Tales from the Script

4 The First Yes

Beginning screenwriters must vault one last hurdle before becoming professionals—they must forge alliances with legitimate talent representatives, either agents or managers. Forever satirized as parasites who do little to earn the 10 (or 15) percent of their clients’ earnings that they collect, agents and managers actually play crucial roles in the lives of the screenwriters they represent.

The most hands-on managers, for instance, provide comprehensive guidance on how to launch a career, or how to shift an established career into a higher gear. But even the busiest agent, who may have but a handful of minutes to offer any particular client in a given week, delivers not only access to buyers but also several layers of legal protection. Submitting material through agents ensures that ideas are as shielded from theft as possible, and ensures that contracts have the necessary safeguards.

The problem, of course, is that getting an agent is impossible. Or at least it seems that way. Most reputable agents refuse to read unsolicited submissions, because doing so exposes them to legal liability. Therein lies the conundrum: Agents only want to work with established clients, but writers can’t become established without agents. Yet new writers land representation every day, either by networking their way to referrals or by earning sufficient notoriety to catch the attention of agents and managers.

Once the two elements of talent and representation are mixed, the conditions are finally right for a rare chemical reaction to occur: the actual sale of a screenplay. Initial success in Hollywood can occur by multitudinous means, as the anecdotes in this chapter prove. From Michael Wolk’s fairy-tale experience of selling the first screenplay he ever wrote, to Antwone Fisher’s touching realization that a Hollywood paycheck was about to change his life, stories about joining the ranks of working screenwriters are as varied as they are inspiring.

That said, success introduces a raft of unexpected challenges. Frank Darabont was intimidated by the prospect of crafting a follow-up to his Oscar-nominated directorial debut. Shane Black withdrew from public life for several years because of the unwanted attention his record-setting paychecks attracted. In one way or another, every screenwriter who achieves success wrestles with the bewildering sensation that Oscar nominee Richard Rush describes as “free fall.”

Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You

STEPHEN SUSCO: Getting an agent is the biggest catch–22 that there is: No one will read your stuff without an agent, but an agent won’t read your stuff. It takes a lot of work for an agent to break in a new writer, so the things they’re gonna look for are really straightforward. One, a really good personality, because they have to put you in a room with people. Two, that you have very strong visions, but you can play ball creatively. Three, that you don’t just have one spec script—you’ve got multiple scripts, multiple pitches, multiple outlines. They want you to make their job easier. If you go in as a creative force with a lot of business sense and say, “I’m willing to work harder than you will work for me,” that’s the key to maximizing your ability to get an agent.

JUSTIN ZACKHAM: My first manager was my girlfriend’s mom. She just represented actors, and she decided to try to take me on as a writer. She got me an agent. Very nice guy, but I knew more having been in Hollywood for two weeks than he knew having been here for five years. I started out with him. I was at ICM (International Creative Management) for maybe two months before they got rid of me, and then I just decided I didn’t need an agent. I went for about six, seven years without an agent. Then I landed at William Morris, and, you know, they’re agents. They don’t do a whole lot. The letterhead gets your scripts read, and studios tell them what projects are available first. Aside from that, in my experience, the whole agent thing is a nice way to throw away 10 percent of what you make. It’s the necessary evil.

MIKE BINDER: What you will find out in the long run is that agents have very little power over you. In the beginning, you think you work for them. In the end, they work for you. It’s like a bank. You know, once you have money in the bank, they’re gonna do their job or you move to another bank. If you don’t have any money and you need a loan, you’ve gotta jump up and do flips in the lobby of the bank. You really don’t want to start off with the biggest agent in town, because they won’t take the time to believe in you. You want someone who’s really gonna be there and walk you through it. What you’ve gotta have is someone that really believes in you and helps you learn to believe in yourself.

MARK D. ROSENTHAL: The business has gotten too busy. The pace has gotten too fast. It’s gotten so much harder to find gigs for clients, so agents can’t have the relationship with clients they used to have in the old days: “Let’s just go out to lunch once a week and talk things over.” There’s not as much hand-holding allowed. Obviously if you’re Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks, you get hand-held because you’re bringing in so much money—but young writers coming into the business today are not gonna get the guidance that an agent used to give. That’s a real problem.

