Pitching Hollywood: How to Sell Your TV Show and Movie Ideas

If you are a fireman, truck driver or stock broker, this book might be useful. For anyone who knows anything about film or tv, this is pretty elementary stuff. Big type, lots of blank space on the pages, and filled with useless witty banter between the 2 "authors", I was very disappointed. There is a basic breakdown of what a pitch is but little concrete information is given about the process or strategies involved in making a successful pitch. The excuse is that you cannot capture the essence of a pitch in words. If this is true, why write a book? A large portion of the book is dedicated to plot summaries of popular films and TV shows. While some of this is useful, in order to illustrate the format of a treatment (a written precursor to the pitch), it feels as if this was done to get the book to a publishable length. In its current state, the information info in this book would best be served by a magazine article.

It's anecdotal advice but it is motivating. The goal is to project your enthusiasm about your project into the guy or gal on the other side of the table. Keep refining your idea until it holds water. Premortem the project till you've seen it from every possible position. Then ring enough bells till someone lets you in. Remember they don't care about whats in it for you or how great of a project you think it is. They want to know if its going to be marketable and feed their hubris in the eyes of their peers once its a hit. Assess the personality type of your audience and focus on the benefits. Preparation meeting opportunity = Luck.Good Luck :)

Although the author gives some good insight on what your TV or film concept should or should not be, he completely misinforms you in reference to "sending out your material everywhere!" I contacted quite a few production companies AND agencies and none of them accepted non-solicited material due to legal reasons. What the author SHOULD have done is tell you how you're supposed to network with agents so that you can find one to represent you at the TV/Film studios. I'm incredibly disappointed, but not discouraged.

Excellent and Easy To Read Book-very informative and interesting. It was funny too. Well worth ordering and reading. Once I started reading I could not put down. It gives great insite I think into developing high concepts. It's very positive and inspiring as well. -Laura

Being someone who writes reality show concepts, I got a wealth of information from this book. It showed me how to pitch the ideas to get them sold and on TV.

Good book on detailing how to pitch your products to Hollywood. As an experienced suit I would tell you practice makes perfect and is no substitute for theory.

This book is amazing! So excited I purchased it.

This book is easy to read and has some very good information for writers who dream of pitching an original story to Hollywood for a movie or tv show.

Lazily written, with less content than you'll find on a quick Google search. The book focuses on coming up with a 'hooky' concept and goes into minor detail on what written form you should put that in. As far as 'pitching' the sole pieces of advice include keeping it to 5mins, maintaining eye contact, and judging your energy from others in the room. Embarrassing. This was course reading for me and is so woeful I've complained. Avoid like the plague.

Amazing. Thank you.