An LA Event That Aspiring Screenwriters Shouldn't Miss

For the past seven years, Creative Screenwriting Magazine has presented the Screenwriting Expo, a four-day extravaganza of seminars and pitch events, this year spread between the Marriott and Renaissance hotels, near Los Angeles International Airport.

More than 4,000 people attended the event, all keen to hear words of wisdom from such luminaries as Stuart Beattie, the man behind Collateral and Pirates of the Caribbean, Seth Rogen, the star of Knocked Up, and Steve Zaillian, who wrote Schindler's List and Gangs of New York.

The conference rooms were filled with aspiring writers bent over notebooks and laptops, hoping to learn the secrets of breaking in and maintaining a successful career from more than a hundred of the country's screenwriting gurus.

This year's event was a truly international affair as scribes of all ages and backgrounds come from all over the country and further afield. There were people from Italy, Great Britain, Norway and even India and Australia - all with the singular ambition of becoming successful screenwriters.

By far the most popular event was the annual Golden Pitch Tournament where for $25 for five minutes, attendees could pitch their project to a selection of agents, managers, producers and production companies such as 20^th Century Fox, MTV Films and New Line Cinema to name just a few.

Pitches were all the rage in the boom-crazy 1980s and early 1990s. In 1993 screenwriter Joe Eszterhaus, riding high after the success of Basic Instinct, sold the most expensive pitch in history, for $4 million. Written on the back of a napkin, it was for an erotic drama One Night Stand, about a man who sleeps with a sexy woman at a conference. When the film was completed, it bombed at the box office.

Then leaner times took hold and the game changed completely: only two in a hundred pitches bought by the major studios make it to the screen, twice the failure rate of scripts. The crazy money that was available for pitches may no longer be available but hundreds are still drawn by the prospect of making a quick sale. So what makes a good pitch and how can you tip the odds in your favour?