True Hollywood Story: my first pitch meeting

It’s my first pitch meeting! I’m so excited. I know all about pitch meetings — I know that to sell your pitch, you need to take your original, dynamic, exciting new idea and express it as a tired old cliche — preferably two tired old cliches combined in an interesting way. It’s Star Wars meets Die Hard, it’s Benji meets The French Connection, it’s Serpico meets The Sound of Music. Maybe, if your idea is outrageously difficult to define, you can throw in a third cliche — it’s Silence of the Lambs meets The Muppet Movie — in space!

(At this stage of my career [that is, 1992], the reader should know, I am of the habit of walking past subway posters, describing the action, and then adding ” — and they have to solve a murder!”  “A woman goes to a laser surgery clinic, where she meets a bespectacled Mideastern doctor  — and they to solve a murder!”  “A woman tries a new toothpaste — and she has to solve a murder!” This joke backfired on me one day when I passed an ad for Newport cigarettes and said “A fun-loving young couple is getting married — and they have to solve a murder!” and then realized that that was actually a pretty good idea for a movie.  Try it some time!)

I go to the meeting. The offices of FLMS are classy in a New York way — lively and plush, lots of edgy, post-modern art in the lobby.

We go into PNW’s office. Pitch meetings are never just the writer and the Person Who Can Say Yes. The Person Who Can Say Yes is always flanked by at least two other people, Pilot Fish really, whose job is to sit there and listen and maybe take notes and then later discuss the pitched projects with the Person Who Can Say Yes. The Person Who Can Say Yes is generally inclined to Say No, and they need, I think, those two other people to help them feel better about that.

Anyway, so PNW has two of these people flanking her. One is a Perfectly Nice Younger Woman and the other is a young man who I will call Blow-Dried Little Asshole. B-DLA looks like he’s 20 years old. His haircut looks like it cost more than my monthly rent and he carries with him an opaque, impenetrable sense of entitlement and arrogance.

I go into my pitch. The movie I’m thinking of is one I’ve written with a friend of mine, a love story set against the alternative music scene of the 1980s. I remember my pitch rule, and I say “It’s The Way We Were meets Slacker.” PNW and PNYW smile and nod, but B-DLA snorts with derision, tosses his head back and says “Slacker performed like an art film.”

I can’t tell you the impact this moment had on me. I loved Slacker, I had never seen anything like it, and, more important, I had never seen a movie that so accurately described the concerns of my peculiar generation so well. Even worse, I loved art films as a genre even more — they were the mainstay of my cinematic diet. Half the movies I saw were either at the Angelika or Film Forum. “Art Film” to me was something to aspire to, not something to spit on.   Bergman and Kurosawa, Kubrick and Antonioni, Fellini and Almodovar, Jarmusch and Lynch, these guys weren’t curse-words in my household, they were models of creative behavior.  Yet this B-DLA had just spit on both Slacker and Art Film in one breath. What I didn’t know was that when a writer says “Art Film” in a pitch meeting, he might as well be saying “Dog Shit.” It’s The Godfather meets Dog Shit!

So, my pitch was dead at that point but I was too green to realize it. And keep in mind, this was not a Big Time Studio, this was the “edgy” studio, the “young” studio known for taking chances and fostering daring young talent.

I still don’t know what B-DLA meant by this statement — how could you denigrate Slacker for performing like an art film? It’s got 100 characters and no plot, how should it perform? It cost $27,000, grossed $1,000,000, introduced a new term to our language, defined a generation and began the career of Richard Linklater, but apparently for B-DLA that’s not good enough, Slacker should have performed like Iron Eagle.