The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/agents-and-managers-101).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, agents and managers. How do you obtain them? How do you work with them? And if necessary, how do you fire them? To answer these questions, we will be traveling back all the way to the start of this podcast to search for the answers. That’s right, it is a compendium episode, where you’ll hear three segments with me and Craig back when we were much younger and still full of umbrage. Drew, tell us about the clips that you’ve picked and what we’re going to hear today.
**Drew Marquardt:** We’re gonna start with Episode 2.
**John:** Episode 2, god, yeah.
**Drew:** At the very beginning. That’s how to get an agent or manager. No two writers get their reps the same way, but this is about finding how to get the right agent or manager to notice you.
**John:** I feel this kind of PTSD from those very early episodes, because I was cutting them all myself in Garage Band. Now we have Matthew. But it was a very manual process for me.
**Drew:** You guys sound so laid back in the early ones.
**John:** It’s very nice. Now we’re just all stress.
**Drew:** Then we’re going on to Episode 172, which is the perfect agent. Do you remember the Perfect series? We had all of that. The perfect agent, it’s now you have an agent and how does this work. How does this relationship work? What do you expect from your reps? How do you build and maintain that relationship?
**John:** Great. For sure. Then our final segment?
**Drew:** Is firing a manager.
**John:** Which is one of Craig’s favorite topics.
**Drew:** Craig’s favorite. He’s historically brought a lot of umbrage to this. I went all the way back to Episode 7 for this, because this is his first whack at the subject, and it’s his most balanced on it. It’s much more tact than umbrage.
**John:** That’s great. We’ll listen to these three clips, and then we’ll be back here at the end for One Cool Things, boilerplate and all the other stuff. But do stick around if you’re a Premium Member, because I will be talking through my big change, which is for the first time in my whole career, I now have a manager. Just a couple weeks ago, I signed with a manager. I’ll talk about why and what that process was like hiring a manager and what’s been interesting and good and different about it.
**Drew:** I’m excited to break it down with you.
**John:** Cool. Let’s travel back into time, and we’ll see you there at the far side of these three great clips.
[Episode 2 Clip]
**John:** I think we should focus on something we do know a lot about. We’re going to rip off the band-aid this week and we’re going to talk about something that in six years of running the blog, I’ve never actually written a post about this because it’s just such a dreadful morass of something to talk about.
**Craig:** It’s the worst, it’s the worst.
**John:** It’s the worst, and at least 80 percent of the questions that come into the site are basically this question. You’re ready? I’m going to paraphrase the one question that I’ve heard my entire blogging career.
**Craig:** Just do it, do it fast.
**John:** “How do I get an agent and/or manager?”
**Craig:** Oh, God. Now, let me just say, just so that anyone out there who is struggling to get an agent or manager doesn’t think that we are mocking your pain.
**John:** No, not at all.
**Craig:** We’re not. Really what we are embracing is the pain of the question itself because here’s what’s difficult, guys. If you really get down to what John and I know about getting an agent or a manager, what we know is how we got an agent in 1995. That’s what we specifically know.
Some of the pain of this question is it’s like a 15-year-old boy coming to you and saying, “How do I lose my virginity?” I could tell you how I lost my virginity in 1986. I just don’t know if it’s going to be applicable to you.
**John:** I think I do have a little bit more experience just because I’ve gone through generations of assistants who have become writers themselves and have gotten agents, so I’ve seen their process.
**Craig:** Good point.
**John:** Yeah. It’s not identical to what my process was and a crucial thing for framing this whole discussion is that there’s not one way it happens. Just like everyone does lose their virginity in a slightly different way, everyone gets to an agent or a manager in a slightly different way. We can only talk about general systems for success that people tend to find when they’re looking for agents and managers. I think we need to start by talking about what the hell an agent or a manager really is, because they’re used interchangeably and they’re actually different things.
