How can I beat the title of last week’s post?

Dear FIDPER,

Today we are going to stop delving into my personal history. There’s a time and a place for everything and I’ve decided that today is both the time and the place to talk about meetings. Meetings are an integral part of every D-Girl and Boy’s life. But I’m not talking about just any meetings, FIDPER. Not script meetings or development meetings today, oh no. Today, we talk about Generals. Or more specifically, how Generals come about and what they are for.

An agent’s job is to get work for their clients. To get work for their clients, they have to get people to know their client’s work. And it’s really not always enough to get to know their client’s work. They want to get you to get to know their client. If you know their client personally and you’ve taken a shine to them, you’re much more likely to want to work with them in the future and – gasp – even hire them and pay them real money! Hence, said General.

After an agent pimps out their client by telling you how amazingly talented they are, they send you the client’s script or movie, which you read or watch as is appropriate for the media. If you like their script or film, then you tell the agent so and say “If you’re sending him/her out on generals, I’d love to meet him/her”. But for simplicity’s sake, we’ll stick to writers for this column. Directors already get enough attention anyway….

Sending a spec out wide (a script the writer has written on their own time, aka speculation, to hopefully sell to a very high bidder) is a great way to get exposure for a client – oh yeah, and to actually sell the script – but agents will also send out samples, scripts that are set up at other studios and production companies but are a good example of their client’s work. They are sending them to executives just like me (even though I’m special and unique and not a cog in a well-oiled machine, oh no!) all over Hollywood.

Agents are obviously clamoring to get their clients’ scripts to and meetings with the Bruckheimers[1], and Rudins[2] of the world – and their minion executives. And then there are the rest of us. We’re at varying locations on the on the continuum between mega-fancy-superstar production company and “I am a producer because I say I am, so hear me roar. But if I roar when no one who has any influence is listening, do I really make a sound?”

This results in a kind of instinctive arithmetic. The agent factors in the position of the executive’s company and the position of the executive within the company (along with the executive’s relationship with the agent) against the level of the writer (produced screenplays + assignments + rewrite gigs + buzz or none of the above). Not to mention taking into account the secret machinations of their demon puppet-master higher-ups.

The agent is also managing their client’s perceptions during this process. Writers want to meet with people who befit their station in Hollywood life. If an agent has just gone out with a writer’s first spec, they’re going to want their client to meet as many people as possible because at that level, every meeting is a meaningful meeting and the writers are happy to do the dog and pony show because they want to build relationships and, you know, careers. The more important the person the agent gets them in the room with, the better the client feels about the service their agent is giving them. But that is only half the battle.

Writers tend to be creative types and strangely seem to like it if they get to have interesting conversations with the people they meet with. So agents also want to get their clients in the room with people they’ll connect with. Therefore, the better your relationship with the agent and the more positively their clients respond to you, the more likely they are to send you good material from their higher level clients. In due time of course, but it’s all about building relationships. It’s just the executive version of the dog and pony show. The way you respond to the material an agent sends you helps them get a feel for your taste, and indicates the kinds of material you like and respond to, which is then factored into the kind of movies your company makes. And that’s how you work your way up the talent chain.

Unsurprisingly, and in keeping with everything you’ve heard, Hollywood all comes down to who you know and what they think of you….

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[1] Bruckheimer, Jerry - Lifetime Gross Total: $4,038,269,965. Yes, that’s BILLION. Not even taking into account that he currently has EIGHT TV shows on the air…..
[2] Rudin, Scott – Hoovers up literary and prestige projects like he’s a very thirsty vampire and they are the blood of very beautiful sacrificial virgins