Q&A: September 2005 Archives
A: Yes, and I went about it politely but firmly.
Firing representation isn’t a pleasant thing. For starters, writers generally aren’t good at managing employees because, generally, we don’t have any.
Our representives are, in fact, our employees, but they do an excellent job of making us feel like we’re the ones who ought to be grateful to be working with them.
Baloney.
When it’s time to fire an agent, here’s my recommendation. They’ll never be happy if you terminate them in this way, but they won’t exactly be able to trash you either.
First, think long and hard about the specifics of your dissatisfaction.
Second, request a lunch meeting with your rep, and explain why you feel dissatisfied. Lay out the problems as you perceive them, and ask for solutions. This is not the “you’re fired” meeting. This meeting is exactly what it seems—a warning shot across the bow.
It’s extremely important to do this. Sometimes agents need a reality check in order to change their course of service to their client. Given that writers can be sort of passive-aggressive about this stuff, it’s not fair to just let all of your gripes explode out in a sudden firing.
This meeting should be businesslike, and it should end optimistically.
Now you wait.
If three to six months pass and you are still dissatisifed, it’s time to drop the axe.
I recommend doing it on the phone. I don’t say this because it’s the cowardly move. It’s not. I say this because agents are extremely well-trained in the art of not letting clients fire them. Don’t kid yourselves…the stories of meetings that began with clients saying “you’re fired” and ended with “okay, you’re still my agent” are legend at the big firms, and they have many ways of breaking you.
Early on in my career, my manager (who is still my manager) left the firm he was with to go to another management company. I chose to follow him. Before I could leave, one of the owners of the firm asked to talk to me about it in person.
I agreed. Seemed fair.
He started off by saying, “Look, your guy brought you into my firm, and so I understand why you want to leave with him. I would love for you to stay. I’m not going to pressure you or badmouth your guy or badmouth the company he’s going to, and I would certainly never threaten you in any way. I just want to talk.”
He then proceeded to do every single thing he said he wouldn’t.
Rather uncomfortable.
You owe the rep that you’re firing some courtesy, but you don’t have to paint a target on yourself either. Call the rep up and say simply and cleanly, “I’m leaving the agency.”
The headline is out of the way. By leading with this, you do one of two things:
- Establish the firing as a fait accomplis.
- Depersonalize the firing.
There will be some shocked silence that you ought to fill dispassionately. Refer back to your prior meeting, explain that your grievances weren’t particularly well-addressed, and state that you’ve decided to make a change. Explain that your decision is final (they will find this insulting and will attempt to make you feel like you owe them a chance to win you back, but that’s just a Jedi mind trick), thank them for the excellent work they’ve done for you in the past, and then get off the phone as fast as you can.
In the days to come, various guilt-trips and insinuations will probably filter back to you. Ignore them. It’s all smoke and mirrors. An executive might even call you to say, “Are you nuts?”, and you’ll ignore that too. An executive who knows you well enough to call doesn’t really care who your agent is. They’ve already judged your writing for themselves.
I want to end by saying that I know I sometimes come off as a bit of a hard-ass against reps, when, in fact, I don’t think I am. Many of them are very smart and very effective at their job.
What concerns me is that there is often an imbalance of psychological power between writers and their agents, and that’s because agents are professional manipulators and writers aren’t.
We have more power than we’ve been led to believe. Don’t be afraid to use it.
It’s your career.
Pie? Read on…A: It depends if the information is needed…or wanted.
Providing characters with a backstory is one of the most common requests we get from executives and producers. The rationale is easy to understand. In order for a character to behave credibly, the audience must feel that the behavior is properly motivated. One way of establishing motivation is to give the character a history that provides an insight into why they are the way they are.
The problem is that this can lead to some horrendous and annoying cliches.
When I’m thinking about my characters, I ask myself if the audience really needs to understand how they became the way they became, or if the audience might merely want to know.
