The Time I Pitched a TV Pilot In Person to a Major Network

The speaker introduces their podcast, Deep Shit, which explores transformative and interesting life experiences. In this episode, the speaker talks about their experience pitching a TV pilot to three major networks. They discuss their background in writing and how they discovered their passion for screenwriting. They also explain the challenges and limited opportunities in the screenwriting industry, particularly after the rise of streaming technology and the economic recession. They mention the difference between the front door (moving to LA and networking) and the back door (finding alternative ways to break into the industry). They highlight the importance of having a platform or IP for success, but acknowledge their lack of awareness about these industry dynamics at the time. Welcome to the very first episode of Deep Shit, a podcast about harrowing, odd, funny, transformative, unique, interesting, life-changing experiences and what we can learn from them. Now normally I'll be interviewing someone, but in this episode, for the sake of it just being the first episode and for you guys, my audience, to get to know me a little better, I'll be talking about one of my many deep shit experiences, the time I pitched a TV pilot in person to a major TV network. I plan to share my other deep shit experiences as well, all of them eventually, but I thought this was a good one to start with because it'll give you a really good idea of my own background and who I am. I did end up writing this one out because I knew if I tried to wing it, it would turn into a total mess, so if it sounds like I'm reading, yes, I am, at least a little bit. So this experience was actually back in 2014. I had what I assumed to be a very unique experience of pitching a TV pilot live, like in person in the same room, to a major TV network. Three of them, actually. I ended up pitching to three TV networks. Let me give you some context first. I've been a writer my entire life. When I was younger, I used to spend hours and hours alone in my room filling spiral notebooks with stories about monsters. As I got older, I started to write articles. I wrote for my high school yearbook and then my college newspaper. I got an internship with a mid-sized Colorado newspaper right out of college and then landed a job with a small newspaper in the SF Bay Area. This was in the late 90s, and journalism at the time was kind of enjoying the last hurrah of its heyday. The warning signs were definitely there. Newspapers were starting to die off, and the ones left were starting to merge. I was actually very lucky to land a job at a fairly respected newspaper in a part of the country that I actually wanted to live in, which is where I'd grown up, in Northern California. A lot of my journalism school friends had moved to places like Kansas to land their first paying gig, and I really didn't want to spend my 20s in a place like Kansas. Anyway, after about four years working for various Bay Area, SF Bay Area newspapers, I abandoned my career and moved to Spain. Why? Because I wanted to learn Spanish for one, and travel, and had always wanted to live in Europe, and since I was single at the time, I felt like if I was going to do it, now was my chance. Pretty soon after moving to Madrid, I met the woman who would become my wife, and together we moved to New York, where I went to graduate school for creative writing. If this sounds like one person's attempt to make as little money in life as possible, it kind of was. I mean, all I knew about myself was that I enjoyed writing, and I was good at it. At least, that's what my mom told me, and that's actually also what my instructors and classmates at Sarah Lawrence, where I got my MFA, were telling me, but they often qualified it with the following question, have you ever thought about screenwriting? To which I responded with a resounding, not really. You see, I'd always seen literary fiction as a higher art form than TV or film. I still kind of do, actually, although now that I know what screenwriting is all about, I have a completely different appreciation of it, but at the time, I wasn't super interested in it. However, on several occasions in grad school, I did get that question, as much from my instructors as from my classmates. They all saw something in my writing that seemed to lend itself to screenwriting more than literary fiction. Maybe it was because I could write funny, and I was good at dialogue, and honestly, I could see myself that my fiction wasn't really lyrical in the same way that my classmates' fiction was. It was a bit more, maybe, grounded, you could say, but these questions about screenwriting started to make me think that maybe this whole time, I should have been focused on screenwriting instead of fiction. So, when I finished grad school, I wrote a book of short stories that I had no intention of trying to publish, and this was always one of my hangups with fiction writing, too. Everything I wrote just felt like it was more for my own sake, or maybe for my own sanity than for the sake of the external world or the general public, and I never really desired to get any of it out there. I then wrote a short novel, or a novella, I guess you could call it, and as I was writing it, I thought, hey, this could make a good movie. It wouldn't have, by the way. In my total lack of screenwriting knowledge at the time, I thought it would have, and I thought I should find someone to turn it into a screenplay for me, and then I thought, well, why don't I just do that myself, and that's what I did. And doing that, I fell in love with the form. Turns out my grad school mentors and classmates were right. Screenwriting was my thing. And that's when this whole mess, for lack of a better word, began. So this was about 16 years ago. I was 34 years old at the time, which, let's be honest, is already old by Hollywood standards. It was 2008, and I had absolutely no clue what I was getting into. I really knew nothing about the screenwriting world, which is a totally different beast from the fiction