Writing Movies For Fun And Profit! (3 page)

Trust us. You need a manager and/or an agent. An entertainment lawyer too.

Do you need an agent AND a manager? Not always. We like having both, because between all of them, they cast a VERY WIDE NET to find us work. And when we’re making big business decisions, we like getting advice from different points of view. They don’t always agree with each other on what our next move should be—and that’s a good thing. It makes us think about our next moves very carefully.

But not everyone has both. (Oh, and those people do not come free. They all take a percentage of what you earn.)

What’s the difference between a manager and an agent, anyway?

For one thing, agents tend to be more specialized: we have a features agent, a TV agent, an acting agent, and a literary agent—four guys, each handling one aspect of our career, all at the same talent agency. They each have tons of clients, but they can handle it, because they are focused on one aspect of your career. Managers tend to focus on your
entire
career— every aspect of what you do.

Managers tend to have fewer clients, and they focus on the big picture, or where your career is going. This may be overstating the difference between managers and agents—but agents tend to be focused on your next job; managers tend to ask you questions like “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Here’s how one of our managers explains the difference:

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MANAGER AND AN AGENT?

Peter Principato

founder, Principato Young Entertainment

(and Tom’s manager)

A recent age-old question. These days, I think there are more managers than there is actual talent to represent. That is because it is honestly easier to become a manager than it is to become an agent. An agent is, by definition, a licensed employment agency, while anyone can hang a shingle on the door and say they are a manager. Even though the job requirements are similar and the agent/manager paradigm continues to change, there are different types of agents and different types of managers.

Agents are glitzy; Managers are down-to-earth

First of all, the simplest way I can explain the difference between agents and managers is to look back at high school, as show business is just a bigger blown-out version of high school to begin with. You have your cliques, still made up of high school stereotypes: the popular crowd, the nerds, the slow kids, and the indescribables, with the studios and networks playing the role of athletic departments and school clubs and the power shift changing with each and every project that people put out. That said, agents are like the specific subject teachers (math, social studies, english, science, etc.), and managers are like the guidance counselors. Managers help make the right choices, guide a career, look toward the future, really get to know a client’s hopes and dreams, and try to lay a path to make them come true. This doesn’t mean that there are not agents who do the same, but for the most part the agents have expertise in a very specific area. You have your film talent agents, film literary agents, TV literary agents, TV talent agents, personal appearance agents, book agents, etc. Best-case scenario? Managers try to have an expertise in ALL these areas and understand how to navigate the big picture, to make sure a client, who may have many talents and abilities, is utilizing all of these assets and not just concentrating on one specific area.

Agents are heat seekers; Managers are caretakers

Also, agents tend to have much larger client lists to fulfill the needs of opportunities being offered and to control a market share of the business, while managers tend to have fewer clients to focus on. Now that doesn’t mean that managers will not have a good amount of clients. Agents tend to like to represent people with existing credits and a body of work so that they can plug them into opportunities more easily, while managers tend to take chances early on in a client’s career, helping build a body of work to attract an agent. These days agents and managers work hand in hand with each other and balance out the relationship, giving the clients more eyes and manpower to create and find opportunities to build a career on.

Agents love money; Managers love art and commerce

Gone are the days—although some people still handle their business this way—when the agents controlled all the info and flow of that info, and managers work out of their homes with one or two clients and take care of all the personal needs of a client; we have evolved and the business invented the personal assistant, and while more and more agencies grow in power, influence, agendas, and prestige, the bigger they get, the more critical the need for the modern-day manager has become. It is a new day. A day when the agent and the manager work hand in hand while watching their backs! Having been both, it is a fine line indeed, but one thing is clear: the need for both has become most urgent. Until, of course, a client decides they don’t want either and just sticks with an attorney to make deals. OY!

I think, to sum it up most clearly:

Agents wear suits; Managers wear jeans

3. Discipline

The single most important ingredient in your success and the thing that will separate you from amateur screenwriters (pronounced: everyone in the world) will be your work habits. Here is a general rule of thumb: ALWAYS
BE WRITING. To work for the studios, you need to write compulsively. You should feel COMPELLED to write every day. Always. It’s that simple. If you don’t feel the desire to write every day—skip it. And let everyone else in the world get rich writing screenplays.

Why do you need to write compulsively? Because so much of your work will be thrown away.

To survive in the studio system, you cannot fall in love with everything you write. Be prepared to throw LOTS of it away and start over from scratch. As a studio writer, you are more contractor than artiste. Look at it as though they have hired you to “write”
them
a new kitchen or bathroom. Don’t let it break your heart when you have to throw out a week’s worth of writing. It happens all the time, for reasons you can’t predict—the star of the film may have just made a CROQUET film and subsequently will not GOLF or even hold a MALLET in your film because it will seem as if they’ve “done that before.” So you will have to rewrite an entire sequence. You will be rewriting all the time. Learn to love it. Or at least not hate it. And most important, LEARN from your rewriting. Keep making the script better.

