Pitching it!
An SWF guide
The centrepiece of the Screenwriters' Festival programme each year is almost certainly the live pitching contest. Pitch Factor, Fever Pitch, Pitch in Time... the name changes each year but the game is the same. And it is a game. Which isn't to say that there are any rules as such, but there are definitely techniques and principals that are worth bearing in mind.
When you play Poker you play the person opposite you, when you pitch a story... you have to play the whole room. At the Screenwriters' Festival that's a big ol' room. Some people are used to delivering presentations, others aren't. Experience of this sort can be a help, but its no guarantee. You're not delivering a lesson to a classroom of children, you're not delivering a marketing report to a boardroom. You're actually putting on a bit of a show. You're a storyteller.
Pick me! Pick me!
We ought to acknowledge a difference here between pitching 'in the real world' and pitching as a contestant in the SWF live pitching competition. The skills that are called for are the same, but it's not only about skills, the idea itself needs to be the right kind of idea, the kind that still works remarkably well even when reduced to a few pithy sentences (you've only got 5 miutes) and perhaps even more crucially: the kind of idea that plays well with an audience when served up as 'evening entertainment'. The Screenwriters' Festival is an event that people want to have fun at. We do strive to ensure that the ten finalists who take part have a diverse range of genres on offer between them. But the comedies do fare conspicuously well.
Pitching even a potentially oscar-winning screenplay about "the academic who survived the Stalinist purges and is now having flashbacks to that time, his daughter whose long bitter marriage is falling apart around her and the journalist who's investigating the academic because he suspects he was never in Russia at the time and who falls obsessively in love with the daughter and sacrifices his career to become a lens grinder in Omsk" is unlikely to hit its mark in quite the same way as the pitch about Kung Fu Nuns! Or old age Superheroes! Or a Bus that will explode if it slows to less than 50 miles per hour! Call it dumbing down, call it high concept, call it whatever you like... A successful pitch is an idea that reduces well, and sells itself well even before you've added your own charismatic magic in the delivery!
By the same token of course, do take whatever consolation you like from the undeniable fact that there are plenty of terrific ideas, scripts and stories that just don't reduce well and don't readily lend themselves to the punishing rigours of being 'pitched'. That's fine, keep those ideas safe, their time will come. For the purposes of a good pitch, dig out that audacious, high-concept,jumped-up firework display of a storyline you once scribbled down. That'll do nicely.