PAUL MAZURSKY: My first important agent was Freddie Fields. Famous agent. When Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was made, it was a big hit. And when you’ve made a big hit, the unwritten rule is you can have five disasters. My next picture was Alex in Wonderland, which was one disaster. The next script that I handed in was Harry and Tonto, and that was turned down about twenty-five times. Freddie Fields said to me, “You only need one yes.” He loved it, I loved it, and we got it made. Art Carney won the Academy Award for the movie, and I was nominated for the Academy Award.

LARRY COHEN: I had a wonderful agent, Peter Saberston, who passed away but who represented me for probably thirty-five, forty years. He wasn’t a major agent, but he kept me workin’ all the time ’cause I was his primary client. I wasn’t just one of a stable of clients; I was the guy who was gonna bring home the bread and butter. If I worked, he was gonna make money. If I didn’t work, he wasn’t gonna make money. He was out there beatin’ the bushes every day, and he got me plenty of jobs over the years. It was an unorthodox way to work. Most writers wanna go with a big agency, but I found that the material speaks for itself. If you’ve got something good, it can be sold.

Larry Cohen

DAVID S. WARD: It was a bit of serendipity how I got my first agent. I was living in Venice. Small $75-a-month apartment across from a place called the Venice Skill Center. It’s a place where they teach people how to be auto mechanics, stenographers, things like that. It’s where I got my scripts typed, because I don’t type. The guy who ran the place, his wife had had a small fender-bender with an agent, and they’d become friends. He said to me, “I’ll give your script to the agent, see what he says.” The agent was a guy named Stu Miller, at the Melbourne Agency. He read the script and really liked it, and that’s how I got my start. He was actually the agent that got Steelyard Blues done, and The Sting as well.

SHANE BLACK: Getting an agent or manager is essential. It’s the most important thing for a young screenwriter, to have their work made available to the industry by someone with more credibility, so people don’t just toss it when it comes over the transom. For me, it was about getting momentum through this group of friends who I was with in college. We all came up together. One of us would get an agent, and then he would reach down the ladder a rung and help someone else up. Then I would in turn help someone after me, and we’d sorta leapfrog up the ladder, each providing whatever access we could by banding together as a group instead of trying to take on Hollywood one by one. It’s important to find a group of like-minded people who are on the same wavelength, who wanna write screenplays as badly as you do, who aren’t selfish, who support you. If you’re sinking or you’re drowning, it’s nice to have somebody else in the boat.

JOHN D. BRANCATO: I remember that the Writers Guild used to issue a piece of yellow paper with a list of all the agencies on it, including ones with little asterisks that said they will only accept submissions from people they know. The big agencies were all that way. I mean, CAA (Creative Artists Agency) and William Morris and ICM won’t accept anything over the transom. But there were a handful of little agencies that would read screenplays, even from a nobody like me. I sent out a spec screenplay to every single one of them, and I met with a couple of them.

I wound up with an agent who had a little studio apartment off Hollywood Boulevard. She had once had a job at an agency, years and years before. She was actually getting elderly and she sorta smelled funny, but she said, “I’ll be your agent.” She would have been anybody’s agent, I think, but she took me on, and she was my first agent. She beat down enough doors that I got a couple of meetings. I got a meeting with Stan Lee through her, and hit it off with Stan right away. I thought he was a great, funny guy, and he hired us to write a draft of Spider-Man.

I don’t think you get a decent agent until you have some work that’s been seen, that people have talked about. Prior to that, anything will do.

JONATHAN LEMKIN: If you don’t know anybody, you definitely have to lie. I cold-called everybody on the WGA list who would take submissions and spoke to them. Most of them weren’t that useful. Then I read the trades and found out who was opening new agencies, called them, and claimed I knew friends of theirs. Sometimes I would know somebody who would give me a name. Eventually, an agent busted me. She said, “You don’t really know this person, do you?” I said no. She said, “I’ll read it anyhow.”

