Michael Hauge – Sell Your Story in 60 Seconds

I’ve read Michael Hauge’s Writing Screenplays that Sell and listened to his CD lecture Screenwriting for Hollywood.  His and Christopher Vogler’s The Hero’s 2 Journeys is a DVD I’ve been slowly working my way through over the last year or so – it’s not that it’s terribly long, it’s just a bit prosaic for my ADHD mind.  Mr. Hauge doesn’t go for style points in presentation, but he offers a lot of useful information.

His lecture, Sell Your Story in 60 Seconds, based on the book of nearly the same title, was the second session I attended at the 2009 Screenwriting Expo.  It fell on Friday morning, two days before I was scheduled to offer pitches at the pitch fest.  Maybe the class helped – maybe it didn’t.  It certainly didn’t hurt.

Mr. Hauge reminded us all that we should have one goal, and one goal only, when pitching – to convince someone to read our screenplay.  The greatest pitch in the world won’t do anything for an awful concept.  Conversely, the worst pitch in the world could still work if the concept is brilliant.  Once again, everything comes down to having a story worth telling.

Mr. Hauge developed a list of 8-steps to pitching.  Without his permission, I hesitate to include the steps here, but I found them all useful, albeit a bit obvious to an intuitive mind.  That said, the most obvious of suggestions are oftentimes the most overlooked.

Now, the one caveat to all the teaching Mr. Hauge puts out through his books, DVDs, and seminars is that he hasn’t, to my knowledge, ever sold a screenplay himself.  That fact doesn’t discount his claims – after all, I’ve only optioned a screenplay and produced one of my own, yet I’m ‘teaching’ through this blog – but it does cause one to step back and consider the source.  Like any research, the learning one seeks in screenwriting should be filtered by the student from a variety of teachers.  Mr. Hauge certainly belongs on the list of screenwriting teachers for the diligent screenwriting student.  I, on the hand, don’t belong on that list, which is why I’m trying to point in the direction of the teachers I’ve enjoyed along the way. :)