BLOG REWIND - ONE PAGE PITCH

One Page Pitches are an art form, difficult to write and get right and probably the most important and powerful selling tool at a writer's disposal. So how exactly do you write a great One Page Pitch? Here's how I do them.

FONT:

The font you use is just as important as everything else. Get it wrong and your pitch will be a difficult read, or at the very least not inspire much enthusiasm in the reader.

I used to use FINAL DRAFT COURIER for everything I wrote until I came to the realisation readers spend their entire lives staring at that font. Your font doesn't need to be fancy, just clear enough to read. I wanted to give readers something different to look at, easier to read, which is why these days I use ARIEL in all my pitch documents and treatments.

LAYOUT:

At the top of the page, centred, in bold, in capitals and font size 14, you need to put your TITLE - ALIEN.  Below this (non-capitals) you need to state the format and genre of your pitch - a sci-fi/horror feature proposal. Then below this 'by (your name)'.

The next line should be your Tagline, written in ITALICS, in font size 12 and captured in quotation marks - "In space, no one can hear you scream!"

Then below that is your Logline (written in a plain font size 12).

And finally, below that is your pitch (written in a plain font size 12 as above), containing a brief outline of the conflicts, characters and plot.

GENRE:

Your pitch will be selling your genre, so if your script is a comedy then your pitch should also be funny, a horror then your pitch should be tense and full of scares, etc. If your script is a comedy and your pitch isn't funny then it's not doing its job.

CONFLICT:

The most important aspect of the One Page Pitch is to show conflict. Your protagonist must be in peril and you have to show this, especially the conflict with other characters. If you don't your pitch will be dull and flat. Show your protagonist bumping up against problems and obstacles, and make the reader really feel for his plight.

THE ENDING:

I've been guilty of this myself on many an occasion, but you should never end a pitch with a question - Will Ripley be able to defeat the Alien and escape home? You want your audience to ask this question, but not your reader. The reader needs the full picture, what happens and how the film or TV series plays out. If you don't tell them they'll think you don't know yourself and it'll go against you.

FOOTER:

Add your NAME - EMAIL - PHONE NUMBER (or your agent's details) in the footer at the bottom of the page. It's OK to do this in Courier font as it's not part of the main document.

Here's an example of one of my pitches (copyright me of course) for reference only.

“SIDEKICK”

a 6 x 60-minute comedy-drama TV series proposal

by

Dominic Carver

‘Second best.’

A middle-aged man, disillusioned with being the sidekick of superhero Captain Cosmos, struggles to find himself as he juggles his family life and his secret identity while looking to get the credit he thinks he deserves.

DAVID TUCKER has just turned 45 and he’s already smashed headfirst into his midlife crisis. By day he works as a traffic control officer and by night he becomes The Gnat, sidekick to the superhero Captain Cosmos. His landmark birthday prompts him to reevaluate his life, his job, his friends and his family. It’s only then he realises he's completely lost.

David hates his job... both of them. He constantly struggles to keep his secret identity from his wife LUCY (42), who’s obsessed with aerobics, fad diets and is desperately trying to reclaim the body she had when she was twenty, and his son ALFIE (17) , who is uncommunicative and embarrassed by his parents on a daily basis. David’s trying to find himself again and thinks coming out from under the shadow of Captain Cosmos to become his own superhero is a much better idea than buying a powerful motorbike, falling off it at high speed only to watch it be totalled by a passing manure truck. But even branching out on your own can have its mishaps - like not being recognised by the police and being arrested for exposure when you’re trying to suit up in a phone box.

Millionaire IAN BAINES (44), aka Captain Cosmos, doesn’t understand and is too ignorant and self-absorbed to notice his crime-fighting partner isn’t happy with his life. Lucy doesn’t have time for her husband to give him the love and support he needs, and Alfie is too wrapped up in his raging hormones and his own burgeoning superpowers to spend any time with his father.

The only one who claims he understands David is PROFESSOR DOOMSDAY (56), aka estate agent MARCUS WAINWRIGHT, turning him against Captain Cosmos, his wife and his son, taking him out drinking and generally leading him astray. But Professor Doomsday’s motives are far more sinister than simply turning David evil - he wants to destroy him, to bring him down so that he’s in no place to rescue his son Alfie. It is Doomsday’s dastardly plan to have Alfie become one of his minions and to join him in the crime of the century - stealing the Royal Family and replacing them with robots.

