Robot in a Wheelchair

I've been a member Think Tank Thursdays for several years now. T3 isn't your typical writers' group, which is exactly why I go. Instead of a group of dour novelists "workshopping" their prologues to death, it's a good-humored cabal of screenwriters who pitch their script ideas. The point is to see how good your concepts are before you ever put 12-pt. Courier font to virtual paper. There is no "workshopping" involved.

Having given and received many a movie pitch, I've figured out the hallmark of a truly good one. It isn't the pitch that draws silence because it's so airtight (like the one about a rogue Israeli soldier and Palestinian terrorist who jointly conspire to bring peace to the Middle East by threatening to detonate a nuclear device if the two sides don't hash out a peace deal in 48 hours). Nor is it the ones that leave people speechless because they're so awful (like the one that started as an interesting tale of corporate fraud, only to degrade into the author's personal conspiracy theory of Paul Wellstone's death).

No, the pitches with real potential are the ones that make people talk... the ones that provide such an appealing and versatile platform that they start chiming in, "Yeah, and then you could do this..." because they instantly want to make the movie their own.

Sure, this can annoy the pitcher, because the new ideas often conflict with his or her own. But if you accept the fact that film is by far the world's most collaborative art form, it's absolutely the best outcome. What you want, ultimately, is for a producer, a director and some actors to want to make your project their own. Barring self-financing, that's the only way your movie will ever get made at all.

Another long-winded analogy for marketing campaigns? Yes. The era of making your campaign completely airtight and closed off is pretty much over. Younger generations have grown up expecting to take any piece of creative work and make it their own, whether it's remixing their favorite song, shooting their own ad for your product, or re-editing the trailer for your movie. In short, everything has become film. Everything is a collaboration. And the quicker you accept that, and more you care more about authoring a good platform instead of taking credit for every product that platform generates, the better off you'll be.

P.S. Why "Robot in a Wheelchair"? In my favorite all-time pitch, a 20-something guy outlined his idea for a sitcom including the character of a robot in a wheelchair. I just thought it was funny.