The Art of the Elevator Pitch

H/T to Tom Peterson for this Wired article:

Got a sec? Then I’ve got one blockbuster of a column for you: It’s about how the “elevator pitch” evolved from sweaty-palmed business ritual — a form of white-collar panhandling perpetrated by pushy salespeople and desperate screenwriters — into the quintessence of the Big Idea. At the marketplace, the multiplex, the dinner table: Everybody talks in elevator pitches, tweets in elevator pitches, thinks in elevator pitches. And that’s fortunate, because wielded properly, the mighty Elevator Pitch could actually save us from the forces of fear, obfuscation, and delusion that savage our culture. That’s the gist of it anyway. Whaddya say?

You’re still reading, so I’ll consider you hooked. But then, I’ve got a bully pulpit. The original elevator pitch was designed for an outsider schmo with nothing but gumption and a million-dollar idea. He corners the Big Boss in the elevator — the one place he can secure a private papal audience — lays out his entire prospectus in less than a minute, and closes the deal before the doors ding open. The notion seems to have edged its way into business-speak during the mid-1980s, when the Big Idea went aerodynamic. (You had to dream in terms that Reagan could comprehend: “A space laser shoots down Russkie nukes. We’re calling it Star Wars!”) The phrase quickly caught on in Hollywood, which saw an uptick in the sort of high-concept movies (“A robot is taught how to love… by Steve Guttenberg”) favored by low-patience executives.

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Today, the elevator pitch has outgrown its original industrial-age metaphor and expanded into mass culture. Terms like biztweet, twitpitch, and twitch are fast replacing Otis’ creaky box-lift, but the idea is unchanged. Of course, some might claim this is a bad thing, that constant elevator-pitching is just another symptom of a sick, overstimulated, hopelessly sound-bitten society in which glibness rules. But an elevator pitch isn’t a sound bite. It’s an idea in miniature: a full three-master built to scale in a bottle. It’s got to be complete, logical, and watertight, stem to stern. A good elevator pitch is the antithesis of a sound bite — and the cure for the common cable-talking-head ramble. Bloviators and professional obscurantists can confuse the basic contours of reality by stringing daisy chains of selective facts into dark webs of bigotry and paranoia. Yet ask them to boil down their conspiracy theories, nebulous prejudices, and voodoo economics to an elevator pitch and they’ll crumble.

I’m reminded of a WordPlay column by Terry Rossio: A Foot in the Door. An excerpt:

Here’s a little scenario I want you to visualize. I call it “The Warner Bros. Hallway Test.” Fix these following scenes in your mind — because if you’re going to be a successful screenwriter, you must pass this test:

Burbank, California. The Warner Bros. film studio. Big trees, old Hollywood-style buildings. Stifling valley heat and throat-tightening smog. Porsches and Jaguars parked in the circular drive. The lawn is very green.

Inside, a guard sits in the foyer, greeting visitors as they step in from the bright sunlight. It is cooler in here. Behind the guard station is a stairway you’re not allowed to climb. To your left is a hallway.

Now, this hallway is very important.

Lining the walls are huge photographs from classic motion pictures, blown up from the original 35mm frame to life-size. In the first one, Humphrey Bogart holds a gun on Peter Lorre. Also lining the walls are doorways, most of the doors open, most with secretaries inside.

Only they’re not called secretaries — they’re called ‘assistants’ or ‘managers of development;’ sometimes they’re just called ‘readers.’ In fact, if you slip by the guard, and go down to the third door on the right, and peek inside, there’s a woman there, reading a screenplay.

Your screenplay.

Her name is Francine, and right now she’s on about page 42… which is pretty good, considering that her phone rings about every 30 seconds… and she’s in the middle of revising her bosses’ upcoming New York itinerary, tracking down agents and juggling about a billion other important details. But right now, the important thing to you is that Francine is also reading your script.

Quick, back out to the hallway. Coming this way is your typical development executive, or ‘vice-president in charge of creative affairs.’ We’ll call this one Larry. Larry’s an affable guy, dresses well, and knows the value of a good screenplay. His career was made when he plucked a spec script out of the slush pile, attached a big star to it, and the film got made and become a major hit.

Larry needs another screenplay.

At his side is a bearded, bespectacled guy, wearing loose clothes, carrying a leather backpack. He’s a ‘hot’ director — we’ll call him Tim — fresh out of film school. Tim is known to be ‘visually very creative’ which is another way of saying he can film but he can’t write.

Tim, too, needs a screenplay.

So Larry and Tim reach Francine’s doorway, stick their heads in, maybe ask for a Diet Coke. Larry — his producer radar ever on alert — notices that she’s reading a screenplay. “So what’s it about?” he asks.

Now I relate this scene in such elaborate detail because it is precisely at this moment that your screenwriting career will be made or broken. Also because the scene is so typical, it could be played out literally a hundred times with your script, in a hundred similar situations.

Here’s what’s going to happen. Francine is going to relate your screenplay’s premise in one or two sentences. And Larry and Tim are going to be either interested, or not. And, depending on which reaction they have, that’s how your career will go.

What you would really like Francine to say next is something like:

“It’s cool. Medical students induce near-death experiences to investigate the afterlife.”

Or perhaps:

“It’s funny. Psychic investigators open a ghost extermination business in New York City.”

Or even:

“It’s called COOTIES. A boy gets cooties, starts to turn into a girl. He has to kiss a certain girl in order to cure himself.”

Any of these and Larry will then ask “Is there a producer attached to it yet?” and Tim will say “Who’s directing it? Put me on the list, will you? And send me a copy.” And then Larry will say “Who wrote it? Let’s meet them. Let’s get them in and see if they have any other ideas. Have their agent call me.”

Now, keep in mind that neither one has even read the script. They may never read the script. All this happens on the basis of just hearing the premise.

Oh. And this is what you don’t want Francine to say when she describes your screenplay: “I’m not quite sure. Seems to be a murder mystery, but the lead character hasn’t done very much yet.”

Because now Larry and Tim are wandering back down the hall with their Diet Cokes, the script will get covered, the coverage will go into the file, and that’s that.

The Warner Bros. Hallway Test. It’s brutal, and it illustrates a simple point:

As a screenwriter, your choice of film premise is your calling card. Not your witty dialog, not your clever descriptions. Not your knowledge of structure and subplot and subtext.

The very first decision you make as a writer — ‘what is my film about?’ — will define your creative instincts in the eyes of the industry. Like actors and directors, you will always be known by the projects you pick (or in this case, by the projects you initiate).

You must — you MUST — choose well.

Most aspiring screenwriters simply don’t spend enough time choosing their concept. It’s by far the most common mistake I see in spec scripts. The writer has lost the race right from the gate. Months — sometimes years — are lost trying to elevate a film idea that by its nature probably had no hope of ever becoming a movie.

The key to an elevator pitch is the concept. You can have everything else right, but if you don’t have a great concept, more than likely you won’t end up with a sale.

For my thoughts on the importance of story concept, a few of my posts on the subject: here, here, and here

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