One minute pitch to Raindance film directors
I had always heard about the Elevator Speech, a one minute pitch to a VIP stranger who you meet by chance in an elevator. So I was delighted when I received an email from my writers group on Monday October 1st 2006 telling me that the following day I had a chance to deliver a pitch to film directors.
What could I pitch? I've got five unpublished novels. The most unforgettable character is in my novel on my amazing and amusing late Uncle Ronnie, the deaf musician, who played for the BBC radio orchestra and who had billed himself as The Fool On The Fiddle.
I knew about one minute pitches. My son had done the one minute sales pitch for himself at my local branch of Business Network at group working breakfasts when everybody speaks for one minute to introduce themselves. I had gone over it with him. I reckoned I had helped him.
I am a home tutor in English literature. I have coached pupils in how to answer questions at school interviews.
I had also done one minute introductions to myself as a guest at branches of Toastmasters International in London, Singapore and Shanghai in China. Surely I could create the perfect pitch with only a couple of minutes preparation?
I learned that it is not so simple.
I did not successfully sell the directors the idea that I am a brilliant novelist and scriptwriter who they must immediately employ.
What went wrong? I had even taught speakers how to do an elevator speech, timing them for one minute at Caerleon Writers Holiday which is held every year in Wales.
I had enthused about the elevator speech.
Here was my opportunity to shine. At short notice. So a lifetime dream came true for me.
What went wrong? Maybe you can learn from my experience. My first pitch.
I consoled myself by telling my son that nobody can ski on their first attempt. My son, who trained in NLP, neuro linguistic programming (a mixture of positive thinking and reframing and life coaching), encouraged me by saying, 'The people who succeed are those who fall down during their first skiing lesson but still go on to try again at a second lesson.'
FAILURE & LEARNING
Let us kindly describe my pitch as 'a learning experience'.
Having attended Toastmasters for two years, I would not recognize 'failure' if I fell into a ten foot hole. I would optimistically describe it as learning to look where I was going and a lucky escape from breaking both ankles. I would nod that the cost of dry cleaning the clothes was cheap if it saved my life on a later occasion.
Having saved face in advance, I can now reveal the real disaster in delicious, some would say excruciating, Technicolor detail.
But first of all, may I boast a bit.
COURAGE TO ENTER THE COMPETITION
a) Of about fifteen people in my writing circle who were emailed the information, I was the only cheerful little lamb which happily set off to be slaughtered. This was a once in a lifetime chance to fail, and I was determined not to miss it.
DETERMINATION & AMBITION
b) I turned down a blind date to do my one minute pitch!
One of the other hopeful pitchers told me I should say that to my directors during my one minute chat afterwards.
I turned down a blind date with a man who owned three boats!
The night before I had told him I was busy Tuesday.
c) Then I spent the whole drizzly day apathetically staring at my computer screen trying to work up the energy to travel into London. I hate travelling into London by train.
I couldn't focus on my pitch. If I didn't go, nobody would know or care. It wouldn't matter to anybody else. Nor to me.
But I realised that I had spent months talking to people, even coaching speakers at Caerleon about the mythical 'elevator pitch' when one meets a film director by chance and has one minute to sell an idea. At the end of my life I would be wishing I'd had the luck to meet a film director in a lift. After today I could not complain that I'd never had the chance.
No need to go to Los Angeles to meet a film director. Here was the opportunity in London. If I didn't take that chance, I'd always be blaming myself for turning down my one lucky break.
d) Then you had to reply to the email. You had to get there by 5 pm. That meant leaving at 3 pm. No way. About 4.45, when the moment had almost gone, nothing to be scared of any more, I looked at the email again.