Wanting ain’t good enough. Just because the audience wants something doesn’t mean you should give it to them. It’s a bit like rationing out candy for your kids. Unsatisifed wanting is part of the fun of going to the movies. Anyone who saw Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation probably wants to know what he said, but it’s best that we’re left filling in the blanks ourselves.
This isn’t a new literary technique. Nietzsche, for instance, prefigured that moment by more than a hundred years when he wrote this passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra.
—Thou thinkest thereon, O Zarathustra, I know it—of soon leaving me!”—
“Yea,” answered I, hesitatingly, “but thou knowest it also”—And I said something into her ear, in amongst her confused, yellow, foolish tresses.
“Thou KNOWEST that, O Zarathustra? That knoweth no one—”
What did he say into her ear, amongst her confused, yellow, foolish tresses? You’ll have to think about that after reading the book, now, won’t you? Ted Elliott told me about a great term that Gore Verbinksi has called “pie talk”. The idea is that after the movie is over, you want at least a few threads dangling, a few questions remaining…for the moviegoers to discuss and debate over pie.
One of the greatest pie talk characters ever is Thelma Dickerson from Callie Khouri’s screenplay Thelma & Louise. Louise refuses to travel through Texas, even when that refusal puts her and Louise at great risk.
Why? Oh, sure, there are some obvious answers we can imagine, but the movie refrains from backstorying us to death with some awful speech about what happened That Terrible Day Way Back When.
This doesn’t mean you should never do backstory. Sometimes, it really helps. For instance, when I was adapting Mary Chase’s play Harvey, I noticed that practically no one had a backstory.
Did Elwood Dowd, the odd drunk who claims to see an invisible rabbit, need a backstory? Did we need some insight into his past to explain how it was that he went from a pillar of the business world to an odd, Zen degenerate?
I decided that we did not. The audience would identify with the Christ-like qualities of Elwood without knowing what happened to him. In fact, I went one step further. I created a sequence that wasn’t in the play, in which the doctor treating Elwood thought (as would the audience) that there was a terrible thing that happened to him. The doctor takes Elwood to a theme park, a place where Elwood indicates something awful occurred when he was a child.
What the doctor learns in that scene is that, in fact, nothing that bad happened at all. There is no neat explanation for why Elwood is the way he is. There is only a pie talk explanation. He has become Christ-like…as can we all.
I did say, though, that I engaged in a little backstorying. In my adaptation, there’s a nurse that the doctor is falling in love with. She’s extremely reluctant, and I felt like the audience needed to know why. Otherwise, it felt as if her behavior would be simply there out of screenwriting convenience, i.e. a pointless obstacle to love.
I decided that she had been left at the altar. I had a secondary character reveal that information to avoid the awful “I was left at the altar!!!” speech.
Boy, that was a looooong answer, huh? Sorry. I guess it boils down to this: give ‘em what they need, but be careful about indulging them with what they want. Some things must be spelled out.
The rest should be whispered into confused, yellow, foolish tresses.
Is my career in here?A: Remind yourself of Mazin’s Law of Representation.
“Hip-pocketing” is one of the more wretched maneuvers that talent agencies employ in lieu of having the actual balls to represent someone. By hip-pocketing you, you’re not really a client, they’re not really an agent, but if they happen to remember to send your script to someone and you get a job, then suddenly you are their client and they are your agent.
What a great deal. For them.
Often times hip-pocketed writers must rely on agents’ assistants to send their work out. This arrangement frequently results in your scripts ending up prioritized somewhere between “get lunch” and “screw that chick in the mailroom”.
If you’re hip-pocketed and you think you’re getting okay service, it’s fine. The agency may need some assurance that you’re worth their time. I’m not a fan of it, but I understand.
If you’re hip-pocketed and you’re getting bad service, you should have a frank chat with the agent (not the assistant…the agent). If that gets you nowhere, then you absolutely must move on and find yourself someone…anyone…who is willing to believe in you and represent you properly.
