When pitching to movie people about your book, you have a short time to absolutely WOW them with how great your story will be on the big screen. Then you're gone. You might want to leave them with something to remember you by, like a pitch sheet.
A Pitch Sheet includes the log line and a synopsis of your book. One page is plenty to hand over after a quick pitch, if there is interest or not.
You don't need to tell them everything on the first meeting, just enough to make them realize that your book would make an awesome movie and get them hooked.
A synopsis over four pages in the biz, is called the Treatment. If they ask for a treatment, that is GREAT news.
You don't need to tell them everything on the first meeting, just enough to make them realize that your book would make an awesome movie and get them hooked.
A synopsis over four pages in the biz, is called the Treatment. If they ask for a treatment, that is GREAT news.
To fluff up the sheet to pitch pack status, you may also include bios on the main characters, other interesting factors like locations, music etc, and a dream cast of who will star in the movie.
A Treatment - This is longer than a synopsis and can be between 10-20 pages. There is much confusion in the industry over the length of a treatment but if you are asked to submit one, keep in mind it's a very long synopsis. Many industry pros differ in what they call the Treatment or the Sheet.
If you are lucky enough to talk to a producer, studio head, director, film maker, just realize that your time with them is extremely short and every minute counts. Be concise, relevant and compelling. In your pitch, answer why would they benefit from making this movie?
For most pitchers, you will only need the pitch sheet initially, until the story is optioned. Then you might need the pack.
If you are a screenwriter, they may ask for a Beat Sheet, a bullet point list of scenes.
If you are a screenwriter, they may ask for a Beat Sheet, a bullet point list of scenes.
Here's a good blog about terminology from the guy who wrote Sweet Home Alabama:
A log line is the one to two sentence summary of your story.
Use action words and powerful writing!
Use action words and powerful writing!
Who is your main character and what does he want?
Who or what stands in his way?
Why is this story unique?
eg) A young man and woman from different social classes fall in love aboard an ill-fated voyage at sea. (Titanic)
This is an example of a short log line.
eg) An older man is forced to deal with an ambiguous future after he enters retirement and his wife passes away. Ultimately, he finds hope as he comes to terms with his daughter's marriage and his own life.(About Schmidt)
This is a longer one.
Both are acceptable and not especially memorable. How would you rewrite them?
When writing your synopsis, be sure to describe the scenes like you are watching a movie.
I've included my Pitch Sheet below, but I'm not entirely convinced it's anywhere near perfect. For the one-page version, I leave out the synopsis and only go with the blurb.
Kim Hornsby is the Author of Award-Winning The Dream Jumper's Promise available on Amazon Books. She is a Bestselling Supernatural Suspense Author who lives in the Seattle area where she writes during the rainy months.
Title: The
Dream Jumper’s Promise
Adventurous Thriller with Romance and Supernatural Elements, Set on Maui,
Contact Information:
425) 444-xxxx
TDJP on Amazon http://amzn.com/B00AA4FAJC
Log Line
A hardened soldier who once misused his psychic ability to
change the future in order to save a girlfriend must set a wrong right by
attempting to find her missing husband. Dead or Alive.
Blurb
Jamey Dunn has freakishly accurate intuition and can slip
into other people's dreams. On leave from his posting in Afghanistan where he dream jumps for the military, Jamey crosses paths with his lost love, Tina Greene, who's life is in a downward spiral after losing her husband to a surfing accident-- presumably dead without a recovered body. Tina doesn't trust Jamey, after walking out on her ten years ago but when she confesses to having strange recurring dreams of her husband, Jamey reveals his secret and offers to help by entering her dreams.--it's Jamey's fault that Hank is missing. In the dream world and awake, Jamey joins Tina in
a search for her husband’s missing body off the Maui coastline in search of an underwater cavern guarded by a Tiger Shark. As Jamey tries to redeem a broken promise to protect the woman he loved from a con man and life of misery, they find the cavern, the body, the shark and a ghost that won't let Tina go.