writing world. In the fiction writing world, you write something, and you try to get it out there via publishing and one of thousands of lit mags that are out there. Yes, like screenwriting, it gets thrown into a slush pile, eventually gets read, and likely rejected. Unlike screenwriting, if it's well written and sent to enough places, it'll eventually find a home of some sort. That home may pay only $25 for it or even nothing, but it'll get published. In screenwriting, given that you can't just publish a screenplay, it needs millions of dollars of investment and many, many, many people with really solid connections and experience loving it to have a chance of getting made into a movie. The odds of anything happening with a screenplay, outside of maybe placing well in a big contest or your spouse or mom telling you they love it, is almost zero. Also, screenwriting is just a very weird thing to say you do. Tell someone who's not a screenwriter that you're a screenwriter, or you do screenwriting, and the response is either, anything I've seen, or a blank stare. You might as well have told them you blow animal balloons for a living, and that's because most people have no context for screenwriting outside of the Oscars. Both of the above responses are totally justified, and they're also both totally devastating to the average screenwriter's ego, but there isn't much you can do, much you, the screenwriter can do, because you can't just whip up a presentation on the spot explaining exactly what the real screenwriting world is and how it works, so you kind of just have to swallow your pride and shame and rage and move on. Now, of course, when I started screenwriting, I knew it was a tough industry, but I didn't realize just how tough it was, especially compared to the fiction publishing world. There were also two things happening at the time that would end up decimating the studio's budgets, and with it, their willingness to work with quote-unquote new screenwriters, or really any screenwriter trying to break in from the outside. Those two things were, one, the rise of streaming technology, which obliterated their DVD sales, which was the primary way they were still making their money back on movies that were getting shorter and shorter theatrical releases and smaller and smaller theatrical audiences, and two, the economic recession, which, of course, gutted all industries, including entertainment. Those two factors essentially limited the studio's development budgets, development meaning willingness to buy a script or an idea for a script for the sake of working with the writer on it to develop it into a movie. Having a brilliant idea was no longer good enough, nor was having a brilliant script. At that point, they shifted to, they, being the studio, shifted to the model we've all come to know and hate, or love, I guess, depending on your taste in movies, a focus on high-budget remakes and sequels and low-budget writer-director indie flicks. Writer-director meaning the director writes it instead of hiring a writer to write it for him or her. So those two things, which occurred around 2008, right when I was starting, essentially ended what I call the backdoor opportunity. I'll explain more on backdoor versus frontdoor in a second, for people who were only screenwriters. Although the door was still open just a tad for screenwriters who were also directors or also actors or also producers or all of the above. Meaning you basically had to be, at this point, a hyphenate, unless you're one really young, like in your 20s, and you already have some kind of IP or platform, like a best-selling book or animated series or comic book that you created, or maybe a storytelling podcast, for example, with a massive following, or a YouTube channel, or you're a TikTok star, something like that. But of course, I really had no concept of any of this taking place at the time. I just had a long list of ideas I wanted to develop into screenplays, and those also included TV scripts. Now TV wasn't in quite as bad of shape as features at the time. It was, in fact, doing much better because it was starting to explode with content and the need for content because of all the new streaming networks that were appearing. With the TV world, and this is also the way it used to be with features, the feature screen writing world, until the aforementioned double stab of death happened, there are basically two ways to break in, the front door and the back door. The front door has a much higher success rate, but it also involves a much bigger type of life commitment. The front door means moving to L.A. right after college, or better yet, in college, networking like crazy, getting a job as a PA, production assistant, on a show set, and then parlaying that into something like a showrunner's assistant job so that at some point when you do have that amazing TV pilot ready to show to people, you're literally just one or two degrees of separation from someone who could actually get it greenlit, at which point maybe you become a writer on a show. Not a given, even if it's your show in itself, but pretty good chance. Then there's the back door. The back door means not moving to L.A. or getting a job in the entertainment industry, but doing something else with your life as you do screenwriting on the side. The front door has a success rate of maybe, I don't know, 20%, 25% to be generous. The back door's success rate is probably less than 1% if we're defining success as breaking into the TV world with a job in a writer's room, so you're making a living off it. That's what I was up against, but ignorance was bliss because I think if I had fully understood just how hard and unlikely it was to break into TV writing via the back door, I probably wouldn't have never even given it a go, to be honest. I first wrote a bunch of features. One of them actually landed me a manager, and that was in 2012, so about four years after I had started screenwriting. This manager used to work as a script editor at Universal Studios before starting her own management company. I actually made my initial contact with