Wally Dalton was on the hotter side of Hollywood. He had pitched a hit show (Barney Miller) and written for another hit show (Laverne and Shirley). It was time he worked on films. Wally and his writing partner had drive-on passes to pitch one of his screenplays at a studio late one afternoon. After sweating and not sleeping for a few days, they both went into some important guy's office and began to crank the engine or spin the web or build Babel. The executive was getting his office redone and was a little distracted. Wally started into his pitch. "Yellow!" the exec hollered suddenly, and called his secretary in. "If the furniture is going to be brown leather, then the ceiling should be yellow!" he announced. "We've got to paint it yellow!" She penciled a note, got a wink, and headed back out. The exec smiled and turned back to Wally: "Where were we?"

The writer in Hollywood communicates with the executive structure of Hollywood via the pitch. A highly stylized, concentrated burst of idea, the pitch is the pinhole through which the writer's idea must be squeezed so that it can be re-expanded on the other side into a full-blown movie. Where the writer has created characters, conflicts, funny bits, and sad bits, and has drafted and redrafted that script into a finished piece of work, the work is all for naught if it cannot be folded down into a single sure-money phrase spoken to a roomful of jaded execs. Here at the crux of the Hollywood universe, nothing is too outrageous; the writer's pitch, and the executives' response, can go absolutely anywhere: Massive doses of money are committed to insane undertakings, or disgraced writers are ridiculed, savaged, dumped out on the sidewalk.

Back in the '80s, Wally was pitching his idea for a football movie. The story was about a father who returns to school at the same time that his son is attending the same college, and they end up on the same football team. The father variously infringes on his son's youth, and the script resolves with the father throwing his son the winning pass in a game: "The Great Santini meets The Longest Yard!" Wally pitched them.

The execs loved it. His film would get made, with Burt Reynolds as the lead. Wally remembers them washing him in clichés; they used them all: "Greenlighted! Gonna get made! Love it! Love it!" And even though it is utterly impossible for a smart man to believe such language, he started to relax with success.

Then, of course, the inevitable. "One small thing," they said. "Instead of football, could it be tennis?" Wally explained that the ending wouldn't make sense if the father and son weren't on the same team. "They'll be playing against each other!" they said, beaming. Any problems could be addressed in a rewrite. Wally gave a last shot: Burt Reynolds, the clutch element of the pitch, was a football player. "Oh," the execs assured him, "Burt is a good tennis player!"

Hollywood wants many things: the movie idea magically brewed from anti-content and anti-meaning; a fusion of the most popular cliché swirled with farce; pretend business significance and the casual death-cough of power. Almost anyone who has pitched in Hollywood describes it as a walk of squalor. It's the willingness to carry a balloon filled with shit that is fated to burst directly overhead.

And it is the most representational act for our culture. It is the greatest symbolism of the one-chance ethic, the construction of money out of nothing, and the beauty of race-paced deals. This culture, as it is born from Hollywood, adores concentrated nothingness. What takes place in the pitch room is, by definition, nothing. The writers or hired pitch guys come in and better have nothing to say. Great movie ideas must be shellacked with generality, and if meaning begins to buckle the performance of the pitch, the executives start to lose their power in all of it and they've "got to shut it down early." But the romanticism of The Deal done, a greenlighted pitch is this American culture's heartbeat. And as it stands in the center of our ideals, and is so carefully built on the idea that all meaning should be absent, the pitch is the substance of our American nausea.