So-called "Hollywood Pitch Master" Bob Kosberg said the
following in an interview with Michael Gill:
"Everyone thinks that in The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch
dies at the end of the story — melted.
And we remember her famous last words
'I'm melting! I'm melting! What a world. What a world.'
The pitch I liked," he says with the excitement of
a child on his birthday,
"was based on that setup.
What if the Witch didn't die?
What if it was all an act?
And now it's the year 2000 and the Wicked Witch is
still alive and well and mean and green and she's
broken out of Oz Jail and she's on her way to New York
to get those damn red slippers once and for all."
FACING THE MUSIC [drama]
Nuremberg, 1947.
Georg, a former Nazi officer is on trial for his
involvement in the operation of the Dachau
extermination camp.
It seems that when the family slipped off-stage one
at a time at the end of that music festival in Linz,
Austria, they did escape over a mountainous border.
But they escaped to the north.
To southern Czechoslovakia in March 1938, just before
Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss,
but less than a year before also annexing
southern Czechoslovakia.
Feeling that his destiny must lie with the Fatherland,
and like a good German, the family patriarch
reported for duty.
His oldest son ("Tee") joined the Wermacht,
and marched off to fight the Bolsheviks
on the approaches to Stalingrad.
His oldest daughter ("La"), who had quickly fallen
in love with that nice Joshua Goldfarb from their
new neighborhood, was relocated with her new husband
to a "resettlement facility" in southern Poland.
The surviving family members have heard nothing
from them since one short letter in mid-1939.
While they fear the worst, they hold out hope that
they were taken to the Soviet Union
and will return some day.
The four youngest children
("Do", "Ray", "Mi", and "Fa")
plus his wife Maria had pitched in to do their part
for the Fatherland after things started going badly
for the Nazis.
Unfortunately, all of them, including the youngest
children, were working in the ball bearing factories
outside Schweinfurt when the US 8th Air Force reduced
them to smoking rubble.
Embittered, Georg volunteered for service as a naval
liason officer to the SS and was sent to serve at
Dachau.
Now he and their only remaining child ("So") are all
that remain, and with Georg facing possible execution
and his daughter completely out of touch with reality
since the Schweinfurt raids of mid-1943,
things look grim for the family.
FACING THE MUSIC is primarily set in 1947 at the
Nuremberg trials.
Georg's testimony and late-night thoughts in his cell
lead to flashbacks gradually filling in the story
of the family over the decade since what most people
believe was their happy ending.
SHAKE-N-BAKE: THE MOVIE [comedy]
Tom Bosworth is a Rhodes Scholar and former Navy SEAL
who led the venture capital group at Manhattan's
premiere financial house.
But then he left finance to become Hollywood's greatest
pitch-man and the genius behind the ten most successful
films of the past decade.
Life is good — very good — for Tom Bosworth.
But then an influential movie critic wrote a
controversial essay in "Variety".
He bemoaned the state of Hollywood, and claimed that
the American public seemed to find even the constant
recycling of 1960s television shows too challenging.
All at once, a strange movie idea crosses
Bosworth's desk.
He thought he had seen it all: Moby Dick in space.
An entire series of pitches based on Jane Austen
being a 19th-century government assassin.
Demented paranoia about Canadian country musicians.
And worse.
But this pitch is SO strange that he can't
simply set it aside.
Someone is pitching the idea of a movie based on the
1970s TV advertisement for chicken breading.
"It's Shake-n-Bake Daddy, an Ah hayulpt!"
The problem is that Bosworth recognizes the source.
He can't help but take notice — it's one of
Hollywood's most successful scriptwriters.
When Bosworth contacts the writer to see just
what the joke is, he is told that it is NOT a joke.
And what's more, Top People are very very interested.
Speilberg and Scorcese are said to be fighting over
the project, and major stars' agents are letting it
be known that their people would work for scale
just to be involved with the project.
Just what is really going on?
PEARLS BEFORE SWINE [comedy]
Our hero (Mack Hammer, Mitch Johnson, Dirk Kosbourne,
or some other testosterone-seeping name) is a former
US Navy SEAL with an advanced degree, a man who turned
down a Harvard post-graduate position for two years of
service in the Peace Corps, and who is now married to
a supermodel.
Now he is a pitch-man in Hollywood.
PEARLS BEFORE SWINE shows the humorous frustrations our
hero must struggle through as he attempts to sell the
few truly good ideas to the Philistines who are
Hollywood studio executives.
But to do this, he is forced to work with the dross
sent to him by the unwashed masses of unsolicited
script submitters, including deranged nonsense
such as dramas about ballerinas with wooden legs,
pun-laden marginalia, and elaborate paranoid fantasies
in which all country singers are some evil conspiracy
of non-human reptilians, Canadians, or even worse.
PEARLS BEFORE SWINE will share, with a wink, just enough
behind-the-scenes realism with viewers to win fans with
its attitude, while also sharing with them the humor to
be found in the daily life of this most unappreciated
of noble avocations.