**Craig:** Very, very different, yes. There’s something called the Talent Representation Act or Talent Agency Act, I can’t remember quite the exact name, but it’s California state law. Basically, the law says if you want to represent artists of any kind as an agent and procure them employment – that’s the big one – you are regulated. You have to be licensed by the state, you cannot charge more than 10 percent of what they earn, and you also can’t own any of it. For screenwriters, what that translates into actually is that agents cannot produce your material, because producing is a kind of an investment in the material itself.
That was the way it was for a long, long time. Then came the rise of managers who are not beholden to that law and they can, in fact, charge any percentage they want, and they can also produce your material. Technically, however, they are not allowed to procure you employment.
**John:** Now, procure sounds like a very legal term. Obviously I know that there’s a lot of overlap between what an agent does and what a manager does, but what is the difference between procure? The manager is not allowed to say, “Pay us this amount of money.”
**Craig:** The manager I do not believe is allowed to directly negotiate the terms of employment, I think. I’ll have to check on that one. By the way, as a general note, if there’s anything like this where I’m not quite sure, I can always lob a clarification on your blog when you put up the link. I know for sure that managers legally can’t seek employment. In other words, they can’t field requests for employment. They certainly can’t call up and say, “My client is available. Do you have anything that they might be interested in?”
Essentially, the manager is supposed to manage. Again, this is all the technical side of it and then there’s the real side. Managers are supposed to handle your day-to-day life. They help you develop material if that’s the way you want to use them. They help take care of your day-to-day needs when you’re working on a project. Let’s say you’re out of town working on something and they help facilitate your life. They’re not supposed to actually go out and get you a job.
**John:** Right. Now, it’s not an either/or situation. Many writers will find they have both a manager and an agent, and in many cases they’ll have a manager a year before they have an agent. It feels like there are many more managers in the business and that they’re easier to gain access to than an agent.
**Craig:** I agree.
**John:** Agents tend to be gathered together in very big, powerful agencies. There are certainly smaller boutique agencies that represent writers. Managers tend to be in smaller shops where they’re representing a smaller group of writers, or directors or other talented people and focusing on them. Managers, in general, might read every draft, and an agent very likely would not read every draft. A manager might give you notes. An agent would be much less likely to give you notes.
I approach the conversation with a dim view of managers, and this is just my generational bias. I’ve been called out for my generational bias because when I started in this business, the writers who had managers weren’t getting a lot out of their managers and they were just looking for the excuse to fire their managers. Now, more writers who are working regularly are talking about having success with their managers and keeping their managers as an active part of their career even after they’ve had a few features produced.
**Craig:** Yeah, I’m with you in the generational bias. I’m somewhat suspicious of managers. I had a manager for a long time, and in many ways it was a good thing, and in a number of ways it wasn’t, and it didn’t end particularly well.
I think that there are basically three reasons that writers gravitate toward… I’m going to give myself a fourth reason. One is, as you pointed out, sometimes they’re the easier representation to get, just to start with. Two, managers are much more willing to help you develop your material. If you’re the kind of writer who actually wants to bounce material off of somebody who isn’t a writer or a producer, a manager can help with that. Three, I think some writers feel, “Look, I can’t have two agents at once. I can’t be represented by CAA and UTA, but I can be represented by CAA and Three Arts. That’s twice the bang for the buck.” I wish I could remember what the fourth one was, but that was probably the most important one of all.
**John:** Those are three good points. To bounce off your third point there, being represented by two different people gets you exposure to more people who you could potentially be working with. And so even though the managers aren’t supposed to be out there giving you employment, they may be sending you out to meet with somebody, and that someone they have you meet with ends up becoming an important link for future employment.
**Craig:** Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I don’t have a huge problem with… If you love your manager, awesome. New writers who are seeking desperately for representation, and understandably so, I think can actually benefit a lot from a manager. But just be aware – this is the great currency problem – when you are a new writer without a track record and limited earning potential, you’re going to get a certain kind of manager. As your career advances, you owe it to yourself to fairly evaluate whether or not your manager is appropriate for where you are in your career if you advance.
