Adam Riback | Hollywood agent on how to turn a screenplay into a movie

[Music] I think the trick is to have an original voice but be able to work in the structure of the marketplace that gets something made. Hey everyone, I'm Katie Trxton and you are listening to Anatomy of an Agency. The podcast that takes you behind the scenes to let you know how the talent industry really works. We have another Hollywood special this week as we speak to Adam Ryback. Adam is a talent manager at Echo Lake Entertainment. He explains to us the intricacies of becoming a screenwriter in Hollywood and how movies go from an idea to the big screen. I started by asking him what sort of people he represents. I represent creators, I represent dreamers, I represent people who love telling stories and have to tell those stories so bad that they need the rest of the world to see them. How do you know when you found one of those people? How does one of those people find you? I think that's different for every representative in town. I think, and the reason for that is because I think it has to speak to you on another level. It can't just be words on a page that are ordered in a good way. There has to be a voice that for some reason speaks to you and the voice that speaks to me is going to be different than the voice that speaks to you or speaks to anybody else. For me, I usually know within 10 pages of reading something and this is if you're a writer. I usually know within 10 pages of reading something if it's going to be something that excites me. What do you do once you're excited? Once I'm excited, I usually finish the script after the first 10 pages and if that excitement kind of remains then the next conversation, it's really setting up a conversation and having a dialogue with the creator to find out what's their backstory, what are their hopes and dreams, what do they like to write about? Do they have any other scripts that I can read that I might like? I think as a representative, it's incredibly important for us to do our due diligence on anybody who we're signing and representing because when we sign someone, we're making a huge commitment to that person. And they're putting so much trust, they're essentially putting their livelihood in our hands. And so for us, we need to be so excited about that person in order to sign them because if it's kind of like that middleing, like, oh yeah, maybe then I've come to learn over time that that's a no because you're not going to work as hard and you won't see the results as if it were someone who it's like a hell yes, then you're hitting the pavement and you feel confident putting them in a room with every single executive in town. And so I always ask myself the question, is it a hell yes? How do you find the people? Are they just called emailing you? So many different ways, they are called emailing me. I had one instance where I got a cold email from a writer when I was a younger manager and found an amazing script that way and we ended up getting the movie made. And she was a single mother from a small town who had never been involved in Hollywood or didn't know anybody, just was a good writer, just wrote a good script. And so that's one way that the barrier to entry can be lowered a little bit. So it's cold submissions a lot of times it's agents who I work with who I've built up relationships with over the years who know my taste and they know what I'm capable of doing for clients and so they'll send me potential clients. It can be lawyers who are doing the same thing. I'll go to film festivals and scout filmmakers that way. Do all writers need agents? It depends who you ask. If you ask an agent, maybe. But no, I don't think that all writers need agents to be able to make it. There are, but it depends what making it means to you. There are plenty of writers who have got in movies made or have sold things who don't have agents or don't have any kind of representatives and they just do the hustle to get it made. I think it becomes infinitely easier when you have a manager and an agent if they're the type people who are excited about you and kind of hitting the ground running and then there are some people who have managers and agents who they sit on a list and nothing gets done for them. So I think that it really is just about the combination and how you use your representatives to your advantage. I'm going to sound very stupid with my next question, but I'm prepared to sacrifice myself for the listeners. Okay. What is a writer? Is it just somebody writing a screenplay or is it a playwright or is it a novel like a hat? I think it's all those things. I think it's anybody who has the gift of telling words and a story on a page. It could be a playwright who has never been a television writer, but it writes beautiful plays and wants to transition to another side of the business. It can be a filmmaker who has never written a script before but wants to try their hand at writing because it's really hard if you're a filmmaker who doesn't write to get someone to give you money to go make someone else's movie. I think a writer is an adjective you get to yourself. If you consider yourself a writer, you can be a writer. You just need to actually do it. There unfortunately are a lot of people out there who say they're writers and don't really write that much and that makes it tougher out in the marketplace where you kind of need to be prolific these days. But yeah, I think it's something that you call yourself. What happens if somebody comes to you and they've got a fantastic script. I've got this person. This is a genius. This has to be made and they go, I'm a writer, filmmaker and they have no evidence of this filmmaking skill. But they're telling you that the two come tied to one another. Do you take that of face value or do you talk to them and try and extricate the two and explain the business? What happens? You're saying in the instance where there's a writer who gives me a script and says, "I'm also going to direct this." Yes. But it hasn't had any directing experience. It's very common. It's very common. Everybody has goals. Everybody has aspirations beyond what they're currently doing. That's just a part of humanity and life. They want to experiment. They want to try new things. They see their friends doing it. So our goal as representatives, it's very simple. It's to support artists. That's what we do. We represent artists. We work with artists. We strategize with them to achieve their goals. So if that