Industry Nexus - Pitches, Letter Openers and Loglines, Oh My!

Pitches, Letter Openers and Loglines, Oh My!

Written by Veronica

Babies crying on airplanes while releasing questionable fluids from various body cavities have nothing on the excruciating few months in the television world known as “pitch season.” Yes, I’ll say it loud and proud: I’d rather spend a 14-hour flight to Europe seated next to sticky-overbearingly-loud-and-excreting-baby than continue on my current path of scheduling pitches for my executive bosses. Sound unreasonable? Try fitting thirty-five 45-minute meetings into a 5-day week without losing the will to wake up in the morning, and then “leave word” for me at the office with your notes. I’ll get back to you when I’m done stabbing myself in the thigh with my letter opener.

As I enter my third pitch season, I’m beginning to notice that my patience has waned even more than previous years. (See “letter opener.”) For the rookies blissfully unaware of pitch setting rituals, every year from approximately July to October, the television networks, studios, production companies, and talent agency TV-lit departments become overrun with a stampede of writers/producers/directors who all claim to have “the next hit TV show.” More specifically, “the next Grey’s Anatomy.” Apparently, adding Grey’s Anatomy to the logline increases the value of the pitch/idea, and the studio/network/producers’ willingness to consider buying it. For example, if a writer wants to create a show about old people in a nursing home who play bingo, he or she should create the following logline to describe it: “Grey’s Anatomyin a nursing home – with bingo!” Doesn’t that sound vastly more appealing than “Old people in a nursing home who play bingo?”

Aside from the various reincarnations of the Grey’s Anatomy premise, pitch season offers other reasons for the letter-opener-in-the-thigh moment. I’m talking to Y-O-U, the greasy-haired assistant in the overburdened cubicle who claims that the writer attached to the project is from Uzbekistan, and will only be in Los Angeles for one hour on Tuesday, August 21st. Yes, the Tuesday that is two days away, and is already booked with seven other pitches that “have to be on that particular day because the writer/director/producer is leaving the following day for vacation.” Post-pitch, the “foreign” writer will be revealed to be from Sherman Oaks, and not the impossible to pronounce Middle Eastern country. Apparently, another sure-fire way to amp up the value of a pitch is to make the auspices as unavailable as possible. “Sorry, John Smith can’t do that time because he is shooting a film in Romania next January, and is trying to acclimate his body for the different time zone.”

As frustrating as it is to deal with the evil that pitch season releases into the atmosphere a la Miss Pandora, there is a small consolation prize in the Cracker Jack box: Getting to release some evil right back. That Ari Gold-worshipping assistant who totally dissed me at the industry mixer in favor of the more important coordinator with the impossibly skinny legs? Yeah, his boss’ pitch is sooo going in November. Hope he’s got a letter-opener on hand. He’s going to have some serious stabbing to do when he gets my bosses’ “earliest available time slots…”

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