This is David’s journey to find himself once more, make it as a superhero in his own right, rekindle the romance with his wife, reconnect with his son and save him from the evil clutches of Professor Doomsday.

Happy writing!

THE WATCH: THE DIFFICULTIES OF ADAPTATION - REVISITED PART 2

I have now viewed all episodes of the first series of THE WATCH and below is my revised review and conclusions...

As a whole, if you don't go in with expectations of THE WATCH being anything like the books, the show's okay, a solid bit of entertainment without being particularly memorable.

After completing the series, I watched an interview on YouTube with creator and lead writer Simon Allen and one of the producers, where they kept going on about how great Sir Terry's novels were and what great characters he had created. This is of course true, but they failed to mention their adaptation is so far removed from GUARDS GUARDS as to be almost unrecognisable and that is where and why the show fails.

Alarm bells started to ring for me when Simon suggested the novel GUARDS GUARDS didn't lend itself to an eight episode series adaptation, even though he delivered exactly that, albeit a pale, greatly diluted imitation that wasn't a patch on the original source novel. Missing was the strength of character of Lady Sybil, the leadership of career copper Captain Vimes, the hapless and delightfully comic duo of Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs, the tongue-in-cheek references, the often darkly sarcastic and self-deprecating humour and the colourfully rich world Sir Terry created for his characters to inhabit. What we actually ended up with was a sanitised view, wiped (almost) clean of everything that made Sir Terry's GUARDS GUARDS so brilliant in the first place.

It felt out of character for Captain Vimes to stumble accidentally and apologetically through the story, with Corporal Cheery instead positioned as the one with all the answers, leading, explaining and handholding the rest of THE WATCH through to the conclusion of the case. This is in contrast to Sir Terry's Watch novels, where although Vimes may have his faults he uses his copper's instincts to lead the Watch to get their man/woman/dragon ... eventually! THE WATCH's Vimes was a little more pitiful and pathetic, often muddled and barely able to make a decision without help or prompt from Corporal Cheery.

It was puzzling as to why when Simon and the producer went to great efforts to constantly praise and refer to Sir Terry's genius, they then decided to disregard the vast majority of GUARDS GUARDS. It seemed odd to me, that they were in one breath trying to sell it as one of Sir Terry's greatest works and in the next telling us they were only 'inspired' by it to deliver something so radically different, completely missing or deliberately ignoring the importance of the audience's expectation.

And 'expectation' is the keyword here. There was already a built-in audience of millions of fans for Vimes and the Night's Watch, all of whom had expectations of what a TV adaptation of the novels would deliver. If the show had delivered on that expectation then the series would have been a runaway hit. But it didn't and the adaptation lost its audience before the show was even aired, which is why I suspect it has appeared on iPlayer rather than episodically on primetime BBC One.

If you adapt such a renowned and well-loved work, or any work for that matter, you have to make sure you deliver on what the audience is expecting, with maybe a few twists and turns along the way to freshen things up and play with that expectation. THE WATCH fell woefully short of this, alienating its audience from the outset, making it almost impossible to recover from the negative word of mouth it generated. As I said above, the show is okay and reasonably entertaining, but when you ignore and alienate your target audience you will always be doomed to failure.

Happy writing!

THE WATCH: THE DIFFICULTIES OF ADAPTATION - REVISITED

The BBC's long-anticipated THE WATCH finally hit iPlayer this week but is it, as fans of Sir Terry's books feared, a complete betrayal of a much-loved series or is it actually quite good?

I've watched the pilot episode twice over the last twenty-four hours and while there is a lot to like, the cyberpunkesque version of the City Watch, the ultraviolet/neon/graffiti covered interiors and exteriors and Richard Dormer's brilliant take on Captain Vimes, it doesn't quite have the depth of colour and uniqueness of the original.

The show's opening title disclaimer 'inspired by the characters created by' is unusual, almost as if the creators wanted to apologise in advance for having made a conscious decision to make radical changes to the source material. The most important consideration of any adaptation is to make sure you don't alienate the fans of the work you are adapting. They're the foundation of your audience, the ones you shouldn't have to convince, so why take such a dramatic change in direction and risk losing them?

