
your movie is the only thing standing between you and piles of money up to your armpits. Money that can be traded for jet skis, piñatas, and hot fudge sundaes served off the bare bottoms of Brazil’s most attractive models. So PAY ATTENTION. These few simple steps will show you how to pitch properly. Take notes,
this is important!
(Just kidding about the notes, we already wrote it all down for you—just rip these pages out of the book and
stick to them
. Yes, even if you’re in a bookstore and haven’t purchased this book, YOU SHOULD STILL RIP THESE PAGES OUT AND KEEP THEM HANDY!)

For the perfect pitch, your movie needs two things:

1. A new idea that is easy to describe in terms of OTHER SUCCESSFUL FILMS.

Like we’ve said, be original, but don’t reinvent the wheel. Invoking the name of a film that has MADE A TON OF MONEY in your pitch is never a bad thing in Hollywood. For example: “It’s
Die Hard
meets
Home Alone
— set at a Chuck E. Cheese. PG. But instead of Bruce Willis to the rescue, it’s an eight-year-old. And Hans Gruber is an animatronic raccoon gone haywire.” (This idea will probably sell, and it’s yours free with the purchase of this book.)

2. The main character must be the kind of flawed-but-amazing character a
MOVIE STAR wants to play
.

Remember: only a movie star or studio head can get your movie greenlit. There are six or seven studio heads in the entire world and fifteen to twenty movie stars. So shoot for a movie star, and your odds of getting your pitch made into a film will be three times as good. If a movie star wants to make your movie, the studio head will hop on board immediately. All you can do once a star is attached is to pray that he doesn’t
accidentally pick up a transvestite prostitute in front of a news crew on his way home
. Or star in
Gigli
. It happens, even to the best of us.

A flawed-but-amazing character should be something like: “GREG (36) is the only dad in the all-moms CARPOOL. Despite his amazingly good looks, he’s shy around women.
He’s too caught up in his work to notice that he’s missing his son DANNY (7), growing up before his eyes
.” Like it or not, the example that studio heads throw at us ALL THE TIME is
Liar Liar
. Jim Carrey is a TOTALLY LIKABLE, PERFECT FATHER with ONE FLAW: he lies.

(FEEL FREE TO USE THIS CHARACTER, “GREG,” COMPLIMENTS OF THE AUTHORS, WITH YOUR PURCHASE OF THIS BOOK.)

And now the Art of the Pitch. In a few rules:

1. Dress well.

DO NOT show up at a pitch in a Cabo Wabo T-shirt and flip-flops. The way you look at a pitch should inspire confidence. It should say to the buyer: “I don’t write as a hobby,
I write as a profession
.”

Left: Sammy Hagar in a Cabo Wabo T-shirt:
No
.

Right: William Faulkner: Yes.

2. Be able to describe your movie in one sentence.

For example: “It’s an animated version of
The Commitments
with Santa’s reindeer, showing how the sleigh-pulling team got together for the first time.” (You can’t have that one. Universal owns that one.)

3. Keep your pitch short.

NO JOKE. Keep it short. Do not waste their time. Keep your pitch to under fifteen minutes. If possible, to around twelve or thirteen minutes. Most humans, especially those in the movie industry, have very short attention spans. Don’t abuse them. Keep it short, and let them ask questions afterward.

4. Act out as much as you can.

Don’t be afraid to actually play the characters.

Take an improvisation or acting class to hone your skills for pitching. Make your pitch
a performance
. It’s more fun for you and them—and it’s also the clearest way to tell the story. It’s the way we’re most accustomed to
hearing
stories told—we’re used to hearing them performed. Don’t be shy. This is your one chance. Play every character and moment to the hilt—
but do not violate number 3
.

5. Practice your pitch.

Out loud
. Say the pitch out loud over and over again, until you’re so relaxed telling it that you could tell it on a Tilt-A-Whirl.
Practice the pitch
. Saying it out loud will also call attention to problems, glitches, and awkward parts of the pitch, which you can correct. If you have friends who will listen to it—TEST IT OUT ON THEM. The more you rehearse the pitch, the better it will be. It will also help you time the pitch.

6. Be gracious.

Seven times out of ten, your pitch WILL NOT SELL, and for reasons beyond your control. Don’t be surprised to hear things like “Adam Sandler already has a competing lion tamer movie in the works, so we can’t buy a lion tamer idea right now.” Even if they don’t buy your pitch, remember: YOU ARE A WRITER. THEY NEED WRITERS. So be gracious, charming, and generally wonderful to be around—and you may well still get hired!!! To
fix another writer’s script, or work on the “SOMALI PIRATES idea they’re all excited about at Paramount.”

RULE 4: If you don’t sell a pitch, that’s okay.

More often than not, they want you to work on an idea THEY came up with anyway. If you leave the room with them thinking: “We won’t do his ‘
Die Hard
in a Chuck E. Cheese’ idea, but that guy’s obviously a good writer.” You’ve won! You’re in the door. They’ll call you in on another project. If you’re easy to work with, YOU WILL GET HIRED AGAIN. And again. Be gracious, polite, and the least amount of a dick you can possibly be. Hollywood is a small town, and the assistant you’re complaining to today will be running the studio next year.

Okay, truth be told: we never actually pitched “drunk,” per se. But we did pitch Disney with hangovers so bad that we had a moderate case of “the spins.” And we were pretty confused in general, and we struggled to remember even the general idea of the slobs-versus-snobs comedy we had been working on. (The general idea was: In the Future, Earth has run out of beer. Hops will not grow in our hostile environment. A team of ragtag losers who failed the space program is assembled to make an intergalactic BEER RUN to another planet.)

But … we were so hung over that not only was it hard to pitch, it was also almost IMPOSSIBLE to eat the chicken Caesar salads in front of us in the wonderful Disney executive dining room called “The Rotunda.” That’s pretty hungover, indeed. The night before, the very funny David Cross of
Mr. Show
had bought us a round of tequilas after a bunch of beers at a terrific bar called the Three of Clubs,
*
and the rest is a movie
that never happened called
Beer Runners
. (Still a moderately good idea, and NOT yours free with purchase of this book.)