It's a corridor

Never Done: pitch meeting. Someone recently asked me what I am writing, and I replied, "Contracts." Somewhere along back May I started selling my first screenplay, which is not, as it turns out, at least in this case, and overnight event. A couple weeks after that, the same producer engaged me and my writing partner to write a script for them. Both of these scripts promised to pay handsomely. (If you are already sensing a downturn in this story, due to the past tense of the word 'promise' you are only partly right; the deals are still very much alive, but admittedly frustrating.) This is a story about the work for hire. My partner and I were pitched an idea (details will be scant; we have signed a non-disclosure agreement) for a screenplay that the financial person of the production company has come up with. It's a totally, perfectly good idea for a screenplay, and we both decided that yes, we could write it, we could make it meaningful to us, and we could do a good job. We were handed a story outline, and hired to write a treatment that could be taken to investors. When we got into it, we saw that the story outline we were given didn't really add up to a screen story -- so we took it and faithfully turned it into a 3-act structure, with fleshed-out characters, plot and subplot, and actually ended up loving the work we did. We turned it in on time -- even a couple days early -- and waited.

The creative producer loved it, and the financial producer (whose idea this is) ... not so much. Long story short, we started to negotiate simultaneously about the story and about the payment for this work -- all while still in negotiation on the terms of the other screenplay deal. Which brings us to the meeting we just had, a full 7 weeks after delivering the treatment, in which I was asked to pitch the screenplay. It caught me off guard, and put me on the spot, but it was actually a great move on the part of the producer to ask me to pitch it, because it brought the story alive for the financial partner. The same story that was on the page -- the same story she'd had in her hands for 7 weeks, she suddenly loved. And I couldn't help but think how much more we communicate with our eyes and hands and intonations than with our words on paper, no matter HOW good we think our writing is.

This isn't the end of the story -- and we still have a ways to go before I get to write the words "Never done: Sold a screenplay" on this blog. But after all my years of training for it, I successfully pitched a screenplay and moved some negotiations forward a little.