How to pitch a mermaid movie to Hollywood, from Brian Grazer’s "Face to Face"
One of the greatest gifts we can offer to the world is our life story. In his book Face to Face, Brian Grazer shares a plethora of stories from his life experience. Splash is one of them.
Brian pitched Splash unsuccessfully for seven years. Splash is a 1984 romantic comedy film about a young man who falls in love with a mermaid.
“When I wanted to make Splash I was turned down once, then twice, then so many times thereafter that I literally stopped keeping track. No one wanted a mermaid movie. I walked out of literally hundreds of meetings where the executives not only said no, but seemed to go out of their way to humiliate me by pointing out how stupid the premise was. I pitched Splash unsuccessfully for seven (yes, seven) years. Illustrating the definition of insanity to a tee, I kept on pitching it basically the same way - it was a mermaid movie - expecting a different outcome.
Then one day I had a conversation with a friend that changed everything. He asked me how I came up with the idea of a mermaid falling in love with an average hardworking guy from Long Island. I told him that Splash was inspired by my personal search for love in Los Angeles, a place where everything - including relationships - seemed superficial. I started to fantasize about what my dream girl would be like… What if she were kind and generous? How would she look at me? What would it feel like? Then I thought about how we would meet and what would make her unattainable. (Giving her a mermaid tail seemed like a sufficiently large obstacle.)”
Suddenly, Brian understood why his pitches were unsuccessful. He had been trying to sell the plot of the movie - the product - and people don’t buy products. People buy feelings.
“As I was talking, I stopped dead in my tracks. Suddenly I understood what I had been doing wrong in pitch after pitch - I had been trying to sell the studio execs on a story. But stories, as I’ve explained, are subjective. Anyone can argue against a specific story for any reason. It’s much harder to turn down a universal theme, an experience, or feeling that almost every human being can relate to. With crystal clarity, I realized that I needed to reframe Splash. “
To sell anything, you have to connect emotionally with your audience. But, you can’t connect emotionally with anyone if you, yourself, are not connected emotionally with your own product. When you ask yourself questions like - why? how did this idea come about? how did I make it? what did I feel as I was creating it? - you unlock your own emotional connection to your product or idea.
You unlock energy that makes you more powerful than you ever thought you were.
As a result, you gain more confidence, even if you’ve been turned down the way Brian was. When you believe in your product, it doesn’t matter what others say. It really doesn’t matter. You become unstoppable and eventually, you will find a way to reframe, to adapt and to succeed.
“My next pitch was with Disney. I went in and did everything differently. Rather than starting off by saying it was a story about a man who falls in love with a mermaid, I pitched it as a story about the universal search for love. [...] Would any one of the execs in the room dare to insist that love doesn’t matter? I spoke with a conviction of personal experience that every other person in the room could relate to on some level. The studio finally bought Splash. Audiences loved it and I received my first Oscar nomination for cowriting the screenplay.”
The first thing that caught my attention about this book was its voice. It is whispered in a distinct voice. I don’t know Brian and I’ve never seen him speak, but while reading this book, I got the feeling that I was literally sitting face to face with him and this book was his “curiosity conversation” with me, the reader. As he writes, a “curiosity conversation” is a face to face meeting with someone, with no agenda other than to listen, learn and connect meaningfully.
I will leave you with my two most favorite paragraphs from Face to Face:
“I may make my living as a producer, but what I really am is a storyteller. And stories are always about the communication of feelings. People have a tendency to see life as binary - right versus wrong, success versus failure - but feelings are more nuanced than that. They are both infinite in their variation and inarguable. You can’t tell someone how they feel or how they experience the world. Feelings, like stories, are subjective, and what people need perhaps more than anything these days is to have their stories acknowledged and heard. Don’t we all want that? To be seen in a way that recognizes our own sense of who we are?”
“We are all human beings. We all have emotions. We all have something to share. We are made for connection. It is the source of growth, discovery, joy and meaning in our short, sweet time here on Earth. We need only be willing to open our minds and our hearts and choose to see the people standing with us face to face. Whether the connection lasts a moment or a lifetime, whether it’s easy or challenging, we are always better for it.”