I'd mis-read it. You didn't have to be there until 7.30. You had to reply by 5 pm. I still had time to do it. I replied, accepting. Five minutes later my 'blind date' rang to say he was free tonight, was I interested? No. I had sent the email. I was committed to the organisers. And to myself.
e) Hatch End station's ticket machine ate £8 of my money without giving me a ticket. I would have to explain why I was travelling without a ticket when I reached Piccadilly. On the journey I did not prepare my one minute pitch but instead my letter of complaint about the lost ticket money.
f) At Piccadilly the station staff let me out of the barrier and I was only five minutes late. But I stopped another five minutes to buy a ticket for the return journey. (Good thing I did - the station was packed when I returned at 10 pm.)
g) At the venue, a restaurant's crowded basement bar in Windmill Street, conveniently near Piccadilly, first left down Shaftesbury Avenue, the girl at the barrier had my name on a list and gave me a numbered ticket. My number was 45.
Several had already pitched. But there were about twenty people ahead of me, so I had time to rehearse.
I had brought with me my electronic violin and battery-operated piano which I had bought for doing a stand-up comedy act, which I thought would amuse the film directors. But the noise level was so high that without a microphone you could not hear my musical instruments.
I looked at the form I'd been given on which I had to tick whether I was offering a pitch or a treatment. We'd discussed treatments at our writers' circle, yet suddenly I was blank about treatments. I wasn't sure exactly what a treatment was. But I knew that I wanted to do a pitch. I read down the list of directors and what they did.
h) I circulated amongst the crowd of hopefuls, mostly half my age, all looking like students, several of them from film schools. The first person I spoke to had been to these events before and explained you had one minute to pitch, then one minute to hear feedback. In Los Angeles people pay about 50 dollars to attend pitchathons.
PITCHATHONS
Normally the pitchathons were in public, which is more embarrassing but gives you the advantage of hearing the good speakers and copy their style, and learning from the mistakes of those who go on ahead of you.
However, on Tuesday the public address system was not working, or not permitted to be used, so the directors were in two pairs sitting in different roped-off alcoves. You threw your five pounds donation for the prize money into a bucket and then went in for a private chat.
WINNER ALREADY CHOSEN
I then spoke to a man who said he had already been told, 'You're the winner!'
I remembered I'd once asked a magazine editor about how she judged short story competitions and why other competitions charged entry fees whilst hers didn't. She explained that unless you paid an entry fee which went to the judge and guaranteed that every entry was read, the magazine staff did not read all the entries. They could not afford to spend all week reading. If they found a publishable entry within the first half dozen, that was a good enough winner. The rest were chucked aside unread.
One man did not take a numbered ticket but sat re-writing his pitch. He said he wanted maximum time to prepare. I discovered you could take a second ticket, we were allowed two, and I took number 66 expecting to pitch to the second pair of directors, having learned from criticism from the first pair.
However, that was not to be. They must have found their second winner at 60, twice 60 minutes, after 2 hours if they kept to time. Or decided it was time for them to leave.
The girl managing the queue asked if I had a script or was going to pitch. I said that I had a novel, which I would pitch as the basis for a screenplay.
I wasn't nervous. I was quite confident, not of winning, but of doing adequately.
a) I was encouraged because the previous evening at the Monday night Toastmasters, Harrovians, I had met a man who remembered my speech about my uncle starting: 'My uncle caused trouble from the moment he was born until the moment he died.'
b) Secondly, the previous week I'd been encouraged when I'd sent an email about my uncle to a new friend who was a musician. He said that he thought I must be a good writer because he round my email about my deaf musician uncle was hilarious. I had written: 'I am learning to sing and can sing in tune, four notes, middle C,D, E and F. I inherited an electric organ from my uncle who had a house with an outside toilet blocked by nettles.'
c) My third encouragement had been from my friend Linda at Caerleon writer's holiday when I looked around the university dining room at our fellow writers and would-be writers and asked her who was the most interesting character in the room, hoping to speak to them and use them. She grinned and retorted, 'You're the most interesting character!'
Me! Why?
