10 Tips For a Winning “Elevator” Pitch

This episode will be a special installment of the podcast, because we are building up to our fourth annual Pitch Festivus! free online pitching event on Dec 7. In years past, when we had a physical location in New York City, we used to have our annual holiday party in our physical location. Having gone online now and becoming fully virtual as a school, we took that party online as well.  So now, instead of a traditional holiday party, you are going to get a three-hour free pitching workshop with top faculty members at Jacob Krueger Studio. You’re going learn how to pitch from some of the best in the business. And we're going to be picking writers from the group who get to pitch their scripts and get feedback from Jacob Krueger Studio faculty members. It's all free – and you have a chance to win prizes. It's super fun. So what do you do if you get chosen to pitch? Well, I’m going to tell you how to prepare a great three-minute pitch. And this isn't only going to be helpful for you when pitching at Pitch Festivus. There are countless events (like Austin Film Festival, for example) that culminate in these awesome pitch opportunities.  So we're going to look at how to create a winning three-minute pitch.  A three-minute pitch for your screenplay or TV show is much different than the kind of pitch that you would give if you're actually in a meeting with an executive or an agent or a manager.  A lot of people call a three-minute pitch an “elevator pitch.” And before I teach you how to make one, I'd like to remind you that the idea of an “elevator pitch” is based on a little bit of fiction.  The concept of an elevator pitch is: “Oh, wow! I'm on an elevator with Martin Scorsese. He's going to floor 13 and I have to pitch my script before we get to his floor!” The idea is that you have to pitch that fast.  But that's not really true. In the real world, even if you are on an elevator with Martin Scorsese, if he's interested, he's gonna be like, “Yeah, keep talking. Come walk with me.”  And the same is true in a real-life environment. Let’s say you’ve just been invited into a producer's office. Sure, you don't want to waste their time. You don't want to wax poetic. You don't want to bore them. But no one is checking their watch going, “Oh, sorry,  that's two minutes and 58 seconds.” No one's checking their watch. It's more of a feeling of whether a pitch is a reasonable length or just too long.  At the same time, learning how to create a three-minute elevator pitch is a valuable skill. Pitch fests, which usually have these kinds of time limits, are wonderful opportunities to get attention for your script, often from very famous people. It's a chance to get heard and it's a chance to practice, but it's also a little bit artificial.  Pitching a producer, agent, manager, star, director, executive or anyone else in the industry is a lot different than the kind of pitching you’re going to be doing at Pitch Festivus! or at any pitch fest.  At Pitch Festivus! we’re going to share a ton of details about how screenwriters can succeed at real-world pitching. How to pitch if you are scared of pitching. If you're an introvert. If you're shy. We’re going to talk about pitching if you're not comfortable pitching. How to pitch without feeling like a used car salesman.