Pitch Festivus: Pitching Tips from Jake & the Faculty Write Your Screenplay Podcast

Pitch Festivus: Pitching Tips from Jake & the Faculty

This episode features a transcript from our recent Pitch Festivus event, in which faculty members from JKS shared their insights into how to pitch screenplays, TV shows, plays, novels and other writing projects.



Jake: Hello everybody! I am so happy and delighted to be surrounded by so many wonderful writers from our community. We have almost all of our faculty here, and it is just great that in these crazy times we can all still be together connecting and creating.



Let’s talk about pitching. In a moment, I am going to introduce you to my whole team, and we are going to learn how to pitch from all these talented writers.

Audrey Sussman - Specialty: Writers Block, Hypnosis for Writers

The first person that I want to introduce-- we are going to go in alphabetical order, but this works out perfectly--the first person that I want to introduce is my mom, Audrey Sussman. Audrey is not a screenwriter, Audrey is a hypnotherapist.



Audrey does hypnosis for artists, she does hypnosis for anxiety, and the way that she works in our school is helping our students through the emotional side of screenwriting and through those roadblocks that get in the way. She is also a master of NLP, which is an incredibly valuable sales technique in addition to being an incredibly powerful therapeutic technique.



And so, Audrey, mom, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how hypnosis works and how people can break through those blocks that they have about pitching when they feel anxious about it?



Audrey:  When you are pitching or when you are writing and you feel like “agh!” anxiety gets in the way of you being at your best. Your creativity gets kind of stifled because you are anxious. Those are called triggers that are set into the unconscious. And you may not realize where they are coming from. Many times, they come from childhood. 



So, what we can do hypnotically is release some of that trauma (almost like from the cellular level) or whatever caused those triggers to get set in, and you create a new pathway so that when you go to pitch you step into calm and confidence, and you are at your best. 



I work with some of the students privately, and one of the guys had a big movie that had already come out and when he came to me he was anxious because he was thinking, “How am I going to recreate this? How am I going to do this again? They are paying me all this money!” He was creating some negative self-talk and self-doubt. We found out it was coming from earlier in his life, got rid of it, and then he flowed with his writing.



So, any time you are feeling that you are getting stuck, there is usually a little younger you inside that is triggering you. So, you can use hypnosis and neurolinguistics in pitching. If you know how to use words and matching body language, many times it helps the person you are pitching to feel like you are like them. And so, there is a whole slew of information about how to use body language, words, to make your pitch even that much more powerful.



Jake: Will you teach us all a quick NLP matching thing that we can all do right now that we can use next time we are in a pitch meeting?



Audrey:  Absolutely. I was working with this guy and he was trying to get a grant, and he did not get it the first time and he begged the person, “Can I just pitch you one more time?” And I did not have time to teach him words and neurolinguistics and hypnosis, I said, “Okay all I want you to do is match the body language, whatever that person does I want you to match it.” 



So when the guy shouted, “You are…” (SLAMS HAND ON TABLE), “....not going to get this,” the guy mirrored him, (also slamming his hand on the table) “I absolutely under...