Exclusive Q&A Interview: Jason Scoggins (Part 3)

Last week, we had two posts so GITS readers could submit questions to Jason Scoggins:

Jason Scoggins is a manager and partner at Protocol, a Beverly Hills-adjacent literary management and production company. He represents writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol’s founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland. After getting his start in the entertainment business as an assistant at ICM, Scoggins became a TV Literary Agent at The Gersh Agency, followed by a stint at Writers & Artists Agency and then several years in the wilderness. He returned to the business in 2007, just in time to be impacted by the run-up to the WGA strike.

Jason also has a great website called Life On The Bubble, which tracks movie box office and the spec script market.

GITS readers asked some good questions and Jason has responded with some valuable insight into screenwriting, the spec script market, and working in Hollywood. In Part 1 on Monday, Jason provided his take on the current state of the movie business. Yesterday in Part 2, he gave his opinion on the status of the spec script market. Today Jason offers his advice on a question that’s come up here quite a bit:

What advice do you have for an unknown writer living outside Hollywood to secure an agent or manager? — The Unknown Lyricist

Move to Los Angeles. Seriously. If you want to be a professional screenwriter, you need to be here when you’re starting out, if only to make it clear to everyone (including yourself) that you’re determined to get into the business. Think about it from my perspective: I’m not in the business of selling one script or filling one OWA, I’m in the business of building and managing writing careers. It’s a waste of time to develop a baby writer if it’s a one-shot deal; I want to represent clients who have the potential to work year after year on project after project. And to get you to that point I need to send you out on dozens of general meetings, most of which will get shuffled around the calendar once or twice, which means coordinating around your travel plans is simply not realistic. (It’s pretty presumptuous to call an exec and say, “You need to rearrange YOUR schedule to accommodate this unknown writer’s.”) Furthermore, you’re going to need to be available for follow-up meetings in which you’re pitching your take on projects already in development, grinding it out until you get your first big break. And then you’re going to need to be here to do the whole dance over and over again until you’re on everyone’s go-to list and have your pick of writing assignments. Once you reach that level you can consider being based in the Outer Banks or wherever and come back to LA as necessary. Until then you should bite the bullet and live here. (You know there’s a great beach or two here, right?) And if you’re of a certain age and economic status, you should get a job as an assistant so you can learn the business from the inside out.

Since I get asked how to secure an agent or manager pretty frequently, here’s the rest of my standard spiel to aspiring writers:

Learn the business backwards and forwards. Do everything you can to soak up information on how the business really works, including getting a job as an assistant to an agent, manager, producer or executive. Scrutinize the trades, subscribe to blogs, watch “Entourage” and “Swimming With Sharks,” read books by industry insiders, sneak onto one of the lots and prowl around, eat lunch at The Palm and eavesdrop on your neighbors, and so on. Treat it like you’re passionately following a stat-heavy sport. You need to develop a detailed sense of what’s going on inside the business, including who does what (to whom, occasionally) and why.

Read as many professionally-written scripts as you can, including specs that recently sold as well as drafts of scripts that are about to go into production. There’s no better way to get a sense of what your end product needs to look and feel like, and it has the added benefit of letting you gauge yourself as a writer. My own development skills, such as they may be, are in no small part a direct result of reading hundreds of scripts over the years.

Once you’ve written a couple of great scripts (one is not enough; two is the minimum, and the more the better), start looking for an agent or manager by ignoring the big agencies (CAA, WME, UTA, and ICM) altogether. They’re not in the business of representing new writers, they’re in the business of taking working writers to the next level. (You’d know this if you lived in Los Angeles. Or watched this season of “Entourage.” Hey, maybe you don’t have to move here…) Instead of the big firms, you’re going to target:

Agents who have been promoted within the past two years at the small and mid-sized agencies (Gersh, Paradigm, APA, etc.);

Coordinators at those same agencies;

and Lit managers at firms who have a track record for finding and breaking new writers. 

Since you’re reading the trades, have a copy of the Hollywood Representation Directory and subscribe to www.trackingb.com, you already know who the candidates for your kinds of scripts might be and what their phone numbers are.

Call the offices of the agents and managers on your list. Ask their assistants (or them directly if they answer the phone) if they accept query letters, and get the email addresses of those who do along with the assistant’s name if applicable (see below). For those who don’t accept queries, ask the assistants if they themselves read submissions and whether you can send your script to them instead. Don’t try to pitch your script to anyone during this step; they don’t have time to listen to you and will treat you like a telemarketer the moment you try. Just be goal oriented: Ask your question, take “Yes” or “No” for an answer, get their information and move on. (By the way, befriending assistants is one of the big secrets to breaking into the business, and another reason to live in Los Angeles and become an assistant yourself. It’s really hard to get past those gatekeepers over the phone, but if you’ve had a couple of lunches or drinks with someone who works for a lit manager, it’s that much easier to ask them to take a look at your material once it’s ready. Your network of relationships among assistants will be an enormous long-term asset. Not only will they rise through the ranks along with you and eventually be in a position to hire you themselves, they have a vested interest in discovering new talent even before they get promoted.)

Keep your query letter business-like. Drop the assistant’s name, but don’t make it sound like more than it is (“Per my conversation with Josh in your office, I’m writing to invite you to read my spec feature script. It’s called…,” etc). If you want to write a clever opening line, fine, but less is more in this arena, in my opinion. Above all, make sure your logline is tight, if not electrifying. (Again, troll through www.trackingb.com or other sources to get a feel for what makes for a good logline. That one- or two-line piece of writing is the only thing I care about when deciding whether to request a copy of the script.)

Proofread your work (your email cover letter, plus every line of every page of your script). And then again, just to be sure. Wordsmithing is your stock in trade, and there are few things more irritating to people who read for a living than typos and misspellings. Even in blog comments, by the way.

Be diligent in your follow-up, but not a nag. If someone tells you to follow up after a certain interval, do so. If not, follow up (via email only) every couple of weeks. If it’s been more than a couple of months or so, it’s a “pass” whether they read it or not, so stop following up. If you send them a query letter for a different script in the future (and you should, unless they’ve made it clear they’re not interested in you or your writing), resist the urge to be passive aggressive about your previous submission.

Be persistent. It’s a numbers game at this point, and that’s not the only way in which it resembles dating. You’re going to hear “no” nearly every time, and even when you get an initial “yes” you’re eventually going to hear a version of “it’s not you, it’s me” nearly every other time. Get used to it, and don’t get discouraged.

Speaking of which, don’t take anything personally. On principle, but also because this business is incredibly subjective. Not everyone is going to like your writing, no matter how empirically good it is. It’s not you, it’s them.

Except a lot of the time it is you, not them. A lot of the time you’re sending out crappy material. I know this because of how often I receive material for representation that is just plain bad, and because of how many query letters I ignore because the concept is…pick an adjective (ridiculous, half-baked, uninteresting, etc). If I were an aspiring writer, I would spring for the couple hundred bucks to have my script covered by a professional reader just to make sure I wasn’t fooling myself about the quality of my work. That coverage will not be seen by anyone but you, and it will let you know whether you’re on the right track. If you’re not, own up to the fact that your material’s not good enough yet. Either abandon that screenplay and start a new one or rewrite the existing script based on the coverage comments. Better yet, invest in a set of detailed notes from the same reader who wrote your coverage. (I’m surprised more writers don’t do this, by the way. It’s a virtual guarantee that your material will be up to snuff when you send it out.)

Check back tomorrow for more advice from Jason Scoggins.

Comment Archive