**John:** Yeah. Let’s start the next part about what is an agent or a manager actually looking for. Let’s stop looking at it from the writer’s point of view. I need someone to represent me, to take me in and introduce me to all the right people and get me jobs. What does an agent want?
**Craig:** They want to make money. Bottom line.
**John:** They’re there to make money for themselves, for their agency. They’re there to try to get their clients hired and working continuously in the business. From that perspective, if they’re looking at a range of possible writers who they could represent, they’re going to look for the ones they believe are talented, the ones they believe will work really hard, the ones who can actually land the job – which means going in there to the meetings, for the nine meetings, and convincing a bunch of people that they are the right person to be hired for the job – the ones who are going to deliver. If an agent has a client that can land a job but then won’t actually turn in the script or finish the script or will turn in a really substandard version of what the script should be, that’s going to hurt.
The agent has a limitation of time. The agent can only represent so many clients. There’s only so many hours in the day. They can only put up so many clients for jobs. Taking on a new person is bringing a new person into the fold, someone they have to introduce to everybody, someone who they have to try to keep employed, someone they have to be talking on the phone all the time and trying to get them hired.
**Craig:** Also, just as an extension of that too, when an agent takes on a client that client is an extension of their reputation. I’m vouching that if I’m an agent I have a brand just the way that you and I have a brand. We’re known for writing certain kinds of things. Agents are known for representing certain kinds of people. They take on the wrong person and that person craps out, that’s an uncomfortable phone call for that agent. That damages their standing and that’s going to hurt them. There’s a ripple effect. When writers approach getting an agent and they look at this incredibly steep wall and the barrier to entry and they go, “Why? Why is this so hard to do?” It’s because of that.
**John:** Yeah. It’s important to remember that screenwriting is about pushing those words around on the paper and it’s being able to write a really good script. Screenwriting, the career of screenwriting, is also the ability to land a job and to get paid for what you are doing.
An agent is excited to read a really good script. They’re not going to sign a writer, in general, without sitting in a room with that writer and making the judgment call, could I send this person out on a job and get them hired to do something? They are measuring the social skills of a person who they are going to be possibly be representing.
**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. You can definitely be a complete weirdo if you are just killing it on the page. If you are what I would consider a conventional screenwriter writing conventional material and you’re just a zero in the room, it’s going to be tough. I have to say that part of the business is unfair, but it’s real.
We can’t deny the fact that part of what we’re offering the people who hire us is a sense of comfort that we’re going to deliver and everything’s going to be okay. They’re just as scared as we are. Everybody’s scared.
**John:** It’s very much a business of trust. As the person hiring you, I am trusting that you will actually be able to deliver me this script. I base that trust on the things I’ve read on the paper but also looking you in the eye and seeing, “Okay, he gets it. He gets what it is we’re trying to do here.”
Yes, it’s incredibly important when you’re talking to the writer you’re bringing in for a million dollars to finish the script that’s about to go into production, but it’s also important just the scale job that you’re trying to get made. Every step for one of those executives is important.
**Craig:** All right. Then here’s the big question as we hit the midpoint of our podcast. Everybody’s been really patient. They’ve listened to us talk about uteruses and the law. John, how do these people get a manager or an agent? We ripped the band-aid off that 15 minutes ago. We’re still dancing around it, aren’t we?
**John:** I think you get an agent or manager through… I can think of three ways. The first is a recommendation. Someone has read your work, has met you, and said, “This guy is awesome. This guy should be writing movies for Hollywood. I’m going to take this script and I’m going to take you, introduce you to this agent or manager, and say you should represent this person because this person is great.” If that person has the ear of the right agent or manager and there’s already trust and taste being established between them, that agent or manager will read your material, say yes or no, and be interested and excited about possibly representing you.
That’s how I got my agent is a friend took the script I had written to his boss. He was interning at a small production company. The boss liked it, wanted to take it to the studio. I said, “I really need an agent. Can you help me get an agent?” He said yes and he took it to an agent he had a relationship with. The agent read it, because this guy who he trusted said that it was worth his time reading. He took it, read it, he met with me, and he signed me. That’s a very, very common story for how writers get represented.
