Jeremiah and I just got back from the Screenwriting Expo 5. I just thought I’d give a quick report. Overall it was good. We got to meet Bill Martell, a screenwriting teacher and a regular poster on wordplayer.com. He’s a Really nice guy. His classes were among the best we attended. Linda Cowgill was pretty good too. The other classes we went to were crap. The one on rewriting dialogue was a joke. All she did was talk about how great The Crying Game is and how she knows Neil Jordan.

The Pixar sessions were a lot of fun, but also kinda depressing hearing them talk about the creative fairy land (their words) that they work in. Just the fact that I’ll most likely never get the chance to work there is very sad. They are a very lucky bunch, and they know it. They are all very humble and don’t even pretend to have it all figured out.

Andrew Stanton started things off with a good talk that kinda covered what they learned on each of their movies through Finding Nemo. The Toy Story section has some really cool gems. They knew that they wanted Woody’s arc to be from selfish to selfless. At first they had him blatantly selfish at the beginning. Andrew showed an early story reel where Woody was really berating the other toys for getting on the bed (this was even before Buzz arrived.) It was almost shocking how petty and spoiled Woody was. They knew this wasn’t working and decided that he should be a benevolent leader with the selfishness just under the surface. Then when Buzz arrives that selfishness slowly seeps out. Brilliant move on their part.

This was followed by two panels that were pretty interesting. One on the writer-director relationship at Pixar and the other with some story artists. The last session was an interview format with Brad Bird on The Incredibles. It was very entertaining, but I think I got more out of Andrew Stanton’s talk.

The other thing going on at the expo was the pitch fest, or as I like to call it the great screenwriter cattle stampede of 2006. It was pretty crazy. Picture American Idol with screenwriters. It all seemed like a joke. Fifteen minutes before your pitch, they herd you into a room with about 50 other screenwriters. Then they move you every five minutes into the next area until you go into the main room. In the main room, there are three long rows of tables. At each table are two production companies. They have two chairs across from them. When they tell you to find your table, your five minutes start then, so you can imagine the mad dash to find your table.

We had five pitches, two agencies and three production companies. 4 out of 5 are interested in reading the script we are pitching. The first one we pitched was the one that didn’t. It was also the first time slot of the day. On that one we just rattled off our prepared pitch. At five minutes, they rang a bell, so we wrapped things up and the guy we were pitching too just looks at us and doesn’t say anything. So we thanked him for his time and got up.

The others we decided to make more conversational. They went much better. We gave them our logline and then asked them if they’d like to hear more. They all did and we told a shorter version. They all asked questions for which we had answers and they all seemed pretty interested. At the end, they asked for our contact info. The last one even told us we had a very solid pitch, so that was cool. Now I guess we just wait and see if we get any emails from them.

Over all the Expo was worth it, but if Pixar hadn’t been there, I don’t think it would have been. I’m not sure I’d do the pitches again. I find it hard to believe any companies there are seriously looking for new material at the Expo. I think it’s more of a “We’ve got to send someone, Disney’s gonna send someone” type situation. But we’ll see. The seminars were good (especially Bill Martell’s), but I didn’t learn anything I couldn’t have gleaned from Wordplayer or Bill Martell’s site.

Our non-expo time was spent site-seeing and sitting in LA traffic. It took us 2 hours to go 15 miles on the 405. We did get to spend an hour at Disneyland for free. Watch next weeks podcast to hear that story. Sunday after the expo we went to Paramount Ranch up in the Santa Monica mountains. That’s where they filmed Dr. Quinn. It’s a small western town that is still used for film and television from time to time. We went there to get some ideas about our script Ghost Town.

I guess that’s it. It was a good trip, but I’m glad to be home.

Josh