"Do it this way." "No, do it that way!" "We love you starting with your bona fides." "Don't start with your bona fides, get right to the logline."
One of the most soul crushing feelings is writing, rewriting then polishing your pitch to where you can see your pain reflected in the shiny poetic 2-pager, then to be told by one industry exec that it's perfect and the next that it's nowhere near ready. Welcome to the film industry!
When you work with a myriad of industry people of all disciplines, you're going NEVER going to get an Industry Standard response. What they are giving you is their preference on how they want to be pitched based on their experience, job title, personality or personal grievance when they woke up that morning.
My grounded sci-fi, BRINGING BOBBY BACK, has been my best reviewed screenplay of the dozen specs I've written. By consensus, the only reason they can't pick it up is because it needs a studio backing. But not by consensus, their feedback is all over the place. Some love it that I equate my characters to existing actors in order give them a jumping off point in their heads; others hate it. Some love that I put my qualifications as a writer-director right up front; some preferer I leave it until the end.
The only thing we as screenwriters can do to not go insane and go back to our day jobs is to throw away all of their notes. Just kidding. What we do is the same thing we do when we get feedback on the scripts themselves from friends, colleagues or script services: Find the common issues. If the majority of execs say the execution of the second act is trash, then you should rework it. If in the pitch, the most keep pointing out that there is no clear conflict, go back to the script, make sure it's there first then (if it is) clean up your pitch.
For the most part, I've been able to refine, not just my pitch but the script itself based on feedback I've gotten from producers, agents, execs, etc. on Stage32 because I don't take anything personally and have learned how to review the reviewer. They usually have really good nuggets in there that will improve you as screenwriter and pitch master. Sometimes they just need to shorten their bona fides to what they actually did and not what the company did before they got hired.
(Whew...nothing like balancing out the screenwriting universe...)
Keep going and believe in YOUR voice. If you don't feel like you have a voice yet, these pitch sessions are a great way to find out. You may be pleasantly surprised...