Second way I would say is agents read material that they found through some sort of pre-filtering mechanism. A pre-filtering mechanism could be a really good graduate school program. If you graduated from a top film school and you were the star screenwriter of a USC graduate film school program, some junior agent at an agency is likely reading those scripts and saying, “Oh, this is actually a really good writer. This is a person we should consider.”
Even without that writer hunting down that agent, the agent was looking for who are the best writers coming out of these programs or the best writers coming out of a competition. These are the Nicholl’s finalists. Those scripts get read and those people will be having meetings with the people who think that they are potentially really good clients.
**Craig:** Makes sense. What’s the third one?
**John:** Just scouring the world to find interesting voices. I don’t know how much of this story is really accurate, but the apocryphal story of Diablo Cody is here’s a young woman who’s writing a funny blog. An agent reads the blog and says, “This woman can really, really write. She’s funny. She has a voice. I bet she could become a screenwriter.”
I don’t think all those details are quite accurate, but there’s always those writers who, they were doing standup and they’re clearly very funny and someone sees their act and says, “I think that person is a performer, but I also think that person is a writer and there’s something there that’s worth pursuing.”
**Craig:** I like those. Of course, all of them are predicated on you being a good writer and writing a good script, as is always the case, but those all make sense. I actually asked an agent at CAA named Bill Zotti. I gave him a call earlier today and I asked him the question. Of course, he groaned, because it’s that question, but he had a couple of pieces of really good advice that I figured I should pass along.
One is to make sure that if you are specifically pursuing an agent, to really know who they represent and ask, is this agent appropriate for my material. He said one of the most frustrating things is when he’ll get query letters or log lines for the kind of movies that his clients just don’t write.
Right now there are a lot of resources out there that are relatively inexpensive, like IMDb Pro for instance, where you can actually see… Let’s say I write movies like Judd Apatow. “Who represents Judd Apatow? Let me see.” I write movies like John August. “Who represents John August? Let me see.” Okay. If I send that person a query letter and say, “Listen, I’m a huge fan of John August. I’m aspiring to write like John August. Here’s my log line,” you might have a shot. Whereas if you send it to a guy that represents writers who write rated-R broad comedies, that person’s going to go, “What do I care? It’s not for me.” Do your homework. If you’re going to go through the effort of trying to break the rocks to get a rep, do your homework about the rep.
The other advice that he gave that I thought was pretty smart was to get a job in the business, which seems so blindingly obvious, but yet so many people resist it. I know why, because it’s hard and it involves a commitment that you may not be willing to make.
He said, “Listen, 80 percent of the people in the mail room at one of the big talent agencies are not really interested in being agents.” They’re there to learn the business because they want to do other things. They want to produce. They want to write. They want to direct. When you work in that business and you work in that place, you get to know the other people there.
You work next to a guy who suddenly is now an assistant to an agent. You say to him, “Listen, I’ve written a script, and I’m going to tell you what the idea is.” If he loves it, he’s got a chance now to impress his boss with a great piece of material, so he’s going to read it. These personal connections are invaluable. It’s nearly impossible to do that kind of thing from Rhode Island.
**John:** Yeah. I would also say what your example stresses is the horizontal networking. Everyone always thinks that to become successful you have to meet more powerful people and get more powerful people to love you. It’s really not that case at all. It’s been my experience, but it’s also been the experience of all my assistants, the way they got to their next step was by helping out everyone else at their same level.
They were reading other people’s scripts and giving them notes. Those same friends were reading their scripts. Eventually, they wrote that thing that was, “You know what? This is really good. This is the script I’ve been waiting for you to write, and I think I know the right person to take this to.” It’s always been those people who were doing exactly the same stuff you were doing who were the next step.
**Craig:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. I think people should think, as they are horizontally networking, about how to market themselves, because the funny thing is Hollywood with one hand is saying, “Get out, stay out,” and with the other hand is saying, “Please, somebody show up,” because they’re hungry for new talent. They’re desperate for new talent. Nothing makes them happier than a writer that’s better than a guy who makes a million dollars that they don’t have to pay a million dollars to.
