2026-05-04
The 30 seconds before your film idea ends in the trash
Commissioning editors decide whether to reach page two in the first thirty seconds. Most pitches are written as if that decision happens at the end.
POV
Commissioners don't read pitches. They triage them. A senior commissioner sees more exposés in a month than they green-light in a year. BBC Storyville, Channel 4 Cutting Edge, PBS Frontline — all working piles in the low hundreds. Page two is a privilege. Most pitches don't earn it.
SCANNING FOR FILM.
Three openers that kill a pitch in paragraph one:
- Passive-voice location. "In a remote village in the Alps, the air is changing…" Sets a scene. No one in it. Editors commission films about people, not places. - The list. "This film explores migration, memory, and climate collapse…" Committee-written, every time. Three topics, no film. - The generic noun. "A family struggles." "A community grapples." No name. No clock. Nothing for the editor to carry out of the room.
So what works? The IDA broke down the opening of Apart — a practitioner look at why the editors picked a breakfast in a prison: ordinary, banal, and exactly the point. The fix isn't literary. It's journalistic. Subject named, stake clear, tense present.
THIRTY SECONDS.
Here's the rule of thumb: read only the first paragraph of your own pitch. Nothing else. Would a commissioning editor turn the page? That's the easy test. The hard test is the one behind the editor — would a viewer not switch off? If the answer is "yes, because Hanna is smuggling insulin across a closed border and the agents are onto her" — keep it. If the answer is "yes, because it sounds interesting" — that's decoration, not a film. Rewrite until the name lands by sentence two.
Attention isn't the bottleneck. The commissioner's job is. BBC Storyville's former lead commissioner Emma Hindley talked to the IDA about what she actually reads for; the Sheffield DocFest 2024 Storyville brief is the same logic in public-document form. The question behind the triage is always the same: is this a film for my slot, my audience, my brand — and can it survive the first edit? The opener sells the film. The rest just confirms you can deliver it.
A commissioning "yes" isn't fate or luck. It's format fit above everything else. Does this belong on her slot, for her audience, in her editorial brand? If no, the named protagonist, the concrete stake, the present-tense grammar — none of it matters. If yes, the opener still has to make every one of those choices in the first paragraph.
Making those choices is hard. Ten research agents, 98 broadcaster formats, twelve minutes to a first draft. Get it free: thepitchdoctor.io →