Inception
Meets Romance on Maui
Characters
Tina Greene is a mid-thirties, girl next door type
from the upper class of Seattle who owns a dive shop in Lahaina on Maui. With
her constant companion, a pit bull mix named Obi Wan, she’s made her mark on
the Maui Scuba scene. She’s recently lost her spunk when her new husband went
missing and has succumbed to depression. Haunting dreams have Tina convinced
she’s going crazy and that her Lahaina shrink is in over her head.
Jamey Dunn is a complicated dude. He has
hyper-intuition (telepathy) and can enter people’s dreams—an unpredictable gift
of three decades. He’s fit, handsome, fastidious, and has loved Tina from the
first moment he saw her ten years earlier and knew he couldn’t have her. On
leave from a Sixth Sense unit in Afghanistan where he enters dreams of POW’s,
he’s recovering after a debilitating dream jump with a member of al Qaeda.
Noble Santiago is a con man. He grew up in LA’s
barrio, and has been pulling cons all his life with his brother. They follow a
con job to Maui, it falls flat and they take up with Tina who has priceless
inherited paintings. Noble hides in the guise of a hula dancer and lives in a
cottage in Tina’s backyard.
Hank (the husband) is Noble’s brother, pulling off
cons his whole 40 years. When they end up on Maui and their target goes soft,
they see the perfect con. But Hank ends up married, in love with his wife,
Tina, and dead.
Locations
Maui – Lahaina Towne,
Front Street, the Dive Shop, restaurants, bars,
Tina’s
house, a plantation-style large cottage surrounded by property and palm trees
Jamey’s
condo overlooking Ironwood beach in the windswept area of Kapalua up north
Dive
scenes underwater – Tank Dive, Cavern Dive, Molokini Crater and the dive scene
to the dark cave
Molokai –
Keanakakai downtown and the Molokai hotel
Diving on the Sweeping Molokai Sea Cliffs and underwater off the
Kalaupapa Leper Colony
Afghanistan –
Flashback of his unit that uses the 6th Sense to interrogate
prisoners and withdraw information
Dream jump in war-torn Afghanistan
Synopsis
Jamey Dunn bolts upright in bed after a nightmare in which
he sliced off a young al Qaeda’s head. After a few deep breaths, Jamey remembers
he’s on leave, on Maui and gets out of bed to step in to the shower.
Tina Greene is opening her dive shop for the day in Lahaina,
Maui. The charming whaling town is coming to life as the sun rises over the
West Maui Mountains. When a policeman enters the store holding a weathered
wallet, Tina recognizes it as Hank’s. The cop says they found her missing husband’s
wallet at the popular surfing spot, Hobbit Land, a rocky pullout with a trail
leading to a favorite wave break. It’s believed that Hank died surfing eight
months earlier and assumed the sharks got the body. Tina can’t accept it.
She settles in at desk to tackle her scuba business that’s teetering
on bankruptcy and hears a scream in the shop. Bolting in to the store, she sees
her shop girl, Katie, hugging a man who turns out to be Katie’s uncle, Jamey.
He’s on leave from his posting in Afghanistan and Tina has agreed he can dive
free while on Maui. When he turns, she realizes Jamey’s the man who left her without
an explanation ten years ago. Tina takes his hand and a jolt passes between
them and she passes out.
That night, she dreams of scuba diving with Hank, who turns
into a tiger shark. She wakes up wet, clutching a hunk of coral from the dream.
She calls her shrink who is treating her for grief and depression. A medication
adjustment is suggested. The day passes freakishly quickly and on her way home
that night, she pops in to the Honokowai Superette to buy beer and sees Jamey
with his wife, the perfect woman Tina always imagined Jamey left her for.
When she wakes the next morning, Tina realizes the pending
storm has arrived with palm trees bending sideways in the wind and rain pelting
her front yard. She cancels the morning boat dive at her dive shop only to
realize that yesterday never happened. She never woke with coral and never saw
Jamey at the grocery store. She was still dreaming. Tina ties a ribbon to her
dog’s collar to determine dream life from reality, hopes it works, and heads
off to see her shrink.
