How to Get Massive Attention with a ‘High-Concept Pitch’

There’s an old-school trick to selling ideas to movie executives. It’s called the high-concept pitch.

A high-concept pitch lays out the entire story — premise, promise, and execution — in one simple sentence. Here are a few famous examples from Hollywood:

• Backdraft: Top Gun in a firehouse
• Ghost: a man dies and becomes his wife’s guardian angel
• Liar Liar: a lawyer is forced to tell the truth for 24 hours
• Hook: what if Peter Pan grew up?

There’s a number of things high-pitch concepts achieve, but they mainly bring together two completely different ideas and then demonstrate in the short pitch why your idea is different …read more