Continued from Part 1… If you want to sell your screenplay to a producer, then they first need to ask to see your script. That’s not an option, that’s the way it is.
You can’t sell a script to a producer if they don’t want to buy it and if they’ve never even heard of you or your story. So how can you go about making this happen? What is it about your story that will appeal to them and make them want to buy from you?
Don’t underestimate the top producers in Hollywood. They are very smart people with a keen sense of story and a nose for screenplays that can be turned into movies.
But the same rules still apply. You need to pitch your story to a producer in order to even have a chance at getting your script picked up or optioned. For your pitch to be effective, you need to focus on the emotional parts of your story and how it can connect emotionally with audiences.
Your Story Must Connect With Producers Emotionally
The producer knows that if they find your story emotionally compelling then there’s a good chance that other people will find your story compelling too.
It’s crucial when making your pitch to a producer that you convey the emotional parts of your story and focus on that.
There’s a great example of this when Hollywood producer Peter Guber was pitched the true story of a father that goes to South America looking for his dead son. The story involved a lot of South American politics as well.
Guber decided that a story heavy on foreign politics and a father’s hopeless search for a son that audiences already knew to be dead was a bad investment. Guber passed on the project. That is until he met with the dead son’s father in person.
The father asked Guber if he really knew his own children. The father then went on to explain that he knew that his son was most likely dead, but he wasn’t searching to find his son, he was searching to know him, to better understand who his son was and pay homage to his memory.
This got Guber thinking. Did he really know his own daughters? That thought was enough to connect Guber emotionally to the story. That’s all it took. Guber took the story and turned it into an academy award winning picture called Missing.
If you want to achieve the same effect when pitching your own stories, you need to know where the emotional core of your story lies. Some of the best pitches I’ve ever seen focused on telling an emotional part of the story, not the actual story itself.
Brilliant. Simple. Powerful. That’s the true power of an emotional pitch. It draws producers in and makes them want to know more.
What’s The Emotional Core Of Your Story?
If you really want to sell your script to a producer, you first need to know this… what’s the emotional core of your story.
Most query letters I see try to pitch a screenplay by plot only. This is a huge mistake.
Screenwriters tend to focus on plot at the expense of emotion. As a writer, it’s important to remember that people connect on an emotional level as opposed to cold hard facts and plot points.
Getting a producer to ask for your script is simply a matter of getting them to emotionally connect with your story.
*Jennifer Sloane has worked as a screenplay agent in Los Angeles and Nashville for the last five years. Jennifer loves good movies, music and animals. A former television and movie executive, Jennifer currently heads business development at Script Mailer (a company that connects screenwriters with agents and producers in Hollywood).