Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: How To Pitch A Work For Hire Project

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: How To Pitch a Work-For-Hire Project.
This week we’ll be talking about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino. We’re going to set aside the question of whether the movie actually works or not. Some people think it’s Quentin Tarantino’s finest work; some people don’t like the film at all.
What I’m interested in with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is how you build a premise into the story you want to tell. 
Now, it’s impossible to talk about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood without some spoilers. I’m going to give some spoilers here at the beginning, but I’m going to keep them light. Then, as we get deeper into the discussion, there’s a big spoiler at the end. I promise to give you a nice warning before we get there. 
The inception for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the Manson murders, obviously a subject that has been explored quite a bit both in news media and film.
So, Quentin Tarantino wants to write a movie about the Manson murders. Whenever you’re exploring a topic other people have explored, you have to have a take. Now, you might love Quentin Tarantino’s take or you may hate Quentin Tarantino’s take, but he’s got a take.
A take means this: why is your approach to this film slightly different than anyone else’s? How are you telling the story differently from an angle that only you could tell it?
This is one of the most important skills to develop as a writer, both for the development of your own projects and also when you get into the work-for-hire world. 
When someone is interested in hiring you, they have an idea, a project that’s maybe just beginning, or a project needing to be rewritten, and you’re being auditioned as the potential person to do that rewrite.
What they don’t want to hear is, “Hey, I’m a great writer and wasn’t Manson horrible?” They want to hear how you are going to approach the material in a way that will differentiate it from how anyone else would approach it.
A lot of that comes from instinct and a lot comes from who you are. But the goal is to learn how to talk about it in a way that’s instantly clear so other people will instantly understand it.
What you realize while watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is that Quentin Tarantino is doing the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead version of the Manson murders.
Instead of focusing on Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, the people living at Cielo, the Manson family, or even Manson himself (who we only get one tiny little glimpse of during the whole movie), Tarantino’s take on the material is to focus on two fictional and tangential characters. One is an actor named Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s on the declining portion of his career. The other is his stunt man Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt, who is his best friend in the world and doesn’t have two nickels to rub together.
Instead of watching the story from the main character’s point of view, we’re going to watch it from these secondary characters’ points of view.
If you don’t know about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, this is a play by Tom Stoppard in which he took Hamlet and turned it inside out using the perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the two tiniest characters in Hamlet.
Quentin Tarantino is using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a model to find his own take on the Manson murders. Maybe he’s doing that consciously or maybe he’s not.
One of the interesting things people do when they pitch screenplays is they always say, “It’s this meets that.” 
“It’s the Manson murders meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” “It’s Jaws meets Rosemary’s Baby.” People always like to pitch mash-ups. 
When I’m pitching a script, I don’t like to pitch mash-ups. If I pitch a mash-up, what I’m doing is sounding just like everybody else. Instead, what I like to do is tell my take on the piece and let the pr...