The Pitch

If you have seen the opening seven or eight minute uncut tracking shot opening to Robert Altman's "The Player" you'll know what I mean by "the pitch". The camera tracks past a window where a man is pitching a film story to a producer: " 'Graduate 2' ," he says. "Mrs Robinson has grown old and her daughter now has an affair....." or words to that effect.
In this week's Spectator Toby Young tells how he has tried pitching ideas over the years to BBC and ITV programme makers, none of which proved successful.
I have tried too, a few times, also unsuccessfully.
You contact someone at the BBC and arrange an appointment (not an easy thing to do of course to start with). Then you meet the producer or script editor in his/her room and sit down. The chair you are in is always lower than theirs. And there's usually a secretary in the room pretending not to listen to what you are saying.
You take along in your mind about seven ideas so that if the first isn't acceptable you try the second, then the third and so on. You can see by the expression on the face of your interviewer if what you are pitching is making any impact: eyes glaze over in boredom, the mouth either curves downward at the edges or is set in a permanent rictous grin.
You leave feeling like a piece of washing out of which all liquid has been squeezed.
I went along once to such a meeting with someone who was starting out as a script editor; he was looking for ideas he could submit to higher levels. Nothing interested him until I said "Four young women, beautiful young women, in a flat together, they are models...."
I could see his eyes shining and his mouth smiling.
"A sit com with a story each week about these girls," I said.
I had him hooked. He'd call me. I waited. Weeks passed. Months passed. Phone calls yielded no sensible replies. Nothing.
That's how it usually is. Then, later, you see some show and it has young women in a flat and.... and you wonder.