BILLY RAY: My father was a literary agent and a good one. He represented some of the best writers ever: Alvin Sargent and Frank Pierson and Paul Brickman…. Quite a list. Well, he didn’t want to represent me because he was my father, so I had to find an agent like everybody else.

There was this one agent who worked at a very small agency, the H. M. Swanson Agency. The agent’s name is Bruce Kaufman. I liked him. I thought he was smart and I thought he was hungry. But I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, because I did business with him. By this point, I was not just a gofer for these two TV producers, but I was kind of a junior executive for them, and I was dealing with agents.

So I called Bruce and said, “I’ve just read this novel that I think you should see.” I tore the title page off, and I sent him the novel that I’d written. He called me back a couple of weeks later and said, “I like this very much, who wrote this?” I said, “I did. Will you represent me?” He said yes, and he’s been my agent ever since. The joke is that I’m trying to make it through my career with one agent and one wife, and so far I’ve managed on both counts.

STEPHEN SUSCO: I got my first job while I was still a film student. I got it in my third semester of school, and it was a pretty big job even though we got paid WGA minimum. It was an established director, Ted Demme, and New Line Cinema was producing it, and the whole thing was packaged by CAA. So my writing partner and I said, “This is it. CAA is gonna represent us, and they’re huge, and it’s gonna launch our careers. We’re set.”

Right after we got the job, CAA called us in for a meeting. So we put on our best suits and sat in the waiting room and looked at the atrium, and we were just overwhelmed by CAA. The third assistant came down and introduced himself and brought us upstairs. Then we sat in that waiting room, and the second assistant brought us in to the first assistant. We kept getting closer and closer—it was like an airlock.

We finally got brought in to meet the agent, and it was probably a three-to four-minute meeting. He sat us down and he said, “Look, we don’t know who the fuck you guys are. We handle Ted Demme, we do business with New Line—that’s all great. You guys are brand-new writers and you’re getting paid nothing for this, so we’re not really gonna do anything for you. All I can tell you is after you leave my office, you should go try to find another agent if you can. And then, years from now, when we’re beggin’ to have you back, tell us to go fuck ourselves. Have a nice day.”

The Right Place at the Right Time

WILLIAM GOLDMAN: I was teaching at Princeton University, and I’d been working on Butch Cassidy for six or eight years. I wrote the script over Christmas vacation, and when it went out, for God knows what reason, every studio but MGM wanted it. My late, great agent, Mr. Everett Ziegler, got an auction going. Dick Zanuck at Fox bought it for a phenomenal amount of money, $400,000. That became headline news—small headline news—all around the country: “Screenplay Sells for $400,000.” Because everybody knew the directors had all the visual concepts, and they didn’t know why this novelist out of New York got that obscene amount of money.

PAUL SCHRADER: I had written Taxi Driver as a kind of self-therapy, and then I drifted around to get myself back together. I stayed on the couches of various college friends in Montreal, Maine, North Carolina. And while I was in North Carolina, I got a letter from my brother, who was in Kyoto, Japan. He wrote this long letter about the yakuza films that he had gotten obsessed with. The Bruce Lee fad was very successful at that time, and it occurred to me that maybe the next phase of Asian martial-arts movies would be Japanese gangsters. My brother and I met up in Los Angeles and wrote The Yakuza.

The Yakuza was sold for the highest fee going at that time. It got involved in an auction—the first day, there were sixteen bids—and so that immediately gave me a profile. I decided I better write as fast and as hard as I could, so I just started writing. Writing like crazy. Wrote Obsession, wrote Rolling Thunder, wrote Hardcore. Just started trying to knock these things out as quickly as I could. I was only writing on spec. At that time, I felt I could work faster on spec—by the time you pitched an idea and made a deal, you could have written the script.

Paul Schrader

GERALD DiPEGO: After I did Sharky’s Machine, I had the feeling of, “Well, that’s kind of kicked me into the feature realm now.” But the features I wrote after that did not sell or were not produced, so the feature career didn’t build on itself immediately, whereas television networks were calling me all the time with assignments. There were some assignments I really liked, so I didn’t strictly write features after that. It was just a matter of timing. I wasn’t able to build on Sharky, so it was really Phenomenon that kicked me into features to stay, because I was able to follow that up. It made enough of a noise that it pushed me over into features.

