Take 100+ Hollywood Production Types put them in a big room just down the road from Burbank Airport.  The day before this, take 500 would be screenwriters with heads firmly in the clouds and whip them in to a frenzy by teaching them how to summarize their BIG ideas in a 30 second “log line”.  Then smash the two together in five minute increments and you have the Great American Pitch Fest 2009.

“I have a story about the last five days of a utopian experiment that was founded by a homeless man who was allowed to win the lottery”  said I, to one dozen carefully selected movie moguls allegedly looking for unique ideas.   This was universally followed by 5-10 seconds of silence as they attempted to mentally process and categorize a concept they had truly never heard before.  I got 8 “tell me mores”,  3 “Wows…Go On!” and one “What was that again?”.   It turns out, once you have their attention,  there is no standard way to continue.  Some want to hear about characters. Some need to know more about the plot.  Others want to know the message of the film.  So you pick one and hope you guessed correctly or that your silver tongued oration will sufficeintly entice them to ask for your contact information and your “one pager”.  I apparently did this correctly 33% of the time as I left the event with 3 producers wanting to know more and 1 wanting to read the script.  I also got 4, “this is a really great idea, BUT not right for our company…make sure you talk to…this is the kind of thing they would do”

There is much more to tell, but I am still a bit bleary-eyed from the emotional intensity of the weekend.  I had a graphic on the front of my 1 pager showing the cover of my book, the log line and a request for them to consider SomeplacElse.  On the back was the script for the opening scene wherein homeless Mike Allen is told to “Give them Hope”…I didn’t realize the irony until just now.