At the previous day's session on writing dramatic opening to novels, she had heard my opening to my novel on my uncle in which I described undressing my uncle's body in the morgue to photograph it in order to have evidence about scars left by his operation in case I wanted to sue the hospital. She thought that was most unusual.
I told her it wasn't an idea I'd created. I really did photograph my uncle in the morgue.
She said the fact that I'd actually done it made me even more bizarre.
So, unfazed, I sneaked off from the throng to rehearse and time my pitch in the ladies toilet which was quiet. I sat on a toilet seat - the toilet seats being the only empty seats in the basement. I was now away from distractions and could concentrate.
I felt quite cheerful as I looked at the list of film directors. One did gangster movies. Another had made a horror movie. First, I tried to decide whether to call my uncle's story The Mad Musician or The Deaf Musician.
Then, what about pleasing the director of horror movies? How about introducing the idea of haunting? Should I change the book and film title to 'Haunted by my uncle?' Should the opening blurb be: Everybody is haunted by their dead ancestors and I am haunted by my uncle ... ?
My entry form had asked me to tick Pitch or Treatment. I had a pitch. I read through the list of directors again.
Later I realised that one of the directors, Will, did documentaries. I could have pitched the story as how I made a novel from my ancestor's life, or how to write a novel based on your ancestor.
Preparation time was up! I was through the barrier, sitting waiting. Next I was standing, throwing my five pounds in the bucket. I was watching the previous pitcher talking to two men in the alcove. Now it was my turn!
d) The director who shook my hand said his name was Will.
MY PITCH
I turned my opening to fit his name: "My story is about wills. My uncle was cut out of his mother's will. There were five trouble-makers in our family. He was the worst. He caused trouble from the minute he was born until the minute he died when we literally lost the plot and didn't know where to bury him. He was a deaf musician. He wanted to join the RAF as a pilot but was rejected because he was colour blind. He thought they were being anti-Semitic. He wanted to be a conductor but his mother wouldn't let him. He won a scholarship but instead joined the RAF. When he died he was buried in a shroud with a cross on it although he was Jewish."
"YOUR MINUTE'S UP!"
MY FEEDBACK ON MY MISTAKE(S)
Will told me, "We've no idea what your story is about. Is it a comedy, or a gangster movie - or a documentary?"
Typically me, no focus.
I didn't hear what he said after that. I was thinking, butterfly mind - I'm a typical ENFP on the Myers Briggs Personality Test, not a focused scientist but far along the creative tunnel, always thinking up a thousand amusing uses for a brick instead of using it to build a wall.
Suddenly it was over. I was out.
Outside I spoke to a man who told me his pitch had gone really well. He asked how mine went. I eventually admitted what had happened.
He helpfully summed it up succinctly. 'They wanted you to start by saying what genre?'
GENRE & FOCUS
So, what can we learn? I could have said, 'I'm offering you a tragic-comic novel which will make a comic film like Fiddler On The Roof.'
But I didn't specify the genre because I tried to keep my options open, hoping that each director would see in it the potential of being adapted to his own speciality.
Why should I think that? Because it had actually happened to me. I'd previously taken a musical to a literary agent who told me, 'Why don’t you turn it into a novel? I can’t sell musicals - but I can sell novels.'
Well, learning experience. I suppose at least you must tell directors what genre your work is so they know what they are getting before they turn it around and adapt it to their speciality.
I thought, I should have followed the advice novelists are given about plots: start with a hero who has an aim and create an enemy of an obstacle to his aim.
HERO /CHARACTER'S AIM & OBSTACLE
So what's my uncle's aim - and what's the obstacle?
He wants to be a musician - but he is deaf?
When Ronnie was dying in hospital he told me that he considered his life had been a failure, a missed opportunity, that he never achieved what he should have done. I was upset by this. I was cheered up when annother member of the orchestra said that all orchestra musicians think they deserve to be soloists and feel frustrated. When I told a new friend that all all orchestra musicians think they should be soloists, he laughed.