ROBERT MARK KAMEN: This is a true story. The day I sold my first novel, I got the call from my New York book agent, and they said, “Simon and Schuster is going to buy your novel, and they’re gonna give you $25,000.” I had written two chapters, and it was this huge tome about Japan and America in World War II. I figured I had two years of work ahead of me. Ten minutes later, the phone rings and it’s Warner Bros. saying they wanna buy my screenplay for $135,000. I never looked back. I never thought about writing another word of fiction. I went straight for the money.

STEVEN E. de SOUZA: I wrote three pilots for Paramount that all sold, and the last one was for the producer Lawrence Gordon. After I did that, it was like the young fighter who gets told, “You know, you’re pretty good with your fists and you’ve got good footwork—I’d like to move you up into the middleweights.” He said, “Listen, we have a picture that we’ve had in development for a number of years, and we wanna do a big rewrite on it. We wanna assign you to this picture.” It was 48 Hrs.

I did the production rewrite of that picture, which was a big change. The script had been around so long that originally the seasoned cop was gonna be played by Robert Mitchum, and the young aggressive punk in jail was gonna be Clint Eastwood. Now it was Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, who had done nothing except Saturday Night Live.

I did a couple more movies for the same group, for Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver. I did Commando, and then I did The Running Man. One thing led to the other. I was lucky to hit my stride at a time when the kind of movies I liked hit their stride—not just in America, but in the global marketplace.

JOHN D. BRANCATO: The first few years, I was writing low-budget movies. I worked for Roger Corman, worked for other entities making movies for next to nothing. It was great because they actually got made. You finally hear how dialogue sounds in the mouths of actors, and get a sense of how your ideas really don’t work when they’re finally thrown up there. You learn a lot right away. But after about four or five years, it felt like it was a dead end. Doing another thing from the outtakes of Iron Eagle was just so depressing. I couldn’t stand it. I thought I owed it to myself to write a screenplay that I really liked—to give it my best shot before I left the industry. I came up with an idea, and worked it out with my partner, and sold it right away. That’s the movie that became The Game.

MICHAEL WOLK: When I wrote my first screenplay, it was sort of an unusually blessed event. I’d written a couple of mystery novels, and decided to try my hand at a screenplay. I was represented by an agent who had never sold a screenplay. She’d only sold novels. She read it, didn’t know what to make of it, showed it to a friend of hers named Raymond Bongiovanni, who was a great literary guy here in New York, and he loved it. They sent it on to William Morris, established a co-agent relationship, and the screenplay sold for a lotta money. It was back in the nineties when there was this wild auction market for spec scripts. When I went to L.A. for my victory tour, people said, “This never happens”—and I must say it never happened again.

GUINEVERE TURNER: Because the world that it represented was so unfamiliar to people, and because the style of it was so scrappy, I think people perceived Go Fish to be a documentary, basically, and thought the script was kind of a one-off. And so in terms of being acknowledged and appreciated as a screenwriter, I think the breakthrough moment for me was American Psycho. That was complete and utter street cred. The amazing thing about that project was that before it was even made—because Leo DiCaprio was connected to it at some point, and because he had just come off of Titanic—it suddenly became, “Oh, you wrote American Psycho? We love American Psycho.” I got jobs off of that movie before it was even made, because the script had buzz.

ANTWONE FISHER: When Todd Black, who produced Antwone Fisher, sold my story to 20th Century–Fox, I still didn’t get that my life was gonna be changing. Even the money I was paid, I didn’t get how much it really was. I’d never had that much money before. If someone gave me, like, fifty or a hundred dollars, I could say, “Oh, that’s a hundred dollars.” But when someone gives you that much money…I had to think about it, and it took a long time to realize that I could actually afford a new pair of shoes.

