Film Courage: Why do pitch meetings exist in the first place?
Scott Kirkpatrick, Executive Vice President of Co-Productions & Distribution/Author: Executives have this issue where they need lots of stuff to make their jobs functional and it is impossible for all of those ideas to come from one place. You can’t just create all of them in the boardroom and they need outside influence, they need people who are much more in a creative mindset. Executives look at these things as problems. You’re walking in saying We need X number of films this year, we need 20 films on our calendar for Q4. All they’re thinking about is more like What are we going to slate, when and where, what are we going to program for this month? What are we going to program for this quarter? We need a lot of assistance in terms of Okay, what are we going to fill that with? I’m really good at getting a deal together, I can get the financing together, I can create the opportunity of this is the movie we’re going to make. A lot of the deals I do we’re making movies before the movie exists, before there’s a script. It’s a concept but I’ve closed many, many deals that are just a big contract with financial numbers attached to it and all the titles are to be determined movie number one, number two, number three and it’s a package of films. That’s when we go out to creative outlets, whether it’s production companies, development executives that we know, screenwriters that we know and it’s much more about We need some films here, what do you have? Or I set up a meeting with a network or a VOD platform and they want to know what films we have. I will go out to writers that we work with a lot and say I’m meeting with this client, what do you have that sort of matches these types of genres? Then I’ll just take two or three log lines that they have, I’ll put them all together and we’ll present them and see what sticks so to speak…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Scott Kirkpatrick is the Executive Vice President of Co-Productions & Distribution for Nicely Entertainment—a Los Angeles-based production and distribution company that produces original TV movies and scripted TV series—where he brokers major content deals and has executive produced a variety of TV movies including “The Art of Christmas”, “Sappy Holiday” and “The Snowball Effect”. Previously, Kirkpatrick served as the Senior Vice President of North American Sales & Business Development for the London-based NENT Studios UK where he oversaw international television distribution deals on a variety of programs including BBC’s “The Cry”, Channel 4’s “Shameless” and ITV’s “Doc Martin”. Prior to this, Kirkpatrick served as Executive Director of Distribution for MarVista Entertainment, a Los Angeles-based production and distribution company that produces original TV movies and has managed international TV deals on major franchises, including “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers”. Before shifting to the distribution side of the industry, Kirkpatrick worked behind the scenes on major studio productions, including “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”, and has produced and directed TV series and feature films including “Eye for an Eye” and “Roadside Massacre”. He is the author of the books “Writing for the Green Light: How to Make Your Script the One Hollywood Notices” and “Introduction to Media Distribution: Film, Television and New Media”. Kirkpatrick lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.
CONNECT WITH SCOTT KIRKPATRICK
Linkedin.com/in/scottkirkpatrick310
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