How to talk to a Hollywood agent

Reader and top commenter SteveinTransit asked me recently why I haven’t written about my career change. After all, I conceived of this blog as a journal tracking my smooth switcheroo from journalist to screenwriter. Ergo, the title. Yet my Act Two, according to Act Two, has largely centered on childcare, school lunches and the consistency of today’s diaper poo.

That’s not an accurate representation of my life. Steve made me think. (Thanks a lot, Steve. Like I need to think.) And I realized I wasn’t blogging about screenwriting for three reasons:

1. I don’t have any huge breakthroughs to report.
2. The whole field still baffles the hell out of me.
3. After a day spent not succeeding at something, the last thing I want to do is write about it.

Next I realized: that sounds like material to me.

So here’s my first (really? my first?) installment from the trenches of beginner screenwriting. It is a topic hogging much of my anxiety reserves these days: how to talk to — and decipher — a Hollywood agent. Specifically, mine.

My Hollywood agent is a well-known operator who works for a big-name agency representing successful TV- and screenwriters. He’s charming, funny, personable, and supposedly a killer at the negotiating table. I liked him from our first phone call.

How did I, a featherless baby bird, land such a fat worm? (Let me rethink that analogy; I don’t think he’s the one getting eaten here.) Ah: connections. My literary agent, Theresa Park, is an old friend of his. When I hatched up an idea for a TV show based on an article I’d written, she made the introduction.

That was two years ago. I have yet to earn him a dime. I have yet to meet him face-to-face. And I have yet to learn the language that Hollywood agents speak, and that their more experienced clients all seem to know.

Let me say that my agent has been bullshit-free on some important things. Like, that my minority-ness is a useful tool for landing in a writers’ room (big networks reserve certain funds to pay for “diverse” writers’ salaries). Like, that the hit show I chose to base my first spec script on was not considered hot or cool enough. Like, that trying to build a TV-writing career in New York rather than L.A. is like trying to thread the needle.

It’s the small talk I need a field guide to translate.

“I’m definitely coming out to New York soon. We’ll have lunch!” Seems to mean: I may fly out at some point, but really, if you’re serious about this, you’ve got to haul your butt out west. I’ll buy you a sandwich.

“Listen, I see you as a long-term relationship.” You know what 10% of nothing is? That’s right. At some point, sweetheart, you’re going to have to start earning.

“Contracts are really not important.” We’ll talk contracts when money changes hands.

“Sure, send your ideas along. I’ll read them over the weekend.” My assistant may read them sometime this month.

Got any agent-speak translations to share? I’ll be waiting in the comments.