means that one of my clients who I've represented for a long time as a writer and is very successful on that stage of things comes to me and says, "Here's a script I wrote. I want to direct it." My job is to figure out how to make that happen. My job is also, for whatever reason, it doesn't work to be blunt and honest with the client and say, "It's not happening. Here's why I think. Here's the feedback. There are a number of options. We can put the script on a shelf until your career gets to a point where you can demand that kind of job. We can go to other directors who we might have an easier time getting it made with. Or we can keep going out to producers who we haven't tried yet maybe. And are you more interested or equally interested in people who come to you and have an original style or people who have a style that's familiar because it seems like somebody who's already successful? I think that it's original. It has to be. It's very easy to write something that feels familiar and it feels like we've seen it a hundred times. Most of the time, that's not the stuff that's going to break through in the most astounding way. It's the original stuff, at least for me, that excites me the most. It's an original voice. A story we've never seen or take on a story we've never seen. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't have an original voice that includes familiar tropes. I have comedy writers who have written crazy big movies that I've never seen before or could ever could have imagined. But the structure that they work in is a traditional three-act structure that makes film studios feel like, oh, we can put this movie into theaters, right? Because it's what audiences want. It's not necessarily experimental, which gets tougher, right? So I think the trick is to have an original voice but be able to work in the structure of the marketplace that gets something made. And once you're a writer who has an agent, do you have to be generating your own original content or is there a situation where you might say, oh, I saw this great play on Broadway. It would be a fantastic film for this writer I work with. I will talk to them about whether they would be interested in converting it into a screenplay. Or maybe you even find a producer in a director and then you attach You'll write it to something, does that happen? - All the time, yeah, it's both. There are so many different prongs of attack that you need to have with any one client because nothing is ever for certain. Whenever you think you're getting further in one direction, it's very likely that you'll hit some roadblock and you'll have wished you were pursuing two or three different things. So that's just how the business works. So for us, when we talk to clients and we advise them, if you're not working on an original project in any given time, and it may be happening very slowly in the background 'cause you've got two or three other paying jobs, which is great, but if you're not constantly trying to push forward something original of yours, then that's a problem. In the meantime, we are also bringing you comic books, graphic novels, remake opportunities, different kinds of IP, we're bringing you OWA's, which stands for Open Writing Assignments from Netflix or Amazon or Apple, right? And those are all opportunities that exist outside of the original idea space for this specific client. So it's a combination of both. - So is an Open Writing Assignments a studio or a channel or whatever saying, we need a writer for this job? - Yes. - Who's available? - Yes. An Open Writing Assignment is when a studio or a producer, Open Writing Assignments aren't always paid. So they're sometimes paid, they're sometimes not. We obviously try and focus on the ones that are paid, because we don't want our writers working for free. But yeah, they're when someone comes to us and say, hey, we have an original idea that we've come up with, but we need a writer 'cause we're not writers. Or we have an article from the New York Times that we wanna adapt, and we're looking for the right person to tell that story. What about collaboration? So do you ever have a situation where you or one of your colleagues has a script has something really, but it's missing something? And you kind of talked to each other and go, oh, maybe we could bring another writer on board, or under one umbrella and sort of pitched them together, or they could adapt the other person's script just to add a certain something to it. Does that happen? - Not at our stage of taking out projects. That happens more once a project is set up at a distributor or a financier where maybe one writer will sell a script, though the executives will give notes back on that script. Maybe that happens two or three times, and then maybe the financiers or the executives say, okay, this person has taken it as far as we think they can in this direction. We're now looking for something different that maybe this person is not their strong suit. Maybe it's a dramatic movie, but we need a comedy writer to do a comedy pass to add some jokes into it. Then we're now gonna hire a comedy writer. That happens all the time, particularly on big studio films. A lot of times you'll see two, three, four writers credited with a screenplay, and that's really because of that. It's not because they're all working together at the beginning, it's because it's usually one or two writers who have brought a project forward, and then throughout the process, other writers have been brought on afterwards to help get it into a place where they feel comfortable to make it. At our stage, we're developing most typically with one writer or a writing team, and we're giving notes and helping get a project to the place where we feel comfortable taking it on to the marketplace. Are there more or fewer opportunities than they used to be? Right now, we have this age of prestige, television, big budgets, high quality, but actually fewer episodes per series sometimes. What's happening? Are there more or fewer opportunities and are there more or fewer opportunities for newbies? Yeah, I think if you look at WGA statistics, it will tell you that there are fewer opportunities, probably from before the pandemic, and then probably also from before the strikes. I think that's probably just a statistical fact. I think that there are different opportunities that have been created. And I think that what the pandemic leading into the double strikes leading to now has done is it's caused a