I’ve sold three projects off of pitches.  One, “The Sender,” actually made it to the screen.  A second pitch, “Louie Louie,” about a guy who duplicates himself using a 3-D printer he’s invented, got bought for the movies and eventually died as an ABC pilot.  A TV pilot pitch, “Area 51,” also went to script, but was never shot.

Though I had some success with pitching, I basically hated the whole process.

I remember driving to NBC with Faye Dunaway to pitch an idea we’d worked out together.  In the car she asked me to rehearse the pitch.  I couldn’t do it.  It was bad enough to have to do it in the room.

Nobody really likes to hear someone tell a story, unless (even if?) the speaker’s a born raconteur, So how did this dread ritual get so out of hand?

In the silent era, directors worked from ideas scribbled on the backs of envelopes.  Actors made up stories as they went along.  “The Birth of a Nation” had no shooting script.  Freelancers submitted “scenarios” through the mail, got paid $15 a pop, and staff writers took it from there.

Even when writers flocked to Hollywood—the Hechts, the Wodehouses, the Algonquin crowd—they were little seen and rarely heard.  Some did nothing, some worked their asses off, but basically nobody was pitching anything except for the homeless guys buttonholing Irving Thalberg in the MGM parking lot (“Irving, I’ve got a great idea for a movie”).  Darryl Zanuck never bought a pitch in his life.

By 1950 things were starting to change. “You’ve got five minutes,” Fred Clark says to William Holden in “Sunset Boulevard.”  “What’s your story about?”  But the hour-long pitch meeting was still a gleam in some unborn junior exec’s eye.

The first young execs came into the business in the 60s, and Peter Bart, who was one of them, told me about  a guy who used to pitch tons of originals (so many he handed in the wrong scripts to the wrong studios).  Tony Bill, who became famous for hiring writers who’d never written a script before (Terry Malick, Paul Schrader, John Patrick Shanley), heard “The Sting” from David Ward as a pitch.  “And the ending will be a surprise,” Ward told him.  That couldn’t happen today.

Back in the 70s, Robert Altman could pop in at the studio, say he wanted to do a movie about country music, and get a go-ahead in the room.  At United Artists, specs, books, articles, and remakes were the rule in the 70s, pitching the exception.  And in the case of “Fist,” the pitch was a mere notion—Jimmy Hoffa as the Godfather.

“Jaws” changed everything.  More money poured into the movie business.  Multiplexes got built.  Conglomerates bought up studios, Ivy League MBAs invaded Hollywood.  Suddenly every studio had development reports that ran to 30-40 pages.  The Disney creative-exec staff expanded from three to 40, and spent a huge amount of time hearing pitches.  Writers went into studios with three or four ideas at a time.

But just as pitch-happiness expanded in the 80s, it began to fizzle thereafter.  Inflated movie budgets shrank development funds.  The junior execs are still there, but now they spend more time overseeing franchises than hearing pitches.

Dwindling or not, the pitch process is here to stay.  Hearing a pitch is easier than making a decision about a screenplay, and safer—a pitch is a Big Lie that postpones the Moment of Truth.  And what if the guy sells his pitch and you didn’t have him in?

So what’s to be done?  In the history of Hollywood, there have never been so many people complaining about the state of the movie business.  Maybe what everybody should do is get together and form a completely different movie business.  That, combined with a renewed commitment to the 15-minute guitar solo, might bring about a new age of enlightenment.  It doesn’t hurt to dream.