Pitch Tape Budgets – Warning: Avoid Traps & Scams

Today’s episode about pitch tape budgets may be the most serious we’ve ever recorded. It includes important tips for anyone who wants to pitch TV shows, but also a warning. We’ve received a cluster of emails in past weeks reporting something that concerns us. Some companies are asking aspiring producers to fork over thousands of dollars. Why? To create pitch tapes or sizzle reels for these producers’ original TV show ideas. Is this legit? Should you consider this? Would established production companies ask you for $30,000 or more to make a pitch tape for your concept? We have important answers for you. You’ll learn the real “why” behind pitch tape budgets. Plus, sizzle reel goals you need to set for yourself, no matter what.   Pitch Tape Budgets, Goals, and Realities We’ve discussed pitch tapes (a.k.a. sizzle reels) before. Essentially, a pitch tape is like a “movie trailer” for your unscripted TV show concept — whether for a documentary series, reality TV show, or even feature length doc. (For instance, we made pitch tape for Dying to do Letterman originally framing it as a documentary series long before it made it to theaters and streaming as a feature film.) The goal when making a pitch tape is to get a TV network or legit production company interested in your concept. This begins a journey that hopefully ends with your TV show concept on the air. There’s no doubt that pitch tapes are an important part of our industry. Our own pitch tapes jump-started our careers and have sold numerous TV shows. That said, we’ve also preached about not going broke while putting together these kinds of presentation tapes. Playing the Numbers Game (Without Going Broke) The honest truth is that every individual TV show concept pitched (including those created by Mark Burnett, J.J. Abrams, the two of us, or anyone in Hollywood) is a long shot. You always pitch more shows than you actually sell. When you need to pitch so much, so often, it just doesn’t make sense to spend big, big money on any one pitch tape. In fact, when we first started out, we never spent more than $500 out-of-pocket on our pitch tapes (and often far less than that. Granted, we were also shooting, editing, and making the graphics for our own productions, so that helped a lot.) To this day we warn people not to spend more than a few hundred dollars on their first-crack at a pitch tape. Scary Emails from Some of You That’s why we were so concerned when we received several emails — all within a relatively short time — from people asking if it was normal for production companies to ask them to personally fund pitch tapes. And these were enormous pitch tape budgets! Tens of thousands of dollars to make a sizzle reel for a concept these producers had pitched. Most frightening was that the producers who reached out to us were seriously considering paying up — all so their ideas could eventually get “pitched to TV networks.”   Now, we’re not saying that, in all these cases, there was some kind of malicious intent behind these big asks. We don’t know these companies in question (nor did our agents.) That doesn’t necessarily mean that the people who run these places are trying to “rip producers off” or are “bad people.” We don’t know or understand their business models. However, our own production company would never ask someone to pony up out-of-pocket cash for a show concept ...