#12 - Liz Hannah, Award Winning Screenwriter - Pt 2

You can find and subscribe to the premium episodes of this podcast at pitch.supportingcast.fm. Last week, we left you with a bit of a cliffhanger. Our guests, Carrie Weisberg and Liz Hannah, were entertaining and educating us all when Leah shared her recent correspondence with an Academy Award nominated screenwriter from the eighties. This writer declined our invite to come on the show as a guest, but said they might be listening to pick up some pointers on how to pitch. Then Liz said she cried, having read a recent pitch for something she's producing. I wanna know what about this person's pitch made her cry. So let's pick up right there and see what she has to say. This is great because I emailed a bunch of Oscar nominated and Oscar winning screenwriters from the sixties onwards. And one of them who was nominated in eighties got back to me, and he said, thanks for writing. I look forward to listening to your podcast and perhaps getting pitch pointers. I'm an absolute disaster at pitching. I have to write the whole script to get anywhere. Yeah. So it's like par for the course. Yeah. It it it absolutely is. And I think, like, I I recent I'm producing and directing a movie that we just pitched, and I'm not writing it. And the writer sent me the the pitch document to, like, give notes on. And I was like, this is like, I cried reading it. And then I was like, this is, like, the best pitch I've ever read. And it was four pages long. And he pitched it and was like, boom, boom, boom. Everybody, like, if you'd like to do the movie with us, that'd be wonderful. But what I thought was great about his pitch that I've now completely stolen for everything that I'll ever do Yes. Please share. Was that, you know, he did the thing that, you know, everybody tells you, which is like, why me and things like that and, like, set up the world. It's based on true story. So, you know, sort of the first page of the pitch was, let me set this up for you. Let me tell you what this is and, like, why it's why it matters. And then talked about, you know, then what the movie is kind of on a on a on a global scale, you know, like, tonally comps that work for it, things like that. And then was like, let me tell you the characters. And then in this telling of who the characters are, tells the story of the movie, and then that's it. And it would and but, like, didn't commit to anything major in because it wasn't like he's like, here's what happens in act one. He just in sort of there was something incredibly clever about saying here's the characters and then tricking you into hearing the pitch for the movie when actually talking about the characters …