Thursday, September 3, 2009

"Yes."

The other day while I was looking for a job, an ad popped up in my Gmail for a literary agency out of NYC. I clicked it with the intention of keeping it for the future when I have stacks of completed manuscripts and need an agent to sell them. As I happen to have a script ready to go, I scrolled through their site to see if they had a screenplay agency. They did. I clicked it and filled out their form, dropped in my logline, and fired it off. The form said they'd get back to me within 48-72 hours.

Lo and behold, I received an email from them today. They wanted to see my script.

That loud thunderclap everyone heard this morning was my brain exploding with glee. I wrote back to them answering their questions (basically a get-to-know-you email telling them a little about myself and so forth), and attached the PDF. BAM! Screenplay is off to an agency, and a solid one at that. It's small, relatively new, and they are looking for COMMERCIALLY VIABLE material (it was in all caps in the email). This tells me a few things:

1) They're hungry and want a solid script that delivers on everything producers want at any given moment.

2) Since they're based out of NYC, they have a work ethic lacking from the California lifestyle. Agents in NYC will kick down the door and threaten people for their clients. Agents in LA schedule a three hour power lunch and talk to you about five minutes while talking on their iPhone to their other clients the rest of the time.

3) They don't take 4-6 weeks to reply with a one sentence message saying they're interested or not. 48-72 hours for the initial response, and 7-10 days after receiving material they let you know whether they like it enough to move forward.

So I'm in a good spot emotionally right now. Because an agency, even a small one, said "Yes."

No comments:

Post a Comment