They’re actually looking, believe it or not. If you can market yourself properly… For instance, we have a couple of friends who wrote a pretty crazy script and just put it out on the internet and marketed it as this insane thing, and it caught on.
**John:** You’re talking about the Robotard 8000?
**Craig:** I’m talking about the Robotard 8000. You may say, “Why would you put your screenplay on the internet, and why would you say it was authored by the Robotard 8000?” Why? Because they have agents at CAA and they’re working. It really got them a lot of attention. Also, it didn’t hurt that other writers that people trusted were saying, “We read this script. This was really funny.”
Similarly, I’ll tell you, if I were 22 again and I were in a writer’s group, I would say – and you and I didn’t have this in the 90s – “Let’s get a web page for our writer’s group, and let’s just start blogging about the experience of our writers group. Let’s track the progress of our scripts and the log lines and the rest of it.” If one of us catches somebody’s attention, suddenly our writer’s group has a little bit of buzz to it. “What will this writer’s group come up with next?” That’s why that Fempire thing was so cool, with Diablo-
**John:** Dana and Lorene.
**Craig:** … and Dana and Lorene. It was like, okay, there’s a group. Now, it’s not really a group. They all have to write their own scripts. But something about it, there’s a little bit of sparkly dust to it. It’s interesting. How do you make yourself interesting? Maybe then somebody will be attracted to your script.
**John:** We talked about marketing, but it’s really almost positioning. People need to know how to consider you or what to consider you as.
Here’s a terrible way to go into your first meeting. You wrote a really good comedy script that people like, and so they brought you in. A manager and agent sat down to meet with you. They say, “I really liked your script. It was really funny. What do you want to write?” It’s like, “I mostly want to write period detective stories with monsters.” The manager is going to hem and haw and make conversation for about another 10 minutes, but they’re not going to want to sign you, because they were thinking about you as a comedy person. Let them pigeonhole you for five minutes until you can actually get something going. They need to know how are they going to make the next phone call to somebody else, saying, “This guy has a really funny comedy script, but he’s exactly the right person to hire for your period action movie.” That just doesn’t make sense.
**Craig:** It doesn’t. Listen, these guys, what is their training in? Managers and agents are not there to tell you what to be. Their expertise is watching trends and patterns and pulling people out that fit what they believe is going to generate cash. They can’t tell you who to be. What they can do is see who you are and say, “That looks like money.” So know who you are. Go in there and be who you are.
It doesn’t mean that you have to go in there as Michael Bay. Not everybody has to make $200 million movies. Not everybody has to sell $3 million scripts. To be successful in this business, you just have to work. If I could walk into an agent’s office and say, “I will never make more than $200,000 a year, but I will make $200,000 every year for the next 20 years and I won’t bother you a lot,” that’s an instant signing. Why not? That’s great.
It’s not about how much you’re going to do, but just will you do. If you walk into an office and you say, “Look. I wrote this script and this is how I want to come off. These are the movies I love. This is the niche I want to fill,” if they feel like that’s a real niche and that niche needs filling, that’s a big deal. But they can’t tell you who to be.
**John:** Exactly. You have to be able to come to them with material that shows what your talent is, and a story, or at least a way of presenting yourself that leads them to believe, “Yeah, I see what he’s going for and I think he or she can achieve that.”
**Craig:** People have to understand that agents and managers – let’s call them representation – they’re never going to be your mommy or your daddy. They’re not your savior. They’re not Superman. What they are, essentially, are the vanguard of the endless decision process that leads to a writer being hired. They’re the first people in line to say, “OK, I’m willing to take a shot on you.” You still haven’t made a dollar when you get an agent. But it all is driven by you.
**John:** I always get the question of, how do I get an agent or manager? Generally, it’s the person who’s like, “I just finished my first script. How do I get an agent or manager?” That’s like, okay, you wrote a script. That’s great. After your second script, then I’ll believe you actually can write a second script. Or they’re like, “We just started working on our first script. How do we get a manager?” It’s acknowledging that part of the process is the ability to prove that you can actually do this repeatedly.