To be a working writer, you should be able to write anywhere and all the time. Practice that art. Write everywhere you go, even if it’s just scenes or sketches. Find a time of day, every day, when you can just write without distractions. It may vary from day-to-day, so try out different times and see what works for you. And for chrissake: TURN OFF YOUR E-MAIL AND WEB-BROWSING APPLICATIONS. Seriously. These will steal a solid twenty minutes per hour or more of your writing time.

If you’ve put in a solid four to five hours without distractions: then, and only then: reward yourself by turning off “safe search” and Googling: HELEN MIRREN > TOPLESS > IMAGES.

There are many self-proclaimed “screenwriting gurus”—though how you get to be a “guru” of something you’ve never actually
done
is beyond us. Screenplays are like blueprints. A guy who’s drawn up a lot of blueprints that have never actually been made into buildings is not an “architecture guru,” he’s an “unemployed douchebag.” A guy who talks about screen-writing but who’s never sold a screenplay is not a “screenwriting guru,” he’s a “lecture circuit bullshit artist.” From now on, that’s what we’ll call them.

… Where were we? Oh, yeah:

There are many
lecture circuit bullshit artists
who say that to write a good screenplay, the most important thing is to come up with “a story that
needs
to be told.” They use that phrase over and over: Is yours “a story that
needs
to be told”?

Here’s a little homework for you. Go see what movies are playing in your local theaters right now. We’ll wait.

• • •

Okay, now—can you honestly say any of those movies playing has a story that “NEEDED to be told”?
Really?
Was
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
“a story that
needed
to be told”?

Even with the
great
movies?
The Matrix. Casablanca. Terminator. The Pacifier
.
*
Are those stories that “
needed
to be told”? A documentary about a guy wrongfully accused of murder, and the guy is still on death row right now—sure. That story “
needs
to be told.”

Studio Movies need to be one thing:

ENTERTAINING.

Some producers will say that the movie being entertaining is the ONLY important thing. Screw character development, screw story. We don’t go quite that far. But after we turn our script in, they usually hand it over to another writer, who proceeds to take out the story and character development SO THAT THE MOVIE IS SHORT AND ENTERTAINING.

A movie where Luke Skywalker and his dad go through therapy and work out their issues would probably make a good story. But unless they blow up a couple Death Stars along the way and get Princess Leia wet AND in a bikini (two different scenes) then—story-schmory. Even movies about serious topics need to be entertaining
first
. (Remember, we’re not talking indies here. We’re talking about STUDIO MOVIES.)
Norma Ray, Silkwood
—entertaining as hell. They’re studio movies. They aren’t slow, and they keep you on the edge of your seat.

If you’re running around Hollywood and you can’t understand why your GREAT STORY isn’t selling … then check: Is your movie as entertaining as
Die Hard
?

If not—

GO BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

There’s another consideration if your movie isn’t selling: Is your movie a lot like OTHER MOVIES that play in the theater? We don’t mean a rip-off of some specific movie, like a
Terminator
rip-off (those go straight to DVD, because no movie stars will do them). We mean:

Is it like the
kinds
of movies that play in multiplex theaters and make money?

Is it an epic tale about people from different religions in a five-way never-requited love pentagon set in a leper colony during the Spanish Inquisition? That’s gonna be a tough sell, buddy. Not a great date movie. Best of luck to you.

Is it a love story about a Hugh Grant–type guy who walks dogs for a living? SOLD! Is it about a bank heist that gets stopped by an off-duty cop who plays by his own rules? SOLD! Is it a comedy about an under-dog in love with a girl out of his league?! OH MY GOD! WE LOVE IT!

Rule 1: No one wants you to reinvent the wheel.

Let’s put it this way: Do you like movies that challenge and confuse you? We do. Sometimes.
Eraserhead
is great. But not every night. Can you take your in-laws and their kids to see
Eraserhead
? Can you pop
Eraser-head
into your Blu-ray when your family is over for Christmas to shut everybody up for two hours? Can you give a DVD of
Eraserhead
to your folks for their birthday?

Don’t get us wrong, we love
Eraserhead
. But 95 percent of Americans, if you forced them to watch
Eraserhead
, would want to punch that movie in the face and would punch YOU in the face for making them watch it. If you want to make movies like that, make an indie. Make a movie with people who don’t care about box-office receipts.

Rule 2: Most people do not go to the movies to be challenged.

They go to the movies to be entertained.

Of the writers we know who HAVEN’T been able to break into the business—a lot of them think they can break into the movie business by writing a script that breaks all the rules. QUITE THE OPPOSITE.
Follow all the rules, to the letter
.

The OTHER reason that your brilliant screenplay you’ve been taking all over town isn’t selling—
is just that
:

DON’T HANG YOUR DREAMS ON YOUR ONE BRILLIANT SCREENPLAY.

We know a few writers who’ve failed because, when their one screenplay didn’t sell, they kept tweaking it, and honing it, and rewriting it, based on whatever feedback they got from the last studio. A studio that passed on it.

This is a big mistake.

One of the biggest.

If everyone passed on your script—consider it dead. Bury it. Dig it up again years from now when you’re as big as Tarantino, and they’ll green-light your old unsold scripts.