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Lesson 9
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ASSIGNMENT:
What I learned from this lesson is that marketing is a lot of being in this business.
Title: Jack Young’s Phone Pitch for “STREAM” and “RocketMen”
Write out your phone pitch along with answers to the questions.
Tell us which of the four strategies you are going to use to open your pitch:
Lead with credibility.
Screenwriter who has written over 40 screenplays and filmmaker with two feature films streaming on Amazon Prime who has had a paid rewrite assignment and is professionally represented by a manager in New York.
Lead with a great title.
PITCH# 1: “STREAM”
PITCH# 2: “ROCKETMEN”
Lead with a strong business hook.
STREAM Comparisons: Think “Star Gate” meets “Flatliners”
ROCKETMEN brings back the nostalgia of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon onto the screen and does for Scifi what Indiana Jones did for action adventure films.
Lead with a High Concept.
STREAM: A man must die and enter a strange energy stream to save mankind.
OR:
A man must die to take a journey to the other side to stop a worldwide no-birth epidemic.
ROCKETMEN: A young jet jockey is selected to pilot an experimental spaceship in 1949 to investigate an alien spacecraft. When the aliens destroy the planet, he is thrust into the future and must find a way to undo events and save mankind.
2. Give us your script for phone call pitches, like I did above.
3. Give us a one or two sentence answer to the questions a producer may ask:
What’s the budget range?
PITCH# 1: 6-10 Million per episode
PITCH# 2: 3-6 Million per episode
Who do you see in the main roles?
How many pages is the script? Pilot is 60 pages. Episodes are 50 – 60 pages
Who else has seen this? My manager.
Why do you think this fits our company? Pitching original and unique sci-fi/fantasy series unlike anything on TV.
How does the movie end? Not pitching movies. Pitching TV series. One series has 5 seasons and the other 3 seasons. Each episode and each season has an ending.
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Eric Humble’s Phone Pitch
What I learned doing this assignment is: that phone pitches can be easy if they are direct, simple, and filled only with information a producer needs. I’ve always had a hard time with phone pitching, mostly because I’m intimidated to talk on the phone in general, but for the Fearlessness As a Writer and MSC classes, I did do some phone pitching and found it to be less intimidating the more I really knew my pitch cold, and the more confidence I had that the material was strong. This phone pitch is still a rough draft, but with just a little more work and practice, I think I’ll have a strong enough pitch that phone pitching can be one of the marketing strategies that I can concentrate on when taking the project to market.
Write out your phone pitch along with answers to the questions.
1. Tell us which of the four strategies you are going to use to open your pitch:
Lead with a High Concept.
2. Give us your script for phone call pitches, like I did above.
Hi, I’m Eric Humble and I have a one-hour thriller about a secret society hunting people whose DNA holds the cure for cancer.
3. Give us a one or two sentence answer to the questions a producer may ask:
What’s the budget range? About $1 million per episode
Who do you see in the main roles? A Joseph Gordon-Levitt type and a Zoe Kravitz type
for the main leads. For the main antagonist, someone like Billy Campbell.
How many pages is the script? 60 page pilot
Who else has seen this? I’m currently shopping it to production companies and I’ve
gotten _______ script requests so far.
Why do you think this fits our company? I enjoyed the concept of your TV show
_______ and thought this might be something you’d be interested in.
How does the movie end? Jude is summoned to a lab where his best friend turns out to be an assassin for the secret society, about to shoot him to keep his cancer cure hidden away forever…
…when Jude creates an explosion and kills his friend. This gets him an audition with the secret society – where he learns he’ll have to fight someone to the death to gain entry, then train as an assassin himself.
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