A thing I think we’ll probably say endlessly in the series of this podcast is that the career of being a screenwriter is not about one script. It’s about being able to write 50 scripts. While there may be one script that really gets representation’s attention, they’re really signing you for the next 30 things you’re going to write. They would love to be able to sell this one script. They mostly want to be able to sell you every year to different clients, to different producers, different studios, to continue generating cash flow and continue making movies.
**Craig:** Yeah, there’s a certain naiveté about the question in and of itself. Again, why we hate the question is just that some people are asking it and they haven’t quite earned it yet. “How do I get an agent or a manager?” Maybe the better way to phrase it is, “Which agent or manager should get me?” Start thinking that way.
Then if you think that way, you realize, “I’d better have something worth getting. I’d better know who these people are. I’d better know what I want and where I want to work and what kind of movies I want to be known for.” It’s the American Idol syndrome. “I go on TV, they like me, they pick me, I’m a star.”
**John:** The lottery mentality, which kills me about screenwriting, is that, by writing this one script, I will sell it for X dollars and then I will be set and everything will be wonderful and happy for here on out. It rarely happens that way.
I really liked the way you rephrased it, and I’m going to rephrase it again slightly, is, “How will the right agent find me?” If you can think about it in that perspective, a lot of things become more clear. How do I make myself visible enough that the right agent will recognize my talent and my determination and say, “This is the client I have to represent.”
What you may discover in that process is that – I say “the right agent find me” – the right agent probably isn’t the superpower agent who has Judd Apatow. It’s more likely the guy who has just a couple of clients, but they’re really good clients.
I left a bigger agent and went to a smaller agent right before Go. I made the change because I needed somebody who was generationally closer to me, who was hungry in the same ways that I was hungry, and I could grow with. I get frustrated when people aim too high, too fast. You want the person who can grow with you, ideally.
**Craig:** So true. The only thing worse than not having an agent is having the wrong agent, because then you feel like you are represented and everything’s going to be fine, but it’s a mismatch, so you have all of the lack of benefit of no agent, but none of the drive to get a new one, because you think you have one. That’s the worst situation.
I don’t care about the size of your agent, how big they are, who their clients are. If you’re just starting out and you’re lucky enough to attract the eye of a very powerful agent, you should ask, because it’s going to happen anyway, that they assign a junior agent as well to you, because you’re going to need more help, and you’re going to need more attention. They’re going to be busy talking to people that earn $20 million a year. They have directors and actors who out-earn every screenwriter. They just won’t talk to you. Get the right guy or girl.
**John:** And if you get the wrong guy, you can tune into a later podcast in which Craig will tell you how to fire your agent or manager.
**Craig:** It’s the best.
**John:** It’s actually one of Craig’s specialties. It’s one of the things I think he’s best known for, is really how to sever ties and move on with grace. I’ve seen him do it for many, many other screenwriters. It’s a master class.
**Craig:** I’m the Kevorkian of talent representation.
[Episode 172 Clip]
**John:** Last week we talked about the perfect studio executive. This week let’s talk about the perfect agent and what makes the perfect agent, what that person should be doing for a screenwriter, what our expectations should be when we’re talking to an agent. Craig, get us started.
**Craig:** I think that we do have quite a few agents and agent assistants who will soon be agents listening to us, so hey, lean in, listen carefully. I’m very simple about what I look for in an agent. Primarily, let’s talk about the real simple stuff. Call us back.
**John:** Always good.
**Craig:** Call us back. Don’t be impossible to reach. Call us back within a reasonable amount of time. That’s the big one.
**John:** Let’s define reasonable amount of time. A reasonable amount of time is 24 hours at the outlier, and if it’s not 24 hours, then it’s some communication that acknowledges, “Got your message, I will get back to you ASAP.”