ZAK PENN: Being part of a spec auction, where your agent is calling, and you have no money, and they’re saying, “They just bid a hundred thousand,” “They just bid two hundred thousand…” It’s like winning the lottery for something that you actually did, as opposed to for luck. It’s a really, really thrilling feeling. I joke with friends that the time I won the grand prize on a game show was the best moment of my life—then the birth of my kids, then selling my first script. That might actually be ahead of my kids. Then maybe selling my second script, and then maybe getting married. You know what I mean? The thrill that you get from those sales—it just feels like you’ve been validated somehow. I don’t think I’d feel that way now. I’m probably a little too jaded. I don’t think I’d be literally falling to my knees. Now the thrill comes from watching the final product.

ANDREW W. MARLOWE: In the film business, there is never one breakthrough moment. It’s always a series of moments.

When I won the Nicholl Fellowship for my USC thesis script, that got me a lot of attention. From there, I got hired on to do a couple of jobs. And then my first real big break, I think, was when we got Air Force One off the ground—when the script went to Harrison Ford and he said yes.

You never really succeed. You always fail at a higher level. As a screenwriter, the first level of failure is you can’t finish your screenplay. I saw a lot of those people in film school. Then you finish the screenplay, and nobody wants to read it. Then you get somebody to read it, and they’re not interested. You get them to read it and they’re interested, but you can’t sell it. Then you sell it, but it’s not made into a movie. Or it’s made into a terrible movie that you’re embarrassed to be associated with. Or, you know, you hit the jackpot. You get the movie made, it’s a critical success, it’s a box-office success—and everybody turns to you and says, “Okay, you gotta do it again.”

You’re always climbing that mountain. Sometimes it’s the same mountain, sometimes it’s a different mountain. But even when you get to the top, there’s this realization: “Okay, the view is great, but tomorrow I gotta get up and start climbing the mountain again.”

Andrew W. Marlowe

The Catastrophe of Success

PETER HYAMS: There are two breakthrough moments you have, in my opinion. The first is when you actually get in—you know, when you sneak under the flap of the circus tent and actually get inside. That’s a breakthrough. That separates you from everybody else who’s trying to get in. And then the probably more significant breakthrough is when you do something that’s successful.

The first thing that I ever did that was successful was a thing I wrote and directed called Capricorn One. We screened the picture, and there was this unbelievable reaction, and I stood in the back of the theater and reacted as I do to most things: I started to cry. I realized that there was a sea change in my life. Somehow or another, things wouldn’t be exactly the same again.

I was with a very smart guy named David Picker, who had run United Artists and Paramount and Columbia. After the screening, he put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, “You’re gonna have a lot of brand-new best friends tomorrow morning. You better learn how to handle it.”

RICHARD RUSH: Most of us have been pushing very hard against a wall, and we’ve been pushing and pushing for so long, that when it suddenly disappears, we free fall into space. And that is a fair definition of success. You’ve gotta be aware of the sensation of the tumble—of momentarily losing the resistance you’re used to.

ANDREW W. MARLOWE: I’ve seen a lot of writers who have gotten that first big break, and they have then gone off and partied and hung out and gone to lunch with everybody in town. Six months later, they’ve been having lunches and they haven’t done the work. It’s very important to keep doing the work, because you’re a writer. That is now your career. I’ve seen some people fall into that trap. And then I’ve seen people who have had a lot of success act like they’re, you know, the Second Coming—and they never are. Maybe you get one a generation who can afford to be an arrogant prick.

JAMES L. WHITE: I decided to keep the smoke in my ass and not let it get to my head, you know what I mean? Because there’s a lotta smoke that comes at you, and if you start believing the hype, then you can’t be creative. Ray was nice. I’m really, really happy with it. I’m very proud of it. But now I’ve gotta move on to something else. I’ve gotta make the next piece I do better than that. Creativity demands that you do something new all the time. You might be tellin’ the same story, but you gotta have a nuance in it. It can’t be the same licks over and over again. If the next film I make looks just like Ray, well, where have I grown?

Doug Atchison

DOUG ATCHISON: Because of Akeelah and the Bee, I get sent a lot of stuff about little kids, a lot of stuff about sports and overcom ing adversity. I like those kinda movies, but I need to diversify. You know, Akeelah is the only spelling-bee movie I’m ever gonna do, and it’s an absolutely distinct piece of writing from everything else I’ve ever written. And yet it is the piece that defines me almost entirely to the business right now. I don’t get sent The Departed, you know? I would love to write a movie like that. That’s not what I get sent. Right now, I have to take advantage of those opportunities that seem like they’ll be good projects. But I also need to write some other scripts that I’m not getting paid for, to show folks I can do these other things. You always have to redefine yourself for people, and convince them that you’re not a one-trick pony.

