Can You Pitch in 5 Words?

That is a fun challenge I see very often on the Done Deal Message Board. Of course, some nutter submitted: girl on girl action which is worth a laugh but four syllables, not five words. Nice try, wiseacre.

Can you pitch or describe the script you're working on in five words? It's a fun challenge but it is useful? A WGA friend of mine pointed out that describing your script in 150 words - 3 concise paragraphs - is the more useful exercise. And I weigh in that actually, zooming in and out from the micro to the macro when describing your story is more than a fantastic way to get to know your story - it is a crucial way to get to know your story. Not only because when you pitch, you'll have to pitch in a number of ways (the elevator pitch, the meet -n- greet pitch, the treatment, the development meeting) but because when you force yourself to zoom in and out of your story, you begin to tattoo the essence of it on your brain. In other words if your five words are: Baker hides body for revenge - then you need to be damn sure that on every single page of your script - that essence is there. THAT is the entertainment value and you need to make sure that the very boiled down basics of your script are evident in every interaction on every page. Does that make sense?

A friend just gave me a disappointed review of DISTURBIA saying the first half was very strong; did he or didn't he? But in the second half, yup, he did and now he's gonna getcha. Wow, Wave-inatrix, that added up to two neat five-word descriptions for the first and second half of the movie, how DO you do it and what is your beauty secret? Well, plenty of sleep and steamed cauliflower, since you asked but bear with me:

DISTURBIA:
page one through fifty: Did he or didn't he?
page fifty one through one hundred: ...and now he's gonna getcha.

So you can see that the entertainment value of "did he or didn't he" is pretty high and varied. But "now he's gonna getcha" takes us down to a lot of pop out moments and narrow escapes.

Full disclosure - I didn't see DISTURBIA, probably should. But the mini-W's droll review made me think twice about my nine bucks.

So I'm talking about two things here - about describing your story in as few words as possible, from five words to three paragraphs to a one page synopsis. Can everybody try that? How did you do?

The other thing that I'm talking about is identifying and paying off the core, the essence, the bottom-line description of the entertainment value of your story.

Put yourself in the head of an executive. You sit at your expensive desk after having parked your BMW and sipped your five dollar coffee, but you know what? You have no job security whatsoever and you know that as does your assistant. You're only as secure as your last project and that one didn't do so well. You've GOT to find the next big thing, you've got to. And some knock-kneed writer sits across the desk from you sweating and all you can think of is that you've got to refinance the house to put the pool in, another creative exec, the backstabbing one you hate, got the corner office and thank god today is a therapy day.

So here's this writer. And they start to babble about their story. And you're thinking to yourself - what is the UPSHOT? What is the upshot of this entertainment? Yeah, yeah, theme, character development but when I take this to my boss and neatly lay my head on a platter and hand him a knife, what am I asking my boss to gamble on, here? A lot of scenes that show some guy who's gonna getcha? A lot of scenes that show a marriage slowly crumbling? Ayyyyeeeee don't really want my head on that platter, no thanks. You glance at your watch, phew, time for your next meeting. You shake the sweaty hand of the writer and mumble see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya. Then yell at your assistant as a way to show him or her exactly what his or her place is in this world, this week, dammit. Thank god it's therapy day.

So when you think of your five words, imagine those five words describing the bulk of the entertainment, writ large. Forget about the nuances, the mystery, that one great piece of dialogue down in the coal mine - basically, the audience is gonna sit through a lot of scenes that show....what?

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