Featuring Vic Shuttee: HSPVA Screenwriting

Vic Shuttee goes over pitches with Bridget Fenner. 

This semester in the Sophomore Creative Writing class at HSPVA, we welcomed Vic Shuttee as our new Screenwriting teacher (known as a consultant at HSPVA), who is certified in the best possible as a winner of the Young Arts and the current host of “Hail Satire!” a radio talk show and someone who has experience on NPR. But I digress. What everyone expected to be a rather typical class of filler assignments and maybe retaining about a fourth of what we ended up learning about, we fell down the rabbit hole into the world of screenwriting, and it turns out there’s a lot more to movies than holding a camera and yelling “Cut!”. 

There’s also politics in the Oscars, like a rather huge bias towards films about Hollywood for Hollywood (Birdman winning the Oscars), Clint Eastwood being one of the few conservatives (who’s actually anti-war, as American Sniper demonstrated) in movie business, the noticeable snubbing of franchise songs that relate to capitalism (Everything is Awesome: Lego Movie).

Vic teaches HSPVA students about pitches.

We learned about the grueling process of writing pitches, the offering of a miniscule summary of your idea to some towels-off-in-Benjamins kind of rich Executive of Sony or Warner Bros. Even if the overarching main idea of pitches was to suck up to some snobby executive in order to get your idea chosen and your paycheck rolling, there much more to it than that. 

You had to be confident in your social skills, the ability to convey your idea in a manner that’s irresistible, no matter what the final product is (Michael Bay’s entire Transformers franchise), the ability to bait the listeners into biting into their own ego, by putting two and two together in your pitch and letting the executives yell out “four!” so they think that if someone of their caliber and salary can figure out what you just told them, then the rest of America will find your concept mind bending and amazing (Not in the “whoa” sense of Inception, but more like realizing how much effort and time went into Hotel Budapest).

After we got out pitches down, the grueling 10-page scripts came next. As an example, we dissected Boyhood, and its breakdown into 12 short films cohesively cut and edited into a three-hour masterpiece. Then we wrote 10-minute scripts on the pitches we presented to Vic and received feedback. As we continue revise and refine our scripts, we all aim for the ultimate goal presented by Vic during his first class: One our scripts will actually be shot as a movie with graduate students.