Screenwriting : What you should never say during a pitch meeting. by Phillip E. Hardy, Prolifique

Some funny ones in there, thanks for sharing.

You bet.

Yes, I have changed my Fantasy script to an Action-Adventure now :( Darn you Lord of the Rings. Of course just for fun I should say it's a Oscar winning huge concept Western Fantasy that you need.

Great advice on the don'ts, how about the do's?

I have discovered "Would you like to touch my butt" doesn't work. Most of these 16 things are "tell" rather than "show" - you just want to pitch your screenplay and have that pitch demonstrate that it's great. The genre things are research stuff - in my BREAKING IN / SELLING Blue Book I have a chapter called Consider The Source, which looks at finding the source for types of films in a genre or subgenre. Fantasy almost always comes from some existing source (novels) rather than spec scripts. The additional problem with Fantasy and "Space Opera" is that it is expensive to make. Actually, that may be an issue with Westerns as well - any movie that takes place in a time period which is not right now. The thing about THE MATRIX is that it does take place right now, and on "Earth", and in the city of Chicago (in the screenplay). It's the idea that our reality isn't real that's cool... and that shows you the power of a great concept. A great high concept is less expensive to film than a non high concept, because ideas cost nothing. You want to pitch your screenplay and have the listener imagine an entire story from the idea, characters, and situations... even if it is not the exact same story as in your screenplay, the pitch sparks the imagination.

Good advice, but the genre advice seems off. A number of InkTip script requests call for science fiction stories. It's not necessarily poison, especially if the company has a history of producing certain types of films.