Talk of the Town - And here’s the pitch February 12 2004

Career breakthrough: Be a Hollywood mogul, just in time for the Oscars.

All you have to do is master the one-line pitch. The single sentence, uttered around a conference table, morphs a mere harebrained notion into movie production.

Because it’s not enough to have a good story, great dialogue and outstanding actors to make a feature film. It’s not even necessary. Look at Gigli. Or don’t. You’d be in good company.

What’s particularly amusing about that cinematic smashup is the involvement of Ben Affleck. In addition to being party to the aforementioned mega-bomb, he is onboard as executive producer of the HBO series “Project Greenlight.”

If you haven’t seen an episode, “Greenlight” involves the travails of amateur screenwriters and directors seeking — and given a studio-backed opportunity — to go pro. Along the way, if there isn’t enough dramatic tension created by the clash of artistic (“I will not work with that man!”) egos, their every move, line of dialogue, every second of film and dollar spent is questioned by studio flacks. The quest for excellence is relentless.

So where were these standards when real money was on the table? The people in “Project Greenlight” get a movie budget below the poverty line. On Gigli, Ben ‘n’ Jen’s salaries alone could have funded a fine guerilla war somewhere in Third World.

What went wrong? It goes back to the one-line pitch. Ben being a big star, I bet he didn’t have to make one. Lesser mortals in Hollywood must, if they want to overcome the attention-span-of-a-fruit fly that personifies top echelons there. After all, we’re talking about a town that pioneered the peremptory saying, “Cut to the chase.”

Hence, the one-line descriptor. It gets even easier when you realize that the pitch for your movie has to be derivative (i.e., unoriginal).

The last thing a La-La-Land MBA laird of the motion picture manor wants to hear is a creative concept that hasn’t been thoroughly audience-tested and market-driven. You have to position your film project as some variation on an established genre — a sci-fi epic, say — or, even better, the refracted version of a specific hit.

This part of moviemaking has gotten easier with time, since there’s more material to steal. In the early days, it’s a wonder anything got produced at all. Imagine the studio conference for The Great Train Robbery (1903), regarded by many cinema historians as both the first Western (albeit one made in pre-turnpike New Jersey) and the first film to tell a complete story.

“We start out with a close-up,” the fin de siecle screenwriter says, “of a guy firing a pistol at the camera.”

“Wait a minute,” interjects the wing-collared executive. “What’s a close-up?”

You can imagine the difficulty. It’s no wonder that, back then, a fella could be acclaimed as a genius for the most basic achievement. (“Pioneer director D.W. Griffith discovered that, by taking the lens cap off the camera, images could be preserved on film.”)

Couple this with the lack of original story ideas. The situation was quantified in 1868 by a monsieur named Georges Polti, who deduced that in all of drama, a discipline going back more than 2,000 years, there were only 36 dramatic situations. He wrote a book on the subject titled, not surprisingly, Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations.

These range from “Crime Pursued By Vengeance” and “Disaster” to “Madness” and “Fatal Imprudence.” Most could describe Thanksgiving dinner with my extended family.

So it turns out there’s nothing really original. Even Citizen Kane, the perennial No. 1 on Best Movie of All Time lists, owes key aspects of its layout — flashbacks and views of the protagonist as told from the perspective of several different characters — to a prior and less well-known film, The Power and the Glory, made eight years earlier.

Meanwhile, I’ve sharpened my one- liner skills:

Movie: Calendar Girls

The pitch: “The Full Monty, but with naked old women!”

Movie: Radio

Pitch: “Forrest Gump, but he’s black!”

Once you get a feel for it, you can view any film (or its preview, often far superior to the three-hour picture) and figure out what somebody said to get it made.

“Ghost, but this time the girl is dead!”

Tom Cruise in old Japan: “It’s Dances with Geishas!”

And don’t stop there. Even if you don’t want to break into movies, use the one-line pitch in all walks of life. Such as explaining why you didn’t show up for Thanksgiving dinner with your significant other’s family:

“It was like North by Northwest, except I got kidnapped instead of Cary Grant!”

And the all-purpose pitch you can use for any endeavor:

“It’s like Gigli, except it doesn’t suck.”

glen.slattery@creativeloafing.com

Glen Slattery is doing retakes in Alpharetta.