contraction mostly in the television side of the business everywhere, but it's hit TV harder than anywhere else. Like you were saying fewer episodes, fewer series being ordered in general, fewer episodes of those series, the rooms, the writer's rooms are smaller. There are many rooms instead of bigger rooms. The room is physically smaller. Yeah, it's a four by four room now. They have to fit 10 people into that. No, no, it's the, when I say room, I mean the number of writers within a writer room. Years ago, it was not uncommon to have 10, 12 writers on staff, especially for maybe a procedural for broadcast, right? And now it's much more common to have one writer writing everything or two or three writers, kind of helping with the beginning stages of what they call a mini room and then see what happens from there. So in that sense, there's fewer opportunities. I think we're super optimistic about the future of the business because we feel like there's a lot of opportunity in other places. Even though staffing used to be a viable kind of livelihood for a lot of writers, not so much anymore. And so we've pivoted into helping writers sell original shows, partnering them with IP, transitioning into the film space, which has a heartbeat right now and is, you know, a lot's going on, selling spec scripts, things like that. Writers need to be creative. You said they need to be dreamers. They need to have expansive thinking. What is the balance of that in someone versus then needing to be in touch with the world? Understand where the industry is going. Understand what the trends are. What people want to hear about tapped into audiences. Like, how do you juggle those two? Yeah, I like to say I work at the intersection of where creativity and art and commerce. That's what we do. We take amazing artistic people who have ideas and we get those ideas ready to be sold into the marketplace and viewed on a massive level. Now, not every idea is the same, right? Some ideas are not meant to be marketable, right? Some are just stories that need to be told, you know, for a variety of reasons. And so we support those stories, too, at the end of the day we're dealing with artists. But for artists who have certain goals of getting to a certain level in the industry and working in the studio space and with streamers, you know, that's how we spend all day every day is dealing with ideas, developing scripts with them to take it from a place where it's, okay, it's been in my head for six months and now it's finally on a piece of paper. Now, how do we get Netflix to buy it? Is there a moment where a writer, like you say an artist should ever give up on one of their dreams? They write the scripts and you've shown it to everyone in the entire world. Is there a moment where you give up or do you just believe? - I don't think it's giving up because, you know, it's the dream, it's very rare where the dream is like we have this one story, right, that needs to be told and if it doesn't get told, I'm gonna die, right? Like that's not typically sometimes, right? There are some artists who are that way and that's okay, right? And then, you know, you just keep working on it to figure out how and who with, you know, all those things and the average film, I've produced four feature length studio films. The average amount of time it takes to get those film made for me so far has been five to six years for each specific one, right? So it's the kind of thing where it's not like, okay, we send to everybody this week, if by next week we get all passes, you know, too bad. That's not how it is, like we're here to fight, right? And it might not be the right thing now, maybe it's the right thing later, maybe it's a company that we talk to a year from now who's like, I'm really looking for something like this and it's like, damn, we have this project that we couldn't sell last year, but maybe it's right for you. So in that sense, the dream doesn't die, but it's more about kind of the larger dream of who you want to be, right? The kind of stories you wanna tell and giving these artists access and the ability to become that person professionally to be able to tell those stories. You said that you're at the intersection of art and commerce. I think people think commerce and they think money. To my mind, actually, the money's the easy part, right? It's because you're. - Not always. - But your agent says, this is the money, here's a number and the person accepts it or they don't accept it. The bigger picture of the world of business can sometimes be really hard to communicate. Well, this is how it works. Five year lead times are normal. We have to show it to a hundred people. It's quite hard sometimes for a creative to understand that. How do you communicate those pieces? - Yeah, when I say art meets commerce, when I say commerce, I don't just mean the money side of it, right? I mean, it's literally everything from the stage of us taking a project out into the marketplace to closing a deal and getting it on screen somewhere, right? It's all of those things. So, you know, how do we do with it? We're understanding. we're extremely understanding that the people who are representing are not the people who are having the conversations that we're having on a daily basis, right? So we're coming at it from two different perspectives a lot of the time. And that's why, hopefully, when those perspectives meet, we can form something and create something that's truly artistically amazing and can live out in the world and do very well. But it's education. It's educating our clients on how the business works, what's working right now, what's not working right now. And the mandates, what is going to give you more a better chance of success. And then there are clients who look at things different ways. There are clients who want to know statistically, am I going to have a better chance with this idea or this idea, right? And then there are clients who are like, this is my idea. Like let's talk about how to get it done. And so it's different for every client. Well, Adam has all the answers. So I know where I'm going once I've finished this script I'm working on. That was the last episode we recorded from our little trip to Los Angeles. Don't forget to go back and listen to the other four L.A. specials, as well as the episodes with all of our other great guests. You can get in touch, [email protected] via email or @goodvibosonlytalentonsocialmedia. For now though, that's all from me, see you next week.