her through a pay-to-play service called Virtual Pitch Fest. It's still around. It's basically where you just pay to send out a query letter to industry professionals, and they're obligated to respond to you through that service within five days. That manager did with me what's called a hit pocket, which is where it's like, I'm going to just send this one script out to a few companies to see if it gets any nibbles and it gets any traction. I was super excited, and I felt like, oh, my God, this is it. I've made it. Of course, she sent the script around to a handful of small production companies, all of whom would have otherwise not read the script, but since they knew her and they have a relationship with her, if she sends them a log line, that's the one-sentence encapsulation of the film's plot. If she sends them a log line that sounds interesting, they'll request to read the script. She sent it around, and we, of course, got all passes across the board, although a few of the companies had really nice things to say about my writing, and they said they'd like to read anything else I wrote. I think that's what made this manager willing to read more of my scripts, and luckily, I had written a few other scripts, which she also liked, and at that point, she officially became my manager. Now, with a manager, I had someone in my court, like an insider who lived in L.A., had lots of connections, and could get my script into production companies that would otherwise totally ignore me. Around this time, or maybe it was the next year, I think, 2013, I wrote my first TV pilot, which was a sitcom pilot called Sycamore Park. It was about a young urban stoner couple that wins one of these suburban dream homes through an online raffle, only to discover that the suburbs, or at least this particular suburb, are way crazier than the city. It was kind of like a fun fish-out-of-water thing. I got the idea when I saw one of the billboards for one of these online raffles, when a dream home raffles. It was a fun setup, and my manager read the pilot and loved it, and actually, the very first producer she had in mind for it, which was the first one she sent it to, who was a pretty big-time producer with big movies made and a few TV shows under his belt, also loved it and wanted to option it. An option is where a producer or director purchases temporary exclusive rights to a script for the sake of sending it around, the idea being, I don't want this script circulating with other people without my knowing it. I want to own it exclusively for now, for the next six months or a year or whatever, to see if I can get other people interested in it and get it off the ground. That's essentially what a producer does, get other people on board with projects. This producer optioned it for a pretty small amount of money. I don't even remember what it was. Actually, that wasn't my first option, but at that point, I'd optioned a romantic comedy feature script, which was the same script that got my manager to hip-pocket me. This producer was a pretty big producer, like I said. This was definitely a bigger deal because this particular producer was an industry veteran with very big connections. He had basically an award-filled office just off of Santa Monica Promenade and everything. Of course, I was super excited, and once again, I was thinking, oh, my God, this is it. This is my big break. Now, this is, yes, somewhat to toot my own horn, but it's a fact worth mentioning that most screenwriters trying to break in through the back door, as I described previously, don't end up even optioning a script or getting a manager, let alone both. Nowadays, it's pretty much impossible to get a manager, actually, unless you're, like I said, young and already have some kind of IP or platform going. Back then, it was possible but rare, and if it's hard to sell a feature-length screenplay, it's 50 times harder to sell a TV pilot because you're not really selling the pilot script itself. You're selling the whole show, all nine seasons or however long you hope it to go for. You're selling the setup, the hook, the characters, the overall budget, the genre tone, the storylines, the seasons. The analogy I would make is if it's like you're a real estate agent selling a single house versus selling an entire neighborhood. With a TV pilot, you're selling the whole neighborhood, so, yeah, not easy, but we optioned it to this producer for free, I think, or maybe it was a small amount, I can't remember. He started sending it around, and a few months later, we got some really exciting news. He'd sent it to a pretty big-time director friend of his, and the director loved it and was totally on board, so now I was thinking, oh, my God, this is incredible, and it was actually perfect timing, too, because the job I had at the time and I'd had for the previous five years was starting to implode via a crazy boss, and I really needed a distraction from that situation, so in addition to starting to look for a new job, I was also starting to fly down to LA for a series of meetings with this producer and his director friend to get the script into shape to send to the director's agent at UTA, which was and still is one of the biggest and most powerful agencies in LA, so I flew down to LA, I don't know, it must have been at least three separate times over the span of a few months for in-person meetings with this producer and director to work first to work on the script. This was obviously pre-COVID and still pre-Zoom, even pre-remote work, and in Hollywood, even to this day, the tendency is still to meet in person, even if it's a creative brainstorming type of thing, you just, the preference is to actually be in the same room as the person. I felt like I was kind of starting to lead a secret double life, like this one where I'm this, a medical writer and the other where I'm this sexy, glamorous Hollywood TV writer, so it was really fun. The producer was very kind of Hollywood producer-esque, I mean, he had, like I said, all his awards showcased in the lobby of his very nice office, which was right off of Santa Monica