Iron Circus: Life's A Pitch.

June 04, 2004

Life's A Pitch.

This link's about pitching cartoon ideas to network execs, and it's categorized in my blog set-up in the "Comics" category. And that's perfectly okay.

I've never known a single comic book goofball (myself included) that didn't, somewhere in the most deluded, self-important, astonishingly attention-hungry recesses of their brain, fantasize about that pot at the end of the funnybook rainbow: Getting an animation deal from the suits. Sure, sometimes a live-action deal, yeah. But my people, the indie people? We like cartoons. We LIKE 'em. We wanna take cartoons out for dinner and give 'em massages and meet their folks. That's probably sad, but it's how we feel. And when we're we're honest with ourselves, it's what we want for what we do. But then, a lot of us want cowboy monkeys trained to ride border collies like horses, and we're not about to get our hands on those, either.

Enter Life's A Pitch. Hollywood: Kills Dreams Dead.

Reprinted from the ASIFA-East Newletter aNYmator and penned by by chapter president David B. Levy, Life's A Pitch won't tell you anything you didn't already know: Namely, gettin' a cartoon made is pretty hard. But at least now you can append that statement with "impossibly hard" for the sake of accuracy. Suits blow you off, enforce senseless rotating taboos, tell you to base your next pitch on past stuff there's no way they would accept now, and so on. Sounds like fun. But then, these are the people who've said no to Jeff Smith's Bone movie, then greenlighted a live-action version of Astroboy, so you can really only expect so much.

Posted by Spike at June 4, 2004 09:26 PM

Comments

I thought Jeff didn't like what was happening to the project and pulled the plug himself...

Posted by John at June 5, 2004 12:15 AM
216.129.254.78

yeah, I admit it, I've had those particular masturbatory fantasies.

...yet I'm clever enough to stay the fuck out of animation school. Urgggg.

Posted by Dylan at June 5, 2004 03:30 AM
63.224.60.41

There's a definite possibility that I'm completely full of shit, But I remember an interview Jeff gave (maybe for Ain't It Cool News) where he talked about being pampered during meetings by execs from Nickelodeon(?) who acted super-excited by the whole project... until he shot down their idea to crowbar a Brtiney Spears song into the movie. (They'd claimed it would add millions to the movie's budget.) After that, he says a noticable cold front descended, and he stopped getting calls.

Posted by spike at June 5, 2004 04:20 AM
66.73.2.244

Working in the industry for so long has killed those little fantasies for me. There's a whole type of personality a person needs to keep a show running without going completely insane and having your studio hate you. I realize I don't have those skills and wouldn't want the stress of handling it. Undying enthusiasm at all times, great negotiation skills, and a willingness to deliver your baby over to a 50+ person team to interpret the way they see fit, plus get picked apart by a team of execs and standards... I'm too much of a control freak for that. On another note, Dave's a great guy and really knows his shit.

Posted by Kim at June 5, 2004 08:01 AM
24.90.9.103

Yeah, loosly following the debatcle surrounding "Invader Zim" made me scratch "animated series" off the ole' to-do list... This is all something I suspect the guy that does Boondocks is about to find out...

Posted by spookable at June 5, 2004 07:41 PM
64.12.116.146

LOL..harry potter fan fiction.
http://www.fictionalley.org/

Posted by mar at June 7, 2004 09:22 AM
209.100.158.66