Learning to Talk the Talk, and Do It Fast

Woodland Hills screenwriter and teacher Ken Rotcop is coaching his students in how to make prospective producers fall in love.

He is teaching them how to pitch their scripts.

The occasion, held earlier this month, is a practice session for one of Rotcop’s “pitchmarts,” where screenwriters have the opportunity to convince studio representatives that their story is the next “Forrest Gump.”

In one significant way, this group is different from most of Rotcop’s classes. Seven of the 25 or so tyro screenwriters have traveled halfway ‘round the world to be here.

Three are winners of a nationwide screenwriting contest held this fall in their native Philippines that attracted more than 135 entrants. The trio emerged from a group of 25 finalists to take the grand prize--10,000 pesos in cash (the equivalent of $381 U.S. dollars in a nation whose per capita income only recently rose above $1,000 a year) and a one-week, all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood to pitch their scripts.

Four of the other Filipino finalists paid their own way to participate in the pitchmart.

Rotcop got the idea for the pitchmarts from a flea market his wife dragged him to. Why not bring studio and production company reps together in one place, so the screenwriters can pitch them all at once, instead of setting up dozens of individual appointments? Rotcop has been holding the events twice a year since 1989.

For all the students, Rotcop’s advice is the same: Be passionate and be enthused, he counsels at a meeting in a West Valley library. “If you are going to sit there and tell your story like a lox, no matter how good your story is, you’re not going to make a deal.”

Rotcop went to the Philippines this fall to help judge the contest. Wherever he went, he says, Filipinos had the same concern. “We are a shy people,” they told him. “How are we going to compete with those sharks in Hollywood?”

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Shark-proofing is a Rotcop specialty. Forget Filipino etiquette--which discourages eye contact among people who don’t know each other--for the duration of the pitch, Rotcop counsels. The first rule of selling your script: “Look them in the eye when you introduce yourself.”

You don’t have to tap-dance to get their attention, he tells the students, but you do have to sell your story quickly. Rotcop’s pitchers have three minutes to persuade the studio reps to look at their scripts, but the first minute is all that really matters. The pitchees make their decisions in 60 seconds or less, Rotcop tells them.

And it’s not just your story that you’re pitching, he says. “Producers are always looking at you from two directions: How good is your story, and are you a person they want to work with.”

The studio reps hate negative. So no whining, and no badmouthing other studios. “These people are so fragile,” Rotcop says, “they think you’ll be knocking them next.”

Lito Tiongson, a 42-year-old college film teacher in Manila, is one of the finalists who picked up his own tab. Like several of the Filipino scripts, his revolves around a favorite Filipino export, the mail-order bride. Tiongson’s “A Deadly Spell” is based on the lurid but true story of a young Filipina who murdered her elderly husband. Voodoo and black magic make the story rich and strange.

In Rotcop’s view, the unique thing that these Filipino scriptwriters can bring to their work is exotic local color, Filipino customs and traditions rarely seen on American screens. But he warns them that, if they want to sell their scripts to American studios, they have to write stories that will have an impact on American audiences. “There must be something the American audience can relate to,” he says. “The easiest way to do that is to have a protagonist who is an American.”

Tiongson has taken Rotcop’s advice to heart. In real life, the elderly victim of the deadly Filipina was an Australian. Tiongson has made him an American Midwesterner and thrown in an American detective as well. That makes cultural sense, the screenwriter says, because so many Filipinos come to the United States in search of the American dream.

As to why he shelled out more than $700 for a plane ticket to Hollywood, Tiongson says, it’s because the American film industry is so much more accessible to new talent than the Filipino one. “In Manila, producers don’t talk to writers unless they know them.”

Sitting on the sidelines during the coaching session is Bobby Garcia, a 36-year-old Filipino American from New York City. Garcia is the project director for Entertainment Design Group (EDG), a consortium that is in the process of building a major film studio in the Philippines, including the country’s first state-of-the-art sound stages. (EDG was one of the national contest’s sponsors.)

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The Filipino film industry is the fifth largest in the world, Garcia points out. It produces more than 150 feature films a year. But existing facilities are primitive by American standards. “They have no sound stages. When it rains, they stop filming.”

Garcia is a man with no significant presence in the American film industry, he says. But he is the nephew of Federico Garcia, a power in Filipino television whom he describes as “the Ted Turner of the Philippines.” Garcia was vacationing in the islands last year when he realized that there were no first-rate studios in the Pacific Rim except the endangered ones of Hong Kong and the astronomically expensive ones of Taiwan and Japan.

“I realized there was a tremendous need,” says Garcia, who has been talking to Warner Bros. and other U.S. studios in recent weeks, hoping to tap their expertise in designing and managing the new studio in Quezon City. If the studio opens as planned next year, it will need product. These Filipino screenwriters could become their nation’s Shane Blacks and Robert Townes.

In a land where film majors at UCLA and USC have agents before they have diplomas, the Filipino contest winners have a refreshing lack of nonchalance. “I have a day job,” says Nicolas Pichay, 35. “I’m a lawyer.” Pichay, who spells his first name “without a h, like Nicolas Cage,” is the author of “Semana,” a melodrama that opens with the voluntary crucifixion of its young Filipina protagonist and ends with the revelation of Semana’s link to an American Army officer, “Major Terence Brown.”

Twenty-seven-year-old Herbert Go, another winner, is thrilled that Garcia was able to get tourist visas for the Filipino visitors. The INS is reluctant to let unmarried men between 18 and 40 into the United States, says the young actor and playwright, because so many remain illegally. (Pichay was denied a tourist visa in 1995, he says.)

Go’s screenplay is titled “Case No. 341226, the Manny M. Story (God Knows Who Does Not Pay).” Based on a friend’s unpublished novella, it is a comedy about a one-legged rooster. Go’s script was one that had Rotcop worried. He took Go aside in the course of his Hollywood visit and told him, frankly, that he wasn’t sure that a story about political corruption in the Philippines, whose protagonist was a one-legged rooster, would appeal to anybody at the pitchmart.

“I was so convinced it was such a provincial story,” says Rotcop.

On Oct. 5, 25 studios and production companies sent representatives to the pitchmart, held at the Smoke House restaurant in Burbank, including HBO and the production companies of actors Jason Alexander and Tim Allen.

The most sought-after script?

The one about the one-legged rooster.