As we veer farther off topic, but for the sake of discourse (literally I guess), Christopher or others, can you elaborate on what "pitching" was like?
I'm not really a good source, since I was pretty terrible at it. The ideal is to come in with a fairly large number of ideas that can be quickly summarized, just a couple of sentences catchy enough (one hopes) to create more interest and spark a discussion about where it could be taken. But I came up with these detailed story outlines and took forever to get through them. And the detail worked against me, because there were a lot of points where my interpretation differed from how the producers saw things, or where they were turned off of a potentially good idea because it included an element they didn't like.
The closest I ever came was on my last pitch, a phone pitch to Michael Taylor when he was a junior member of the
Voyager staff. I pitched an idea about the ship coming across an alien archive that contained, essentially, sentient replicas of great historical figures from across the galaxy, including Surak, and Tuvok had a crisis of faith when he discovered how different the real Surak had been from what he'd been taught. I got bogged down in the technicalities of how the replication worked, and that almost blew it for me until I said "Okay, let's forget that part, we can change it." I got far enough that Taylor said he'd bring it up in the writers' room, but I never heard back.
Anyway, I hated the pitching process. I'm too insecure... I can handle rejections in print, but it's agonizing to put an idea out there face-to-face and get it shot down verbally. But the thing about Hollywood pitches is, they
have to be oral, either in person or over the phone. Because if a film or TV production asks you to write something down for them, that's effectively a binding contract and they have to pay you for what you write.
So it was after that third awkward pitch that I decided screenwriting just wasn't for me. Still, my first pitch, where I actually flew out to LA and pitched to Robert Hewitt Wolfe, was invaluable to me. Robert had been a protege of Michael Piller and picked up his focus on character above all, and he passed that along to me when I pitched. I spun these elaborately detailed plots and he kept asking, "How does it affect the characters? What's the character impact?" It was a very important lesson in writing, and I took it to heart.
Of course, then I went and developed a bunch of character-centric outlines for my VGR phone pitch, only to be told, "These are too character-focused -- the network wants more high-concept plot-driven stuff." D'oh!
I also made the mistake of pitching some Kes-centric ideas during the late third season -- i.e., at a time when they were taking submissions for fourth-season scripts. Joe Menosky gave various reasons to turn them down, but in retrospect I think he was trying to avoid revealing that Kes wouldn't be coming back. (One of my pitches had Kes going through a sort of adolescence that kicked her powers into high gear, and Menosky told me they were developing a similar story already. I guess he was talking about "The Gift.")
And would you have gotten story credit and had a script written by the writers' room? Or were you hoping to sell a script too?
The former scenario would've been more likely for a first-time seller, but the latter was certainly the hoped-for outcome, since it would've paid a lot better and been a stronger credit for the ol' CV.
). And to slightly correct (based on memory) -- Echevaria gave an interview in those days in which he said his girlfriend's agent submitted his first script to TNG, so not quite the slush pile.
