There are moments you train for and there are moments you perform. Gotham Week was definitely when everything I’d prepared for over the course of two years had to come together in a single week.
For those unfamiliar with the format, Gotham Project Market is a week-long showcase of fiction and non-fiction films and shows in various stages of development. Filmmakers present their projects to financiers, production companies, talent management, talent development programs, and sales companies all with the goal of moving the project closer to being made.
Representatives from organizations such as Disney, Netflix, NEON, Sundance, Citizen Skull, Zero Gravity and A24 actively select meetings with filmmakers based on projects they’re interested in. This alone, to me, makes the entire thing very interesting and is a real-time gauge of the types of companies and people who are attracted to a filmmaker’s voice.
Once a project has been selected for Project Week, the Gotham team actively brokers meetings with industry reps and the filmmaker has very little influence over who the meetings are with. I know this may sound frustrating, but I actually like it because it gives a sense of organic feedback. It answers whether your project is attracting who you want to attract. There’s no question about the quality of the work, the selection process is very competitive so the fact that the project is being pitched to the industry by the Gotham team says a lot already.
Pitching a project, to me, is the third most important craft after filmmaking and screenwriting, and the only way to improve is to actually it. “Pitching,” in my mind, is inclusive of: the actual act of pitching, writing log lines, synopses, building decks, and cutting together showreels. That’s why I call it a craft, it’s inclusive, and requires the use, of various skills. By the time I attended Gotham Week, I had pitched my project over fifty times, written and rewritten synopses, loglines and built and re-built decks more times that sanely reasonable. I was prepared.
Before Project Week began, the Gotham team asked us for a wish list of who we would want to connect with and throughout the week they would try to make the intros informally during breaks or networking events if a formal meeting didn’t work out.
My final meeting schedule surprised me. I wasn’t expecting to meet with some of the reps I ended up connecting with, but the conversations were natural and felt really good. Each of my meetings resulted in a read request (where the rep asked to read the full script).
Unlike a fellowship or lab, which generally has the feeling of a safe collaborative space to incubate ideas, the project market has the high energy of possibility. The industry is there for the same reason the filmmakers are there - to get the films out in the world.
I should also mention that I’m not done with my meetings. Some have been scheduled virtually beyond the week itself. Post-Gotham, I’ve spent a significant amount of time following up and continuing conversations about the project.
That being said, the experience can be draining. I needed a couple of weeks to unwind. I honestly didn’t want to speak for a week after Gotham because I was so sick of hearing my own voice. But, what an honor to have had the opportunity to pitch the industry. While ultimately I want to get the film made, a read request is a solid result going into these things. It means someone liked the pitch enough to spend an hour with the script.
At the end of the day, it all starts with the script and the request is the beginning of everything that comes next.