JOE FORTE: Having a movie come out, first of all, takes the monkey off your back. No matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you made a movie. When you’re trying to get there, that’s a big cloud over your head. You want to have something that’s concrete evidence of all the work you’ve put in. So the psychological aspect of completing your goal is great.

When Firewall came out, I felt the pressure to sell the next piece, to get another movie made, to keep it going—and I think I got myself into the position where I had to stop and realize that the person who was creating that pressure was actually me.

Once you get one produced, then you’re like, “Well, that’s not good enough. I need two produced.” You create a consumption mentality, and the way I stopped that mentality was to focus on what I loved. If I write something that people don’t respond to, despite my best efforts, then that’s just where the chips fall. I think it’s really about being on a path that’s authentic to you.

SHANE BLACK: With my early deals, there was such insane scrutiny. The numbers were very large. I got this mixed-bag reaction from people, which I didn’t expect. Some writers were very angry. I wanted to be invisible and vanish from the equation, and not be accountable for the money I was making. I just wrote the story—it’s not my problem who offers to pay for it. I just wanted to disappear and again become a guy who wrote stories. I didn’t want to deal with this insanity.

The first time I applied to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, my friend Dale Launer offered to sponsor me. The criteria for entry is you need at least two produced pieces of work of substantive merit in the motion picture field. At that time, I had Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon 2, Last Boy Scout, Long Kiss Goodnight, Last Action Hero, Monster Squad—and they turned me down. They said, “We don’t feel that your credits warrant membership in the Academy, but perhaps you can reapply at a future date when you have more credits.”

This was after all those sales, and I went, “This can’t be just about the work.” It had to be that money. It had to be these writers sittin’ around going, “We don’t want that guy in here, that one who made all that money.”

So for a while, I kind of crawled in a wormhole. I came out again to write and direct a small movie I’m very happy with, and now, hopefully, I’ll keep going, but…be careful what you wish for. That big paycheck—on two occasions, bigger than anybody had received for screenwriting in history—was a curse that ended up taking me out for a few years. I was scared. Petrified. That kind of money can freeze you up and cause all kinds of unforeseen problems.

FRANK DARABONT: When your first movie out of the gate gets that kind of response—you know, your first movie gets nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay—it can be daunting. It can be somewhat crippling. It’s like, “How are you gonna top that?” Maybe you shouldn’t even try. That was probably one of the reasons it took me about five years to direct another movie, because I was looking for material that had the same kind of meat, the same kind of meaning—and that’s not easy to find. Those stories are very rare. It’s hard to find a Shawshank every time you make a movie. If it were easy, everybody would be making Shawshank.

It really just goes to show that the story is the thing that will spark. It’s not necessarily the efforts of the actors, or the skill of the director, or the skill of the screenwriter. For something to become special, in a way it kinda transcends and supersedes all of those components. It becomes something greater than itself, and that’s not something you can plan for.

BILLY RAY: When I first began, I was a bit of a flavor of the month, and I was writing two scripts for this very powerful producer. It was around Christmastime, and I went into her office to get notes on one of the projects. As I was walking into her office, I saw this computer printer, and it was spitting out a list. I looked, and at the very top of the list it said “AA,” and it was the name of her husband and her agent. Then it said “A,” and a bunch of other names. I thought, “Okay, this is her Christmas list.” A voice inside me said, “Billy, don’t look at this list, because you don’t want to know where you are. It’ll just depress you.”

So I went and had my meeting, and a couple of days later, a messenger from her office showed up at my door and presented me with this great silver tray with a gingerbread house on it, and the gin gerbread house was inlaid with lights and candies. I mean, it was fantastic. I thought, “You know, I’m not ‘AA,’ but I’m ‘A,’ and that’s pretty good.”

