How Did You Get Your Agent / Manager / First Job and How Can I Do That?
And how asking those questions isn’t going to help you.
One of the most common types of question I get from up and coming writers is “How did you get your manager? How did you get your agent? How did you get your first job?” Whatever the specifics of the question, the idea is the same — “How did you start to break in? How did you crack the code? And can you share that code with me?”
The good news is — I can tell you exactly how all of these things happened for me. And I think in hindsight I have cracked the code. The bad news is — while I think it’s possible to describe the code broadly, the specifics are impossible to replicate, and the specifics probably won’t help you very much in your own career.
How did you meet your manager?
I met my manager in 2016 over email because a friend had sent my play to him. I lived in NY at the time, was working as a playwright (and a salesperson, and a theater manager, and and and). I had had a few plays produced off off Broadway and had applied to Juilliard’s playwriting program in the hope that that might be the thing that would springboard my career — either it would help me get more productions or it would help me maybe get an agent / manager and hopefully someday work in film and TV, which was where I’d always wanted to be anyway. After graduating from NYU’s Department of Dramatic Writing specifically hoping to write for features and television, I’d ended up mainly friends with theater folks, and producing plays in basements seemed a lot more attainable than making movies. Six years later, I’d had a few plays produced and was feeling a little stymied with my attempts to break in to any sort of success as a writer in any medium. Maybe a piece of paper from Juilliard would give me the bump I needed?
I was interviewed at Juilliard, and soon after, their Literary Manager (someone I’d worked with on a play years ago, so we kind of knew each other) emailed me to ask if he could send the play I’d applied with as a writing sample (Everything Flashes, you can read it on my website if you’re so inclined) to some managers on my behalf. He knew I wanted to someday work in film, and making those connections was a big part of his job anyway.
Well… the manager who read it was young, hungry, an assistant who was just starting to try to carve out a roster of his own clients, and liked my play. A lot. He reached out to see if I’d want to talk and when we did speak I’d already serendipitously planned to go to LA for a few weeks to make a short film with a friend. We spoke, we hit it off, and when he asked I’d ever want to come out to LA, I told him “I’m coming tomorrow.” He asked if I had any feature film scripts and I did (more on that later) and I sent him the one I liked the best — a really stupid comedy called Giant Killer Slugs. I warned him it was VERY different from my play.
During those few weeks I was in LA, I shot a short film, met this manager in person for the first time, and we hit it off. He liked both my scripts, though they were wildly different, and he offered to try to set me up to meet a couple junior executives and agents he knew. I asked if we needed to sign anything for him to be my manager and he said “No. If anyone asks you to sign anything, run.”
I think I passed the test during my first couple meetings. His friends who he was introducing me to were able to report back to him that I was charming and smart and easy to get along with in the meetings and that sealed the deal. Soon he was my legit manager. We agreed to this arrangement over the phone, it was basically an “are we really dating?” conversation.
How did you get your first writing job?
My manager sent my play out as a “Get to know this writer” sample, and my feature out to a few young producers and agents he knew who might be interested. The Slugs script made its way via a junior agent at WME whom I’d met to a producer who was known for two things: 1) low budget horror and 2) musicals. Weirdly, this script was made for them. Schlocky horror with a musical number in the film.
La La Land was just about to come out and Lionsgate was incredibly bullish on it, and when these producers proposed Slugs to Lionsgate, they were all-in on the idea of another new musical. Lionsgate wanted to option the script and hire me to rewrite it into a full musical à la Little Shop of Horrors.
How did you get an agent?
Because this remarkably serendipitous introduction had all been brokered by this junior agent I’d met at WME, and there was some (not a lot, but some) money on the table, it fast tracked me into a call with him saying “great, we want to sign you as a client here at WME.” I said yes.
All of this was happening from January 2016 —August 2016, during which I was going back and forth from NY to LA, waiting to hear from Juilliard. When I was officially rejected in June I decided, “I’m moving to LA.”
I moved into a sublet from a friend of a friend on August 1. I signed paperwork allowing WME to cash checks on my behalf on August 1. And I signed a writing deal for Giant Killer Slugs August 1. (I’m now at UTA, but that’s a story for another time)
Soooooo that’s the answer. Manager. First job. Agent. Bing bang boom.
As it reads, it might sound a little bit like an overnight (or at least over months) success story. But that’s sort of discounting the years of prep work required to get to a place where an overnight success is possible. Giant Killer Slugs was a script I’d started writing in 2008. I’d then adapted it into a play and produced that in 2013. I took what I learned from that experience and used it to rewrite and improve the feature script so that by the time I was asked to share something with my prospective manager, it was very solid.
Everything Flashes I’d started writing in 2014 and had mounted three or four different workshops of it with various actors and directors to write and rewrite and figure it out before I ever submitted it to Juilliard.
From 2010 — 2016 I wrote five full-length plays, had three produced, and ran a playwrights group where I helped develop another 20+ shows by other writers.
Over that same six year period I wrote three or four feature films, three or four pilots, and approximately one million short films and one act plays. Some were staged, some made, many many more were not.
In 2008 I wrote and produced a micro budget feature film with a friend of mine for a budget of $6,000 which we begged and borrowed to be able to afford to make. Then we did more begging to be able to raise another $6,000 to finish it. It went to a couple small festivals but wasn’t as good as we’d hoped it could be. Thank god it’s not available anywhere online.
I wrote my first feature film my sophomore year of high school.
When I was seven years old I started recording dumb comedy sketches on a VHS camcorder I stole from my grandfather’s office.
This is all the prep work I was doing, basically my whole life, that somehow, eventually, in an extremely roundabout way, led to me meeting my manager. And getting my first job. And getting an agent.
The question of “how did you get your manager” comes from a good place. We want to be able to find the path, or replicate someone’s success in the brutal business that is trying to break in. But you aren’t going to be able to know my friend Adam who knew my manager. And you aren’t going to be doing it in 2016. You can’t really duplicate the many many steps taken, the circuitous “I once worked with this person and four years later they were working here and knew I was good at X and wanted to Y so introduced me to Z.” For better and for worse there is no such thing as THE WAY. All the different versions of this kind of “How did you break in” story (and everyone has a different version) boil down to the same thing:
“I had the right thing and met the right person at the right time.”
Ok… so… what’s the code? Didn’t you promise us the code, Colby???? Well, in my humble opinion, there is a code, and it is pretty simple, but it’s also very, very hard.
The code is: Skill + Effort + Luck = Opportunity.
All you can really do, all you should really be worrying about, in my opinion is…
Make a lot of things. Work with a lot of different people. Work hard to make the best thing you can every time. Always try to make it better. Do this over and over for as long as you can stand it. If you’re good (and you do have to be good, undeniably good), and you are ready, and you are lucky, the managers and the agents will find you. You won’t need them until you need them. And then they’ll find you. Or they won’t.
But you don’t need them to make something. And you don’t need them to make it better. And you don’t need them to enjoy making things. Those are the things you can control, and in my opinion, those are the things that actually matter the most. Work on those things as long and as hard as you can and maybe you’ll get lucky. But I’d recommend trying to find a way to enjoy it even if you don’t get lucky. Because you can’t always be lucky.
Sorry to let you down, but that’s the only way I know to get a manager, agent, and a first job. And it’s not just for the firsts. Every opportunity comes out of that same mix of ingredients. Over and over again. So enjoy the ride. Because even once you do get the agent or the manager or the job, you’re still going to be on the same roller coaster. Skill + Effort + Luck.
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