ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

1 year, 4 months ago - Lynwood Shiva Sawyer

Today for your consideration:
Anybody have any thoughts about the increasing requirement for writers to create pitch books for their projects?
I personally am extremely dubious about this development for myriad reasons.
I sense the current crop of studio readers rely on tick boxes and metrics rather than their own gut instincts, passion or imagination and see writer pitch books as an easy way of wriggling out of having to read the script , as well as being a foolproof CYA defense mechanism.
One of my mentors worked in the Story Department of Columbia Pictures, who produced the treatments for BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI and DR. ZHIVAGO, which she wrote a few sentences at a time from pages smuggled piecemeal out of Russia.
I always thought that it was the Story Department’s job to find stories to render into movies. My mentor explained the Story Department’s purpose to write ambiguous, but mostly negative, coverage reports so that when a competing studio made the film that turned out to be a success, the Columbia executive who passed on the project could fetch the coverage report and say to the higher ups, “This is why we didn’t make the film.”
Of course, if Columbia did make the film (cf. cites above), and the film turned out to be a success, the negative coverage report would magically disappear.
I just have to wonder how much have studios changed over the decades?
We are writers, not graphic artists or designers, and if we do create a pitch book, it reflects our heartfelt intentions about the way the film should be made.
Everyone creates a movie in their minds from a fictional narrative. I can’t help but believe that a pitch book will influence, no matter how subtly, the opinions of a producer, director, attachment or studio reader. What happens if visions of the above are at odds with the writer’s intent as expressed in the pitch book? Or the reader finds the generic pictures annoying to the point of irritation? Just happened to me.
I suspect the outcome will be either a pass or a movie that the writer intensely dislikes.
I also feel that it takes as much or more effort to craft a good pitch book as it does to draft a gripping synopsis.
I know three writers who created fabulous pitch books, one so polished, it could have been designed by the same people who crafted Lamborghini or Philip Patek ads.
As of this writing, you know how many of these pitch books have been turned into series?
You already know the answer.
The only time I’ve ever heard of a pitch book swaying somebody’s opinion is when it is submitted by an established writer, and sometimes not even then, as happened in a name writer with whom I am familiar.
Plus I have to wonder, how many mediocre movies have been made from great pitches? SNAKES ON A PLANE anybody?
To quote William Goldman, “You can great movie from a great script, or a bad movie from a great script, but you can’t make a great movie from a bad script.”
This is obviously not true of pitch books - you CAN make a fabulous pitch book from a lousy script.
Am I behind the times? Or ahead of them?
As I delight in being proven wrong, I’d love to hear from any unestablished screenwriter whose pitch book resulted in a produced film.