Thirty-five years ago, Brian Grazer learned a valuable tip for pitching ideas. The secret sent his career soaring. Once you learn the tip, your pitches–and your career–might never be the same.
Grazer, the co-founder of Imagine Entertainment with partner Ron Howard, let me in on the secret during a recent conversation. We caught up to talk about his new book, Face to Face: The Art of Human Connection. It’s one of best books I’ve read in years on the topic of interpersonal communication.
The story begins with the hit movie, Splash, that turned Tom Hanks into a global movie star. It almost never made it to the big screen. Grazer pitched the idea of a regular guy falling in love with a mermaid for seven years and, for seven years, endured rejection from one studio head after another. “They thought it was such a terrible idea, they went out of their way to humiliate me,” Grazer recalls.
Although the rejections were painful, Grazer’s recollections of the early pitch meetings are very funny. For example, one studio head didn’t think the Tom Hanks character would give up life on dry land to join a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) in an underwater kingdom at the end of the movie.
“The ending just doesn’t seem real,” he told Grazer.
“But a mermaid isn’t real!” Grazer shot back. “That’s why it’s called a fantasy romantic comedy.”
The studio passed.
One day, Grazer had an ‘aha’ moment that changed the way he pitched the idea. A friend asked Grazer why he had written a mermaid movie. It’s not a mermaid movie, Grazer thought. Instead, it was inspired by Grazer’s personal search for true love in Los Angeles, “a place where everything—including relationships—seemed superficial.” Finding a deep connection seemed unattainable to Grazer at the time, almost like falling in love with a mermaid.
Grazer reframed the idea in his next pitch to Disney. He spoke to themes, experiences and feelings that almost every human being can relate to. The pitch worked. Splash went on to achieve massive financial success. Tapping a little-known actor named Tom Hanks helped Grazer and Ron Howard make the movie for $8 million. It grossed $70 million—a huge amount in 1984. The movie earned Grazer his first Oscar-nomination. He went on to make A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, American Gangster,8 Mile, and nearly 100 other films and television shows.
“Now, when a pitch a movie or television project, I always begin with an inarguable, universal theme, something that is essential to the human experience,” Grazer writes in Face to Face. “My protagonists have goals that we all, as a species, want and root for—things like love, family unity, self-respect, and survival against the odds.”
Grazer provided me with more examples.
A Beautiful Mind isn’t just about John Nash, the schizophrenic genius who earned a Nobel Prize in math. In Grazer’s pitch, A Beautiful Mind “is about anyone who is perceived as different. It’s about taking up a more empathetic lens and finding shared humanity.”
Arrested Development isn’t just about the dysfunctional Bluth family. “It is a celebration of love within families. “However imperfect they may be, we want them to stay together. Why? It makes us feel happy and secure.”
After my conversation with Grazer, I can look back on my interviews with successful entrepreneurs in a new light. The best pitches tap into universal themes.
For example, Melanie Perkins, the youngest founder of a tech ‘unicorn,’ told me that her pitch for Canva was rejected for years until she reframed it as a universal theme. Instead of focusing on the features of her online design tool–which wasn’t resonating with investors– she began to focus on a problem that nearly everyone can relate to—the frustration of learning complex systems. Canva, she argued, solved a common frustration. The pitch worked and today Canva is worth $2.5 billion.
Brian Grazer is a pitch expert. After all, nothing gets done in Hollywood unless someone builds a strong case for their idea and convinces others to buy into it. And that’s where Grazer’s experience with Splash provides a valuable lesson for any communicator who has to ‘sell’ or convince others that their idea is a good one.
“I am convinced that this approach to pitches—looking for the common human thread in the story and opening with that—accounts in large part for my ability to ‘sell’ my ideas in an ultra-competitive, high-stakes business that is generally wary of outside-the-box thinking,” writes Grazer.
Give your listener a universal theme they can relate to and you’ll connect with them in a more profound way. It’s a powerful pitch tip that you can learn from one of the most iconic film producers in Hollywood.