Typed by hand. It may still contain mistakes; the recording is the original.
Biagio: Hey everybody, she is Joke.
Joke: He is Biagio.
Biagio: We are married and we make unscripted film and television and want to help you do the same hopefully by teaming up with us. Well, you might have noticed there was no music up top this week. No fancy intros and there is going to be no editing because we are knee-deep in pre-production production and postproduction on a bunch of different projects so we are wing dinging this and just uploading it.
That does not mean the advice will not be good. As a matter of fact, the advice is going to be priceless. But the episode will likely be short and you are not going to get any musical intro or outro this week. Sorry.
Joke: Actually Biagio is just being lazy because we have been, other times when we have been this busy and you have done musical outros.
Biagio: Okay I am being lazy, I admit it. Man, I am also helping out editing at a couple of projects right now. I have moved the bay home. It has been a busy, busy, busy couple of weeks. So, no music.
However, what we did want to talk about this week, and this is something very, very important because we are getting pitched a lot of shows. One, by people who have never listened to episode two of this podcast, producingunscripted.com/002. And two, by people who really are not thinking through what it means to package up an idea. And here is what I mean by that, if you are going to pitch us a show about a celebrity, with a celebrity or that is going to have a ton of celebrities on week after week. Guess what, you already have to have those celebrities.
Joke: Yes, and it is not even just the celebrity thing. It is like what these shows that are getting pitched have in common is that they really at their heart, format shows that involve access, right? Access to a celebrity, if it involves that celebrity access to a business. If it involves that business a world, a location, a place that if you do not have access to that, you cannot pitch it.
Do not pitch us a White House show unless you have the White House on board. Do not pitch us a celebrity show unless you have that celebrity on board because we cannot even take that idea seriously because there is nothing there. You come with nothing.
Biagio: Here, I am going to make up a show right now, okay? We have been pitched shows similar to this but I am going to make this one up. This is not a show we have been pitched but this is exactly the kind of pitch is that we have been getting by the handful.
Hey everybody, it is the Jack Nicholson look-a-like contest. What we are going to do is we are going to get a bunch of people that think that they are the best Jack Nicholson impersonator and they are going to compete and we will have Jack Nicholson weigh in to see who the winner is and we will have some other famous impersonators. We will get Rich Little, we will get Robin Williams, people who really know impersonators. They will be the judges and in the end, the best Jack Nicholson impersonator will win.
First of all, if you listened to any of our podcast episodes, you might even wonder where you would sell that show these days. Aside from that fact, you cannot pitch that show unless you have Jack Nicholson on board or at least Robin Williams or any of the people that you are mentioning in this pitch. And what is happening is that people are walking in and I mean a lot of people are walking in pitching shows like this with this long list of celebrities they have absolutely have no contact to, with show ideas that are completely contingent on having access to these worlds.
Joke: Yes and I think that is okay because I think it is not just celebrity because listen, a lot of you guys are really smart and you understand that a celebrity is a whole different world. But it is also a government agency or it is like, hey I have a show with NASA. Well okay, do you have a NASA on board? Have you talked to NASA about this? Is somebody there that has any authority given you the go ahead, or if it is like an organization or if it is like doing a show with NASCAR. Okay, is NASCAR on board, because they are very hard to sign up for a show.
These are people that have brands to protect. But it is as simple as like, the Girl Scouts. Do you have the Girl Scouts of America on board? So it is all these kinds of shows that when you boil it down, if it really comes to a format that only means something, once the value-added celebrity or brand or world is attached, you have to have that value-added brand world cleared. Does that make sense?
Because you cannot say, oh it is kind of a character show based around a celebrity when you do not have footage of that celebrity doing an interview with you to show us that you actually have that celebrity then you do not have the celebrity.
Biagio: Yes and it does not mean YouTube videos that you pulled off of YouTube of the celebrity talking so we can see what the celebrity looks like talking. We know what celebrities look like talking. Again, yes we are successful television producers. Yes, we have worked with a lot of celebrities over the years.
It does not mean that I can call up Jack Nicholson and be like, “Hey Jack, we are going to do this show together.” No. Number one, I would not even try to do that show but number two if you are bringing us an idea like that, the value, the package, what you are adding to the pitch as discussed in episode two of this podcast producingunscripted.com/002, what you are bringing is what adds value.
Believe me, we have been pitched every single organization under the sun multiple times. Like Joke said, Girls Scouts, NASCAR, NBA, NFL, MBL, I mean you name it. Any sports league, any organization, any celebrity, people pitch them to us all the time and yet they do not get the simple fact that you cannot pitch what you do not have.
So in thinking about show ideas as you put together your potential slate of stuff that you are looking to pitch, do not ever, ever, ever pitch a person, an organization, a business, a world you do not have access to and you do not have people on board to do a show with you. That was really bad English, me speak bad English at moment, but you get what I am saying.
Do not pitch us something you do not have. That is going to be it for this week’s episode. Super short but I think such important advice as evidenced by the hundreds of pitches we are getting from people who are pitching shows just like this.
Joke: Yes again, if you are pitching, the fastest way of getting in here and getting something going is by coming in with something of value which most often is a character or access to a world, but you have to have those characters and access to that world. And you may feel like, oh I will just write them a quick email saying hey will this be something you are interested in. Again, we cannot judge characters without seeing them on tape. Okay, so that is why listen to all of the episodes and you will kind of get a sense of what the process really is like.
But if you are pitching us a world, a brand, a person, and you have zero contact with them and you have zero access to them, I am just telling you, it is not going to work out.
Biagio: Yes and again for the record, this and a plethora of other mistakes people make when pitching to us can be solved just by visiting our YouTube Channel youtube.com/jokeandbiagio, that is youtube.com/jokeandbiagio where we have taken our first eight episodes, added a clickable table of contents so that you can instantly jump to the part that you need, all free, all for you, all because we want to make your life easier.
You would be silly, silly to pitch us anything at all without at least hitting up the YouTube Channel, going through the table of contents of these eight different episodes and making sure you are not making those mistakes. Again, that is youtube.com/jokeandbiagio. In case you do not know how to spell our names, it is J-O-K-E-A-N-D-B-I-A-G-I-O.
Now all that said, we have just teamed up with three more of you. We are super excited because a lot of the pitches are getting better. Thank you to all of those pitching and most importantly who are taking our advice. Several of you we have just pitched up, teamed up with, they have pitched more than one show. They had learned from our notes over time and it was a third or fourth attempt, and we are like this is great.
Remember people, it is a numbers game. It is a process. Pitch to us enough times, eventually we will team up on something.
That is it for this episode 32 of Producing Unscripted. Thanks again for listening. Sorry for no music. Yes, I am being lazy today. But hey, I hope the advice was helpful.
Joke: Bye.
Biagio: Bye.