Promenade. He was in his 50s and he wore things like white dress slacks. His director friend that he got on board was this tall, dashing Englishman with a super dry English wit, and of course, they've been great buddies going all the way back, I don't know, many, many years, because they've worked on many projects together, and at the time, they were actually putting together a movie that had Gary Oldman attached to the star in it, so they were a pretty impressive duo, and this is something that's going to come out later on in other deep shit, my own deep shit stories that I share in the podcast, but I've never been great at ingratiating myself into already established cliques or social circles, especially male-oriented ones, and male bonding is essentially my worst nightmare, but it's a recurring theme in my life, and finding myself in these situations and suffering through them and going into self-sabotage or self-destruct mode, for whatever reason, the universe keeps putting me into these situations, probably for me to just get over it or learn a lesson of some kind, but yeah, so even starting off, it was a bit of an awkward situation for me, because these two guys knew each other so well, they're obviously good friends, but in the end, they're both really, really, really nice guys, and I ended up kind of feeling like I was friends with them by the end of this whole thing, so the entire thing took place over a span of maybe about a year, so first, we met a number of times to talk about the pilot, get it into shape or get it into better shape based on notes from the producer or director, and then we go into a series of meetings after that about the pitch for the script itself, and it was around this time that the director decided that we should change the name of the show from Sycamore Park to Young, Fabulous, and Broke, which sounds to me, sounded to me more like a really bad reality TV show than a TV comedy, and in addition to that, he also added in this kind of weird plot twist towards the end that didn't really make any sense, so needless to say, I wasn't crazy about these changes, these suggestions, but they made it clear to me that it was a my way or the highway type of situation. If I didn't make them, he wasn't going to have his agent try to arrange the pitches to the networks, and he was no longer going to be involved in the project, so it was sad because I knew with that name and that weird plot twist, it would never sell, and yet without it, I wouldn't have a chance to pitch it, so yeah, more for the sake of being able to experience pitching it, I went along with his suggestions, so soon enough, we had his agent at UTA on board, and I flew down to practice the pitch with his agent, so it was like a live pitch with me, the director, the producer inside the agent's office. I was pretty nervous about it, but it went by okay, the agent liked it, gave us some small pointers, and then we went ahead and set up the first pitch meeting, which was I think with IFC, if I recall correctly, but a pretty big well-known network. The day of the pitch, we first met in the producer's office to do a dry run, and I have to say, I was pretty nervous, even though I didn't have any hope that it would actually sell, I still felt a little bit like my future as a screenwriter would hinge on these meetings for some reason, which they were of course by far the biggest meetings of my screenwriting career to that point, and actually, it was around this point that I began to see kind of how Hollywood really works. At the time, this producer and director were also working together on another project, a movie that would be released in the theaters the following year with an A-list actor lead, but they were still trying to nail down the lead for the movie, and this pitch practice session we did that morning of our first pitch to the TV network ended up getting interrupted by a call from Bruce Willis's agent to the producer, which of course he had to take, leaving me and the director there to practice the pitch alone, but through all this, it was clear that my TV pilot was kind of just a small side project for them. They were basically putting a $100 bet on a 500 to 1 odds horse. They already had projects going for which they were getting paid, and they weren't getting paid for any of the work they were doing with me on this one, so it became clear to me why nobody in Hollywood who's already in it, entrenched in the industry, really bothers with anyone outside the industry, even if they have an amazing script, there's really no point. Budgets are budgets for a reason. The studios control the money, and post-2008 and the variables I mentioned above, they're not going to waste their money on long shots or on writers. That's just the way it is, so this realization was at once devastating and reassuring, or comforting I guess you could say. Devastating because I knew I'd already missed the best possible chance to break into Hollywood, which is through, as I described before, the front door, moving to LA right after college. Reassuring because at least my impending failure to become a Hollywood writer wouldn't really have anything to do with talent, but with the circumstances and state of the industry. All good, so I would go ahead and pitch this pilot and then get on with my life. Now, one would think this realization would make me not care too much about how the impending pitches would go, but think again. That day of the first pitch, I was absolutely terrified. First of all, it was my first time ever pitching something live to a network, obviously. Second, the new name of the show was just awful. It was just an embarrassing pilot to be pitching. Third, I was pitching it with this producer and director who were weathered veterans at this, and were basically treating it like just another day at the office, which for them it was. This first pitch was an after-lunch meeting with three executives from the network. We were essentially a panel pitching to a panel. I had this vision or fantasy, maybe you could call it, of the three executives being these old white men