There are the noticeable absences of Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs and Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler has gone from a loveable street vendor who would sell his own grandmother for a profit to an almost unrecognisable wheelchair bound thug called simply Throat Dibbler, with more menace and a lot less charm than the much loved original.

It's easy then, to see why the fans of Sir Terry's GUARDS GUARDS might be disappointed and even hostile towards the adaptation. These changes dilute the richness of the world Sir Terry created, weakening the story, and the reason why GUARDS GUARDS worked so well in the first place was because of the warmness and camaraderie of the dysfunctional family of the Watch and the beautifully created world they inhabited. Take from that and it doesn't quite work.

The biggest disappointment for me is the lack of Sir Terry's humour. I'm not saying the show isn't funny, it is, it just doesn't have the humour of the novels and the adaptation loses something because of this. The novel had me laughing out loud but I barely cracked a smile during the opening episode.

The show is a little disappointing, but then the expectation was set very high to begin with. It's not awful by any means and there are some lovely moments between characters that made me believe there was better to come. For me, it's definitely worth the watch, just leave your expectations behind and watch it with an open mind. 

Happy writing!

MARE OF EASTTOWN - THE FIRST EPISODE

NOTE - this blog is about the 1st episode only of MARE OF EASTTOWN and not the series as a whole.

While most were raving about how good the series was I couldn't dredge up even a tiny amount of enthusiasm to watch the second episode, let alone the entire series.

I disliked the opening episode, found it to be laborious to watch, the characters ordinary and unappealing and the plot directionless and dull. Where was the crime/mystery drama I was promised? Why did I have to wait until the end of the episode for things to finally begin to look interesting? But I persevered for the full sixty minutes, willing the episode to improve while my wife urged me to change the channel and save us both. I eventually lost her to her mobile about a third of the way through and despite my perseverance, I still felt the same as the episode came to an end. 

Look, I get it... I get that the show is an aching examination of loss. I get that it's written with the murder as a backdrop to the in-focus impact it has on Mare and her community. What I don't get is why I had to sit through 59 minutes of setup and backstory to reach the heart of the idea? I don't believe for one moment that I'm the only person on the planet who gave up on the series after the disappointing first episode. Comments like, "It's worth giving another go," "It's a slow burn" and "It did start a little slow," all tell me others DID feel the same but didn't want to be seen being negative about a show so critically well-received.

After reading articles on the show it's clear to me the creator wanted the theme of loss front and centre and the murder mystery playing quietly in the background. But for me, without the murder mystery in the first episode, you are left with nothing strong enough to compare the theme of loss to. Is the writing in the first episode new and innovative as some people claim..? Not in my opinion, because without the murder mystery running parallel to the theme from the outset, all you are really watching is setup and exposition, regardless of how well it's disguised with clever and often brilliant dialogue.

The show doesn't 'hit the ground running', rather it drags itself across the tarmac for fifty-nine minutes in a stumbling attempt to get to its feet. If a show doesn't capture my attention and make me care about the characters all within the first sixty minutes, then it's lost me.

In the light of others' glowing testimony there's a part of me tempted to go back and rewatch the first episode and continue with the series, but in all honesty, why should I? In the world of downloadable content and on-demand binge-watching, there are other shows more deserving of my time and attention, so why waste more of it when I wasn't enthralled the first time around? Entertain me, don't make me work for it!

I tried to do something similar with the pilot of a recent spec, taking my time to set up the rich universe I had created, where the main character only accepts the call to arms halfway through the episode. Quite rightly my agent informed me the first half of my screenplay was slow, dull and although it set up the world brilliantly, I could have done exactly the same job weaving bits of information in amongst the action.

That's why MARE OF EASTTOWN didn't ignite my imagination because while being massively unmoved by the whole first episode, I was also struggling to decide if the show was a thriller or a drama. A murder/mystery, the chase to catch a killer naturally lends itself to the thriller genre, so being forced to wade through sixty minutes of setup before the show got up off the floor and started to find its momentum, felt like a lifetime.

There will always be exceptions and for some of you MARE OF EASTTOWN is it. However, for me, it failed to entertain or capture my attention. But that's okay, we're allowed to have a difference of opinion, it would be a dull world if we all agreed on everything.

If you think I'm wrong, please... try and convince me otherwise, I would genuinely love to hear your thoughts.

Happy writing!