That year passed. And during that year, the two projects that I was writing for her both went into turnaround. Christmastime came, and I thought, “Hmm, something tells me there’s no silver tray coming for me this year.” So sure enough, a messenger from her office shows up one day in late December, and he presents me with this great-looking gift basket. In the gift basket is, you know, wine and cheese and salami. I thought, “Okay, you know what? I’m not ‘A,’ but I’m ‘B,’ and ‘B’ is okay.” You know, I’m still a twenty-five-year-old kid at this point, so I’ve learned my lesson, and it’s fine.

A couple hours later, there’s this call from her office saying, “Did you get a gift basket from us?” I said yes. And they said, “Don’t open it.” I asked why, and they said, “We sent you someone else’s gift, and we sent yours to him.” I said, “Look, he’ll take my basket, I’ll take his basket. It’s no big deal.” They said, “Do not open the basket,” so I said, “Okay.”

Ten minutes later, I hear this screech of brakes outside my apartment, and this set of panicked footsteps going up my stairs, and then this out-of-breath production assistant knocks on my door. I open it, and he says, “Do you have a gift basket?” I said yes, and I hand him the gift basket, and there was a card on it addressed to some young ICM agent. He takes it, and then he hands me a tin of yogurt-covered pretzels.

When people ask me what it’s like to be a young screenwriter in Hollywood, that’s the story I tell.

The Agent’s Perspective: Richard Arlook

Richard Arlook

Richard Arlook spent eighteen years at the Gersh Agency, eventually becoming a partner and the head of the firm’s motion picture literary department, before shifting to his current role as a manager-producer at his own firm, the Arlook Group. His stable of writers, directors, and writer-directors includes artists ranging from emerging talents to established veterans.

The Accidental Agent

I came out here to produce movies. I went from taking any job I could, which was as the contestant coordinator on Tic Tac Dough, to my first job in the film business, which was as a foreign sales guy, to getting into the studio area by working as an assistant to Scott Rudin, who was running Fox. I took all that experience, wrote a business plan, and approached some successful commercial producers who wanted to get into the movie business. That’s how I became a producer. I started a company in 1986, when I was twenty-four. Two and a half years later, MGM green-lit this movie I had called After Mid-night. MGM was going through an upheaval, and the minute all the big TV buys and the release plan changed, I knew the movie was going to video. For the time being, it was over for me as a producer.

I got this opportunity to become an agent at Gersh, and I started there in 1990. They needed somebody young who could find new talent, and I had been in all these different worlds where you discover new talent.

In representing writers, my function is to sell their screenplays, secure employment for them, and negotiate the terms of their deals. The time from when I get handed a script to it getting made could sometimes be five, seven, ten years—and the large majority of scripts never get made. I probably sell ten to fifteen out of every fifty scripts. But then, out of every twenty that I sell, maybe two get made. Because those are the stats, every time you’ve actually gone through that process—from where you’re the first one to read the script to actually seeing it projected on the big screen—it’s a certain kind of high, you know?

It’s a great feeling to discover young talent—that guy working in the video store, or the woman working at a Star-bucks. This person who’s been on their feet all day to make $25,000 a year, and literally within months you’re handing them a check for $50,000 on their first payment, or $100,000, or sometimes even more. I mean, there was a guy that I met, and within weeks, I sold his script and handed him $250,000. He was this close to being evicted. To know that your good work and your brains and your passion have had a positive effect on somebody’s life—to me, that’s an exciting thing. It doesn’t hurt that when you do your job well, you can get compensated well.

The Representative’s Role

I’m very concerned about my clients and their lives, beyond just the writing. There are times where you get somebody when they have nothing, and then they start earning money. You see them get married and have kids, and they put the kids in private school, and they buy that dream house because all of a sudden they’re making $300,000 to $1 million a year. Then they turn in something and it isn’t received well, and they can’t get hired. When they start hurting, if you’re a human, you start hurting. And so when somebody’s hurting, the conversations are, “How are we gonna get the train back on the tracks?”

If somebody’s doing really well, the conversations tend to be more like, “How are we gonna sustain what we have?” You don’t speak to every client the same way, because everybody’s in a different place.

