Help Wanted
Let’s review. After I worked on the TV show White Collar, things were going great with my agent, and I signed with Manager #2. Then I didn’t sell a script or book a gig for six years. So I wrote a Contained Action/Thriller that felt like the right thing for my career. My reps didn’t agree so we parted ways. Shortly after that, the agency I had just left became the hottest agency in town.
I had seen better days.
Fortunately, I also broke the six-year slump when my good friend Ben Rock brought me in to co-wrote a narrative podcast with him for SHUDDER. We were super proud of the resulting show Video Palace, and even made a few bucks. Soon after we sold another show to Audible for a few more bucks. It wasn’t screenwriting money, but it was a solid reminder that I could write stuff that this town wanted. I still didn’t have reps, but I FINALLY had some momentum.
Then the pandemic happened and everything went to hell. For everyone, really.
In hind site, timing actually worked in our favor. Ben and I closed our Audible deal in early 2020 and started breaking the story for Catchers in my office when the pandemic happened. So we moved to Zoom without missing a beat and spent eight months writing the show remotely. I can’t stress enough how much these gigs with Ben saved my ass. It felt really good to be a working writer again, and getting paid to make something cool with one of my best friends made it even sweeter.
But I still had that new script and no reps to send it out. The WGA had a few new tools to help writers since the mass firing of everyone’s agents. One of those was a “memo” that would go out to studio execs with the loglines of available specs by WGA writers. I put my Contained Action/Thriller on that memo and got a few bites but nothing consequential. I also emailed the few producers I was still in touch with.
And wouldn’t you know it, the producer who got me my first ever job in Hollywood liked the script! He was interested in trying to get it made along with another producer I’d known my entire career. So those guys got to work and soon enough, they had a director attached. We all met, got along, and there it was - my script had producers, a director, and a plan. Still no money, but that’s okay. I felt like this passion project finally had a shot at getting made.
Shortly after that, I reconnected with another producer I knew who had worked on my first movie, and was now the in-house producer at a big management company. They’d been on my radar since they repped a lot of writers and directors who work in genres I like (such as horror, action, sci-fi). I took a meeting with my producer friend, and he asked to see a list of my available scripts. I put together a batch of loglines and sent them off. He responded with interest in an older script of mine, a Big Fun Action Movie. I loved his plan for it, so he attached himself as producer and starting looking for a director.
This was around mid-2020 when I realized I had two scripts with producers attached, and all that happened without reps. I breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe things were going to be okay. But I missed having a manager to collaborate with. A couple of previous agents of mine had moved into management. I sent emails, but that led nowhere. I reached out to a couple of other possibilities. Nothing clicked.
I decided to do what always worked for me: I kept writing. I finished a new script, a grounded sci-fi thriller and put a logline for that up on the WGA memo. And I was very surprised when the first message of interest I received was not from a producer or an exec.
It was from a manager.
JB had seen my listing on the WGA memo and read my bio, which revealed that I had a project with my producer friend at that big management company. And JB was a manager there! He expressed interest in reading my newest script plus the Contained Action/Thriller. He enjoyed both scripts, and we began discussions about possibly working together.
Now I feel I’d made a crucial mistake with Manager #2. I was coming off of White Collar, ready to pitch TV ideas and write new features. But crucially, I did not have a new script for him to go out with. I wasn't even sure what I would write next. So I signed with him, and we started completely from scratch. And over time, I learned we weren’t a good creative fit. I wanted to avoid that same mistake with Manager #3.
Luckily, JB had already read a couple of my scripts and shared his thoughts about them which gave me an idea of his taste and how he shared notes. But I decided I didn’t want to sign with anyone until I knew the first thing we’d be developing together. So I sent him five ideas.
He passed.
“Passed” in this situation means he didn't he feel particularly excited about any of them, both creatively and how they might be received in the marketplace. He asked for some more ideas, and I sent him another list. And he found a couple of them interesting. We emailed back and forth, discussing the various ideas. This is the exact logline for the one we settled on:
THE WANTED MAN (action/thriller) – A government assassin has been alone in the field for 20 years, moving from job to job, his orders coming through an arcane system involving the newspaper wanted section. When the daughter he never knew he had, now a brilliant young CIA analyst, manages to track him down, he learns that his handlers are all dead, his division long since shut down, and his services have been hijacked by someone who is getting rich selling his services to the highest bidder. He reconnects with his daughter as together they set out to discover who has been pulling his strings all these years.
And with that, we decided to work together.
It felt like a fog was lifting.
I’d gone from a long period of time where all I heard was no, no, no to a moment when the universe was at the very least giving me a cautiously optimistic maybe. I still wasn’t making a living wage, but I could see the possibilities before me.
And looking back - if I hadn’t put my heart into a script I really believed in, parted ways with my reps, and gone through this scary time where I wondered if I’d ever work again, I might never had come out the other side with a new manager and an idea I was excited to write.
An idea that got turned into a movie that comes out next month!
But I’ll save that for the next post.