That night she arrives home to find Noble worried about her.
He lives in the cottage on her large property and has been her rock during this
tragic time. Noble is fond of Tina, protective of her, and together they are
trying to pick up the pieces and move on after Hank’s disappearance. He’s been
sleeping with her, (platonically,) to get her through the night. But there is
interest on Noble’s part.
Tina can’t go near the ocean without seeing Hank’s mangled
body below the surface and can’t dive anymore. But the next day her boat
captain falls sick and she steps in to drive the boat. Jamey is on board the
8-passenger dive boat and she is plagued by memories of how much she loved
Jamey years ago.
That night, she wakes after her recurring diving dream with
Hank and finds her nightgown wet, on her floor. She’s unknowingly changed her clothes
since going to bed. In fear, she runs to Noble’s cottage and tripping, wakes up
in her bed to see her dog, Obi, wearing the ribbon on his collar. She’s had
another WILD – Wake Induced Lucid Dream with a false awakening. Insanity looms.
Jamey wakes on high alert. He senses something is wrong and
phones his father in Seattle to check on his ten-year-old daughters from a
failed marriage. They talk about Jamey healing from brain trauma during an
Afghanistan Dream Jump and Pops asks about Jamey’s diminished ability to enter
dreams. That morning, Jamey senses Tina is in danger and takes a spot on the morning
boat dive. At Molokini Crater, Tina must
replace her sick instructor as the dive leader. Her dreaded hallucination of a
mangled Hank with his skin falling off shows itself and has her surfacing
quickly. Jamey takes over to lead the divers back to the boat.
When Jamey corners Tina back in Lahaina, she’s hesitant to
divulge anything to Jamey, who she thinks betrayed her ten years earlier.
Especially after hearing the heartbreaking news that Jamey married his
ex-girlfriend and had twins after promising to return to Maui for a life with
her. Like a slap in the face, Jamey’s fatherhood hurts more because Tina and
Hank had been trying to have a baby when he disappeared.
The next day, Tina’s dive boat captain is still sick and she
asks Jamey to lead the dive on a wrecked sunken tank with experienced divers.
On the boat, her feelings for him soften when he makes her laugh.
After the dive, Tina mentions her strange dreams of diving
with Hank, and Jamey feels responsible for the mess of Tina’s life. He asks to meet
at the Barefoot Bar in Kaanapali, thinking she might be more likely to meet at
a bar on the way home from work. where he cautiously reveals his psychic
ability and that he can enter dreams. She doesn’t believe either claim until he
reveals something only she would know as they walk along a darkened Maui beach
with the huge hotels of Kaanapali in the background.
That night, he finds himself in a dream with Tina, as Hank,
and is surprised at how much Hank loved his wife. He’d assumed otherwise.
Hank’s broken surfboard turns up and Tina takes it home from
the police station. Noble comforts Tina, admitting his growing feelings for her.
He suggests they’d make great parents. Things heat up, but Tina is unsure about
getting involved with Hank’s best friend, reminding herself she’s vulnerable.
Jamey thinks about his last tragic dream jump in Afghanistan
and the secrecy involved, including his pseudonym, Freud. A young al Qaeda
member was killed in prison after Jamey’s finding from his last jump and
Jamey’s nightmare about the beheading resurfaces. Flashback to Jamey’s last jump to find a
weapons cache in Kandahar where the dreamer somehow knew he was a jumper and
tried to kill him in the dream.
Tina’s recurring dream of diving with Hank has her surfacing
in the ocean to pinpoint a location. A stony beach and a sheer cliff are seen
before she wakes. Skeptical of dream sharing with Jamey, she agrees to give it
a try that night. Her parents show up on Maui from Seattle for her birthday and
Tina is less than thrilled. The parents are rich, meddlesome, and don’t approve
of Maui. Tina drinks too much at dinner and later, at her house, Jamey shows up
to dream jump, as planned. Noble takes an immediate disliking to the handsome
stranger in Tina’s life and she asks him to leave.