Because I’m on the front lines, a client will always rely on me to say, “Here’s what’s going on in the marketplace. This is what they tell me they’re looking for and not looking for.” It’s my job to know that. Having read countless scripts, I can also make an argument that I’m as expert as the next guy on what makes a good screenplay, but the relationships with writers are always different. I have young writers who look up to me because I was reading scripts and selling scripts, in some cases, before they were born. But some established client who’s been in the business longer than I have doesn’t really wanna hear me feed him lines of dialogue.

I define commercial as any script that I can sell. I could also say that a commercial screenplay is something that has a big idea, something that’s multiquadrant, something that’s a very castable piece, something that’s gonna attract a director or an actor. All those things enable the studio to green-light the script. That makes it commercial.

If an agent is good, he’s gonna be able to guide a client in terms of what’s selling, what isn’t selling, what’s gonna require an actor, what’s gonna require a director. When that agent reads a script, he’ll be able to identify what’s working and what’s not working, and give the client feedback and notes and guidance.

Spotting the Reptiles

There are people that really love being involved in movies, who care about taking the ride with their clients. When they’re in a signing meeting, they say, “I’m gonna be there for you through thick and thin,” and they view the relationship as a marriage. I think it’s very hard for those people to be agents. Those are the warm-blooded people. And then there are the reptiles.

The reptiles are completely cold-blooded: This is a war, so everything is fair. They’ll poach other people’s clients. They’ll say anything to get somebody on their roster, and as long as the client’s generating a lot of money, they will find the time to keep the client happy. The minute the client gets cold, the agent can’t give them the attention they need at the time they need it most. Those agents tend to be very, very successful people. Those same people go home and read to their children, and are loving husbands and loving wives, and give to charity—I call them the reptiles because they have the ability to cut themselves off emotionally.

When I was a young producer, I never really got the time of day from agents. So when I became an agent, I was like, “I’m gonna treat people the way I always wanted to be treated.” I used to be upset that I would call agents wanting material from them, and they’d laugh at me.

And then, when I became an agent, and I would sign a young writer that became hot, all of a sudden I’d get a call from somebody saying, “I want that guy’s next script.” I’d be like, “I can’t give you that guy’s next script,” and they wouldn’t understand. They thought just because they were passionate producers, that was enough. But I’m thinking, “I finally have this hot writer, and he’s got an action script. I’m not gonna give it to Joe Schmoe, I’m gonna give it to Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer.”

A lot of things happen when you become an agent. You see how difficult the business is, and for survival purposes, you have to become a lot tougher. Sometimes in success, a lot of the reptiles become a little warmer. And sometimes in reality, a lot of the warm-blooded ones become more reptilian.

What Writers Need to Hear

What writers want to hear in a signing meeting and what they need to hear are two different things. If you’ve written a script, you ask an agent, “Can you sell this?” Well, the honest answer is, “I believe I can because I read it and I loved it, and that’s why we’re here. But can I guarantee you that I can sell it? No.” The reptile will say, “Absolutely! How is this not gonna sell?” It’s so infectious that the writer just wants to believe it.

Plenty of people have met with me and met with somebody else—and I’ll get them because people can read through the bullshit. And there’s plenty of times when they’ll go with that other person, and six months later they’re calling me because the script hasn’t sold and the agent’s not returning their calls.

With the scripts I have to read that are sent to me with referrals, the scripts that my clients are creating that I need to give them notes on, the scripts that are being submitted to me for clients to direct or rewrite—that’s already three, four scripts a week. There’s only so much time in the day. So it’s not that I won’t read an emerging writer’s script—it’s that it has to come to me by a referral.

Short of me getting the greatest script in the world that I sell tomorrow for $1 million and then start booking this guy in $400,000 writing assignments nonstop, it’s gonna take time to get an emerging writer a job or sell their first script. At this point in my life, that’s not a good use of my time when I’ve already got people in my stable that have established quotes, that are a lot easier to sell.

It’s the responsibility of the writer to realize that and to target the proper agent. When I first started off and I didn’t have any clients, I would read twelve, fifteen scripts a weekend—or at least attempt to. So it’s not that emerging writers can’t get their work read. You just need to be smart about who you approach to read your work.