Writing Screenplays...And who does it?

[Thomas Guycott]

Okay Michael Bay Fan, I read all those pitches you posted up there, and as someone who considers himself fairly well read, written and watched on film, I think I can best sum up my advice as follows:

You really need to get your head out of high school.

From my point of view, most of your pitches reflect the lack of a wider perspective on life experience, or to put in another way, lack an adult perspective on the world. The actual text of these pitches, the words themselves (focus on young teens as characters, descriptive terms and comparisons, etc: that reality show killer pitch is bitter as hell), reveals a somewhat young and naive frame of mind, and as a consequence end up telling totally uninteresting stories (Who cares if some sperglord collects insurance on his DVD collection? That's not a movie. Fifteen years isn't nostalgic enough of a past to reflect on, and your protagonist would only be 14. Who cares?) or consist of tenuous genre mash-ups derived from what sounds cool.

But I'd say the biggest issue with most of these pitches is that none of them really have a story, or at the very least a story hook: they're all about premise and plot. You're putting premise and plot ahead of story, and you can't do that because you'll only end up with something held together purely by plot momentum which falls apart because it lacks a strong core in story that provides momentum to the plot: Story is what happens, plot is how it happens. Come up with a story worth telling and then you can build everything else up around that, and to tell a story you often literally have to start from the ground up: Jean-Luc Goddard once said "all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun."

A final point of advice I would give concerns how you format the pitch/summary itself. Concentrate less on justifying the movie's existence, explaining aspects of the premise, or how the world works and more on tying up everything in a simple package. A single paragraph should be enough to sum up what a movie's about and function as a pitch, and some say if you can't summarize a movie in a single sentence (the "elevator pitch") then you've failed. I wouldn't go quite that drastic but it's a good thing to keep in mind.

For what it's worth I do like your drive-in idea, although I would drop the documentary aspect and make it more like an American Graffiti for the classic drive-in scene.

Edit: I have a handful of ideas of my own which I might share with the thread later.