A Major Pitch Fest at USC...

A Major Pitch Fest

You'll never be a player in Hollywood if you can't talk a good game. Last week film students met the real world.

By Sean Smith

May 16 issue - A few weeks from now, 22-year-old Molly Kron will graduate from one of the most prestigious film schools in the country. Last Monday night, though, all that mattered was whether she could channel all that education into a three-minute pitch for an animated comedy screenplay she calls "Cash Cow." "I'm a little nervous," she said, as she prepared to face a room full of suits in the hopes of scoring an agent, a manager or a movie deal. "In the beginning my pitch was really long. It gets pretty crazy at times, with the talking weasels and dancing muskrats."

Every year the USC School of Cinema-Television—alma mater to George Lucas, among other luminaries—sponsors a program called First Pitch, which trains graduating screenwriting seniors and master's students in Hollywood's lingua franca, the pitch, and then puts them in the ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills with three dozen industry players. On Monday, Kron and 51 other students entered the ballroom and faced row upon row of small, white tables. At each table sat someone with the power to kick-start their careers. (So, you know, no pressure.) Each student would get five minutes with a CAA agent or an executive from Warner Bros.—five minutes to dazzle the listener into requesting a copy of the script—before a little bell rang, and the student moved to a new table and started all over again. They would repeat the process up to 20 times. "It's like speed-dating," says First Pitch director Hayley Terris-Feldman. "It's insane, really."

The program, now in its fourth year, is organized and run by students, but has the full support of the faculty. "You don't write screenplays to be published, you write them to be made," says school dean Elizabeth Daley. "This gives them a chance to test their wings, and I would feel irresponsible if we weren't helping them with the transition."

The students rehearse their pitches for months, guided by literary-talent manager Mikkel Bondesen. "The worst thing that can happen to these kids," Bondesen says, "is that they have a great script but they don't know how to pitch it, so it never sees the light of day." Actually, there are worse things. "One person asked me if I was on crack," Kron said as the evening finally wound down. "I'm guessing that's bad." Still, she got an impressive 11 requests for copies of her work, and she high-fived with pal Jonathan Igla, who was "very psyched" that both Warner Bros. and Sony asked to read his scripts. Greg Levine, who spent the night talking up his TV pilot "Happily Ever After?" discovered that he likes pitching. "It was so much fun! But the woman from Warner Bros. told me, 'Sometimes the best screenplays don't pitch well at all'." He laughs. "I was, like, 'Please don't tell USC that'." They'll never know.