When Tina falls in to a dream, Jamey succeeds in jumping her
dream with Hank leading her to a cave. She wakes wet, and worries that Jamey is
acting aggressively. She’s still dreaming! Jamey and Tina wake together and
Jamey reveals his theory-- Hank is dead and his spirit is still in her bedroom
trying to help her find his body. Privately, Jamey wonders whether he has
regained his full jumping capabilities or if Tina is now the jumper, entering
his dreams.
Tina recalls that she and Hank were happy once. When they
met, they flirted at a Lahaina poolside party but Hank was engaged to an art
dealer. The engagement was broken and Hank showed up at her dive shop one day.
They became a couple and eventually married.
Tina’s parents are driving her crazy, trying to get her to
return to Seattle with them for a break. What she needs is to find Hank’s body.
She and Jamey take the boat out to look for the dream dive site--the rocky
beach from her dream but can’t find the beach.
Jamey has a dream that he and Tina making love in a bed
suspended over the ocean, a gorgeously ethereal scene, and when he realizes
he’s jumped her dream, he leaves. The next day he and Tina take a small plane
to search the coastline of Maui for the stony beach. Tina is livid that Jamey
let her make love with him in the dream but Jamey defends himself saying he
left the dream. And that it might have been Tina’s dream that he jumped, not
his.
They don’t find the dive site by air, but talk about Hank’s
past as an art dealer and Tina reveals she owns expensive inherited paintings
in air-tight containers in her garage.
Jamey makes headway communicating with Hank in Tina’s empty
house, through automatic writing. He’s given a clue that’s difficult to
decipher. MO As he searches for clues, Jamey remembers a dream with Tina ten
years earlier. She was dancing at her own wedding reception with a skeleton.
Having promised his dream-jumping uncle never to interfere with the future,
Jamey walked out of Tina’s life knowing she was headed for marriage to another man
and ultimately tragedy. It was one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do.
Especially when he met Hank years later and intuited his interest in Tina
involved a con job.
The parents find Jamey at Tina’s house and order him to
leave. It’s Tina’s birthday and Jamey takes her for breakfast on Front Street
overlooking the ocean at Longhi’s restaurant. They flirt and enjoy each other’s
company. Jamey is funny and Tina almost feels like she did when she first fell
in love with Jamey years ago.
Coming home from a strained dinner with her parents, Tina
finds a house full of surprise party guests. Jamey wasn’t invited but Noble
was, although the parents seem to ignore him. Tina gets tipsy and is put to
bed. When Jamey arrives to dream jump at midnight, he finds Noble in bed with
Tina. Jamey is concerned but tries to jump Tina’s dream from outside the house
only to find that Tina has jumped in to Noble’s sexy dream of them making love.
Jamey helps Tina get out of the dream and she wakes,
disoriented. He’s still on the front lawn under her bedroom window, sure Noble
drugged her. Tina tells Noble she’d like to sleep alone.
The next morning Tina’s father accompanies her to the shrink
to suggest that Tina belongs in Seattle under expert psychiatric care. Meanwhile,
at the house, Jamey tries to summon Hank’s ghost, but Tina’s mother arrives and
banishes him.
Jamey suspects that Molokai is the clue he’s channeled from
Hank and rents a plane to scour the Molokai coast for the stony beach in the
dream. A still groggy Tina vows she’ll come to Seattle for one week but must
get her dog situated first. As her parents make plans to take her from Maui,
Jamey suspects Tina will be gone for longer than a week if her father gets
power of attorney. He hunts for the stony beach. Noble supports the parents in
taking Tina “home”. Mid-afternoon, Jamey
finds Tina asleep in her bed and he jumps her dream to see the Molokai coastline
he’d just flown over. Noble arrives and Jamey ducks into the closet to hear
Noble speak ill of Jamey.
When Noble leaves, Jamey tells Tina about the Molokai dive
site and pleads with her to postpone Seattle. Noble returns and a physical
fight breaks out between the men. Tina orders them both out of her house and
goes for a walk on the beach with her dog to clear her foggy head. Jamey phones
to say he’s got a plane waiting to verify it’s Molokai. Her flight leaves soon
but she goes with Jamey and finds the dream beach. Under Jamey’s advice, she
stays at his place and passes out on his bed with her dog, having taken her
prescribed meds for the night. Something is not right and Jamey suspects Noble
has been drugging her through her meds.
