Screenwriting : The art and science of the elevator pitch/mixture descriptions by Marisa Torre

New term for me.... what is an elevator pitch?

One should be able to talk briefly and succinctly about one's project, in about the time the elevator goes from the lobby to the top floor. Reference the film Working Girl to see a literal one take place, as delivered by Melanie Griffith!

Think of your logline or a ten second summary of your project. Kevin is right when it has to be completed in the amount of time the doors are closed in the elevator.

When pitching random shoppers in Walmart, the elevator pitch works better than the synopsis. Just sayin'

Sign of the times. No one has time for an in depth conversation. The concept of the elevator speech is also wonderfully skewered in the opening long shot of The Player starring Tim Robbins and a host of starts and cameos. Highly recommended viewing.

I totally hate the comparison films (this meets that) when pitching, and wait until the exec asks (if they ever do) before doing it. I might use another film as tone, though. The thing about an "elevator pitch" is that it is all about the concept, so you need a great idea. That is where so many scripts fail - bland idea. I've been a panelist on some pitch events where you hear 100 pitches... and if you are lucky one of them is something good enough to be taken to script and the others are all discard pile material. Problem is - all 100 people wrote scripts. They didn't write a screenplay based on the best idea, they wrote a script based on the first idea they came up with or the one they liked (but no one else in the world would like).

Twenty (yes, I said 20) years ago when I was a baby writer and all of us baby writers thought mixing two titles to describe a film was a hot new idea (it wasn't then and it isn't now but we did not know that we thought we had a hot new angle) an agent called me who had liked my query and asked me what the story was about. And I said (breathlessly, oh the humanity) "It's this hot title meets this hot title." There was a long pause. Then she said, "That's darling, now tell me what the story is about." She didn't want some mix up of film titles. She wanted a straight forward logline that told her exactly what the story was about. It is much more important to be able to tell someone in one clean sentence what the story is about than it is to be able to mix two hot film titles that may or may not be credible mixing to describe a story.