Film Courage: We put a call out to our YouTube community and we asked for bad pitches and we had a tremendous response. Here’s just a few of our favorites. There were so many great ones to choose from. This one is from the username The Soylent Company.
Here’s the pitch:
There’s a guy who can’t open this jar of pickles so he runs around Los Angeles trying to find ways to open the jar of pickles. He finds himself in weird situations as well as in more and more trouble. In the end he finds a girl that has been trying to open a jar of jelly. They manage to open the jars in the end and then they sit down and they watch Shrek together. The End.
Jeffrey Davis, Writer/Professor: May I? Oh man, please. I’ll just tell you everything that I’ve learned and I’ve been taught. It’s not a story. A pitch has to give you a sense of story. Storytelling is everything. That’s the biggest thing in this book. First of all, it’s silly. It’s an incident, it’s a little sketch of people. I don’t have any details. I guess it’s funny in a kind of grade school, I mean I’m sorry, I apologize. The other thing is that it makes the mistake of a lot of writers (I’ve made it to) is the…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
CONNECT WITH JEFFREY DAVIS
CONNECT WITH PETER DESBERG
BUY THE BOOK – NOW THAT’S FUNNY!: The Art and Craft of Writing Comedy
BUY THE BOOK – PITCH LIKE HOLLYWOOD: What You Can Learn from the High-Stakes Film Industry
BIO:
Peter Desberg is professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award and Outstanding Professor Award. He is also a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in the area of stage fright and performance anxiety. The author of 23 books, he has been quoted by such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today and The New York Times, and has consulted for companies including Apple, Boeing and Toyota in the areas of pitching and persuasion, corporate presentations, and using storytelling and humor in business presentations.
Jeffrey Davis is a professor of screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and served from 2009–2019 as the department chair. Davis has also written and produced trade shows for Dick Clark Productions and counted among his advertising clients Dell Computers, Toyota of America and Honda. His has more than 30 credits to his name, including Night Court, Remington Steele, and documentaries for A&E, Discovery, and The History Channel. As a consultant, his areas have also included writing, pitching, and employing storytelling and humor in business presentations.
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