The next morning, Jamey and Tina take the boat to Molokai,
but the S belt breaks in the channel. They eventually drift and paddle in to
Kaunakakai and overnight on Molokai while waiting for a part to be flown in.
Tina and Jamey feel a reprieve from the heaviness of late. Like a pocket of borrowed
time. They eat at a beachside restaurant, dance to a Hawaiian trio and Jamey
confesses how, years ago, he saw her future didn’t include him. The dream of
her wedding with Hank made him leave her suddenly with no explanation. She’s
touched that Jamey did the honorable thing when he found she’d marry another
man. He married his ex-girlfriend after finding she was pregnant with their twins.
That night Tina and Jamey fall into bed together on Molokai and
make love like they’d never been separated by ten years and two marriages. When
they fall off into a dream, Jamey finds himself in the scene of Hank’s death at
the picturesque cliffs of Hobbit Land on Maui. In the dream, it’s revealed that
Noble and Hank were con artists, brothers, intent on stealing Tina’s paintings,
but along the way Hank’s feelings for Tina turned into something more and he
wanted out of the con to stay with Tina. When Noble refused, they fought and
Hank fell to his death on the rocks below the cliff. Noble threw his brother’s body
and surf board in the surging ocean, hoping it would look like a surfing
accident.
Tina and Jamey wake from the shared dream finally knowing
how Hank died. On their way to find Hank’s body, Jamey phones to ask Katie, the
shop girl if she has seen Noble. He plans alert the police to Noble’s guilt in
Hank’s death. But Katie says that Noble is dead. He shot himself months ago in
Tina’s cottage. She warns Jamey not to speak to Tina of Noble. She’s under the
care of a psychiatrist to work out her denial of Noble’s suicide.
Jamey is shocked. He and Tina have been communicating with a
ghost and Tina has blocked out Noble’s death. Jamey keeps this to himself and
when they find the dream dive site, the two suit up to dive. The surge is
dangerous, also making the dive murky, but they find the cave. Tina sets up a
rope pulley to use against the current to get inside the turbulent cave. Once
in, she sees Hank’s body blocking the blow hole opening. She panics and tries
to exit. But the strong surge prevents an exit. Just as she runs out of air,
Jamey pulls himself around the cave’s doorway on the pulley. He only has a few
more breaths left but gives his regulator to Tina. A twelve-foot tiger shark,
the one from the dream, emerges from the cave’s shadows and as it swims by,
Jamey grabs the dorsal fin to get them around the corner. They rush to the
surface and gasp for air. The shark is gone.
Police divers are summoned to recover the body. Jamey will
stay, and Tina will return to the Molokai hotel to wait for him. But she
reroutes the police helicopter to Maui where Noble is waiting for her. A
confrontation has him apologizing for the con, saying he wasn’t sure if he was
dead or alive and begging Tina to come with him to the afterlife, like Hank did
to him. After telling Noble no, she forgives him for everything, and Noble’s
image fades to nothing.
Jamey frantically arrives at her house thinking Noble might
have killed her but she’s waiting for him, having just called her mother who admitted
to using sedatives to make Tina compliant to leaving Maui. Tina is glad to see
Jamey, though in shock. She has heard Hank’s voice on the television, telling
her he loves her. She tells Jamey she believes Hank has moved on. He agrees
Hank spoke through electronic voice phenomena.
Jamey knows he must bury the secret that he wrote her
parents anonymously to out Hank’s criminal history, a year ago. He’d just met
Hank on Maui and sensed he would take Tina’s money. He can’t tell her it was
his letter to Tina’s parents that ruined her marriage.
Tina and Jamey make love and finally fall asleep. He dreams
of them on a beach with a child. Their child. He wakes to rest his hand on her
tummy and senses life growing within her.
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