So, back to focusing on Ronnie's problem. He wants to be a soloist - but hasn't enough courage, pushiness and PR, so he stays in the orchestra.
His Achilles heel is fear; he blames his mother for ruining his life because she taught him to be afraid of life. Also he inherited from her his colour blindness.
Other possible titles for my novel or film:
My Haunting Uncle;
What's Stopping You?
I Blame Mother. (Blurb: Why can't Ronnie be a conductor? He blames his mother for discouraging him; she blames him for having misplaced ambition. Who is to blame?)
WHAT I GAINED FROM PITCHING
Let's look on the bright side. Although I was not able to pitch a second time and try righting my mistake, the cancellation of the pitch meant I had profited financially because it saved me losing another five pounds.
I reckoned the five pounds I paid was money well spent. I not only had an interesting evening networking, the 'course' in pitching, at five pounds, was not expensive.
Pitching is something I can add to what I've done. On my real c.v. and the internal cv in my head.
Another failure! To add to my list. Like the unpublished novel.
But it's better to have written an unpublished novel than not to. (However, my husband Trevor, who is not living with me currently, would say it would have been better to have cooked him dinners.)
After all that time teaching an elevator speech, at least I've actually done one.
REVISED PITCH
Here's my new one minute pitch for a comic film:
'This film is adapted from a novel, which is a black comedy about a deaf musician. My eccentric uncle Ronnie calls himself The Fool on The Fiddle. He’s a vegetarian, and colour blind. Comic scenes include him leaving his Stradivarius on a bus. He tries to join the army, accompanied by his domineering histrionic mother. His toilet is overgrown with nettles and can’t pay a plumber so he teaches the plumber to play the trumpet. In the end we can’t bury Ronnie because we’ve literally lost the plot. I’m his niece, the narrator.'
I must now plan my one minute pitch for each book in my series of five. And all my other books.
I wrote to my good friend William who I know from Toastmasters, sending him the above account.
He replied,
Dear Angela,
Well done and congratulations. You took a bold step and have learnt from it. Instead of brooding over it you are planning your next pitch. That is the Angela we know. I appreciate Toastmasters but agree it can sometimes be a bit sugary. Sometimes only strangers can tell us what we really need to know.
Best wishes William
Raindance show films in regular festivals which are bundled with the pitchathons and the next event should be in December. Today it's so cold I'm dreaming of going away somewhere warm for Christmas, but even if I miss it, you can be sure that I'll be at another Pitchathon.
If anybody wants to pair up with me, practising their pitch on me whilst I rehearse to them, please contact me.
I offered to hear another contestant who was next to me in the queue, hoping that in return he'd let me try out my pitch on him. He was probably afraid I'd pinch his idea.
However, afterwards we discovered that he was doing a gangster movie, nothing like my historical comical family history novel.
If you want to do mutual coaching, you are welcome to contact me at angelalansbury@hotmail.com
You can also contact me for tuition in creative writing or giving speeches. The current lowest fee for schoolchildren, GCSE, O level and A level, which can cover spelling, grammar, writing essays, reading newspapers and set books, conversation and reading or speaking in assembly or on speech day is about £25 for a one hour lesson at my address. I stick to the prices charged by local agencies and the rates are fixed each school term usually going up in September.
Prices for adults are higher, and for groups and businesses obviously more, depending on how much time you need to brief me, discuss and be briefed by me, my course work preparation time, handouts and travelling. I help people write and deliver barmitzvah speeches, wedding speeches, motivational speeches, after dinner speeches, business presentations, and talking on radio and TV. I've written ten books including Wedding Speeches & Toasts and I've spoken on radio and TV all over the world from America to Australia. Of course, you can also contact me to speak on radio or TV or research and write any kind of serious or humorous brochure, magazine feature, travel article, book or encyclopaedia article.
posted by Angela Lansbury Author at 9:46 PM
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