who knew nothing about TV comedy, like total douchebags, out of touch. I really wanted them to be this way because then I would be way less nervous in the room with them. The producer, director, and I met briefly in the network lobby, and then we all went out our own separate ways for lunch to clear our heads before the pitch. I walked down the street to the local Chipotle, I think it was, or some Mexican restaurant, and that's when the nerves really started to kick in. I felt like, if you've ever seen the movie Get Out, the part where the woman tells the guy about the sunken place where you're kind of viewing the world from somewhere behind your eyes or kind of sunken within your body behind them so that they're more like little tunnels, that's the way I felt. It was total dissociation, total panic attack. I was in the sunken place. Then it came time to do the pitch. We're sitting there in the network lobby waiting for them to call us in, and I almost had an instinct at that point to run. I mean, my nerves were that bad. I'm getting even nervous just talking about it right now. Meanwhile, the director and producer are kind of there just thumbing their phones, talking about the news. I mean, I think they really had no idea how nervous I was. Then it comes time to do the pitch, and the person at the front desk says they're waiting for us in the conference room. We walk in, and there are three very, very non-beefbagging, non-old white male, pretty young, probably late 20s or 30s. I think two of them were women. I'm pretty sure one was a woman of color. I mean, they could have been real estate agents, paralegals, tech marketing people, anything. They weren't what I had in mind at all when I heard the phrase network executives. Their titles were more like head of creative, head of scripted programming, so stuff like that. Of course, this made me even more nervous because I was about to get rejected by regular people with a good understanding of things. Somehow, I got through this first pitch. My part was to talk about the characters, and I literally did it from the sunken place, watching myself deliver the pitch pretty much as we planned. I'm sure I was visibly uncomfortable, but the degree to which I was panicking probably wasn't noticeable. I don't know. Of course, I felt incredibly relieved once it was done. I also realized that, of course, the pitch wasn't that great, and if I was on the other side of it, I would not be buying this TV show. No way. Sure enough, they didn't buy it, so we made some small tweaks to the pitch. We pitched it, again, to another network. I think it was a few months later. This second time, I was way less nervous, and they passed on it. The third time, I was almost completely at ease in the room. All the network executives were the same, like young, cool, relaxed people. They were very easy to talk to. The third pitch was more like a casual conversation about the show. It seemed to go really well, and they seemed to really like it. All three of us afterwards, the producer, director, and I, we came out of it really pleased with how it went and feeling like this actually could be it. Maybe we just sold it. I felt so good after that final pitch that I went on a joyride through the hills of Topanga Canyon in the fun little green Fiat I'd rented. Then, when I was on that joyride, the producer actually called me, and he said, Hey, you did such a great job. I'm so proud of you. He knew that I surfed, and he invited me to go use his Malibu house, which was on a private beach for the rest of the day. He was heading off on a trip, and he wasn't going to be there. He said he'd leave the key in the mailbox. I was very close to taking him up on it. I wish I did, because it would have made this first episode of deep shit better. In the end, I had to catch my flight back home. This high that I got, the sense of accomplishment and elation from that final pitch going so well, lasted a few more weeks. Then, of course, a few weeks later, we heard back from the network. The third one we pitched it to, and sadly, but also, let's admit it, predictably, they passed. The producer said he had some other tricks up his sleeve, but at that point, the director's agent had basically exhausted all his resources, so we couldn't really use him anymore. Then, I think it was maybe five or six months later, the producer called. He wanted to connect on it again. I was driving on Highway 101 in Marin County, heading into the Robin Williams Tunnel. Then, it was called something else, because it was before Robin Williams had died. The producer was telling me he still loved it and wanted to try to do something with it. Deep down, I knew this is one of those Hollywood type goodbye calls, breakup calls, and it would be the last time I would hear from him. I told him I was about to lose reception, because I was headed into the tunnel. He said, okay, I'll let you go. We'll talk soon. That was it. The production company read a few more pilots of mine over the years, but they were never passionate enough to give it a go like they did with the other one. That said, I'm very grateful for the entire experience, because apart from being really fun, it taught me a lot about pitching and also a lot about how Hollywood works. It's really a 100% friends and family industry. There's no reason for anyone inside the industry to work with or take on a project from anyone on the outside. I think the only reason I had this chance is because the producer just loved the pilot so much. He was willing to take out a flyer on me. I still write TV scripts and have options a few, but I have yet to get that far again with one of them. That was my first deep shit story. I hope you enjoyed it and got something from it. I hope there are some screenwriters listening to it. It's not meant to be discouraging at all. I still absolutely think it's possible to sell a TV pilot as an outsider. I just think, yeah, it's really hard, but maybe this will give you some insights around how the process works. Thank you so much for listening. This has been really fun. Stay tuned for the next episode.