**Craig:** Yeah. My feeling is if I call before lunch, I get a call before the end of the day. If I call after lunch, I should still get a call by the end of the day, but if not, first thing the next day and an acknowledgment that the call was received. That’s a real simple thing. I know that this is something that is talked about a lot in the agency hallways as a kind of nuts and bolts things. I cannot stress how important it is. Ultimately, the constancy of communication is the glue of the agent-client relationship. It’s as simple as that.
The other thing I look for in an agent is clarity. When a writer asks an agent, “What should I do? Should I do this job or this job? Should I pass on this? Should I accept it? Who should we give this to? Is this the right producer?” what we want desperately is the same thing that the people that hire us want: clarity and comfort. We want our agent to give us an answer. If there is no answer, then explain why there’s no answer, and then explain that either way will be okay. But this wishy-washiness or asking questions back – we’re not looking for an Ericksonian therapist to just rephrase our questions. We want answers.
**John:** When you proposed this topic, I went through and sort of made my list of archetypes of sort of the things I think about when I think of an agent. And not all agents are going to be all these people, but generally these are the kind of roles an agent fulfills in a writer’s life.
One is as adviser, which is just what you described, is the person who has an informed opinion about what should be done on a project, in a situation, what is the overall shape of what this experience should be.
Secondly is as kan advocate. You want your agent to be someone who is like on your side. And so when people are pushing you around, they’re pushing back. And that’s a really crucial role because sometimes the agent has to be the bad guy. The agent has to say, “No, he delivered. Pay him.” And convince on the next step if you want the next step. That’s a critical function of an agent and sometimes one that they are reluctant to perform because they’re trying to maintain all these other relationships. But from the writer’s perspective, we just need you to stick up for us.
Third archetype is sort of the connector. And really good agents are smart at being able to put people together who they think can work well together. That’s putting writers in rooms with studio executives who actually know what they’re doing, setting up a lunch between a writer and a director because there’s probably something they could work on together, bringing the right material to the writer, because this is a book we have and we think you would probably like it. That’s a crucial function of a good agent.
**Craig:** Let’s stop there on that one, because a lot of these things are sort of constitutionally required for agents. Some of them are things that agents have to earn their way towards. The truth is that we want from our agents a certain amount of connectivity. And there are all sorts of words for this, juice, or whatever you want to call it. We want our agent to be able to get the people we need to get on the phone on the phone. And if you can’t get those people on the phone, then you need to have a relationship with a senior agent who can.
**John:** That’s a crucial point, because a lot of times as newer writers, you’re going to be working with a junior agent, someone who doesn’t have all the history and all of the contacts and all the access that the top people have. But in some cases, those younger agents have tremendous numbers of contacts, they’re just at a lower level. And those can be incredibly valuable, and they can actually be faster than some of the very top-tier people can actually get that information. That can be really useful.
Obviously, if your agent is plugged in at CAA and they have this vast knowledge network of how everything is set up, that’s awesome. But even if your agent is at a smaller sort of boutique agency that deals with just TV writers, that can be exactly perfect if that’s what you’re trying to do.
My first agent was just a terrific agent, but his client list was mostly very esoteric indie writer-directors. He was really good at dealing with sort of specialty film arms of things, but that wasn’t who I ultimately was. And it got to be very frustrating, because he didn’t know the people who I needed to be in rooms with. And that’s why it didn’t last.
**Craig:** Exactly right. There’s another thing that I think the perfect agent is capable of doing, and that is switching their tone from every kind of communication they have, except for their communication with their writer clients, and the communication with the writer clients. We know when we’re being agented.
So, what is being agented? It’s being handled, cajoled. There’s that agent talk that’s smooth and fast and all facts have suddenly become fogged by war. And everything gets twisted around. That’s what they do. And they need to be able to do that. When they’re dealing with other agents, when they’re dealing with producers, when they’re dealing with studios, when they’re dealing with business affairs, they need to agent people. That’s their job.
But when you’re talking to us, before you get on the phone with us, take a breath and say this: “This person I don’t agent. This is my client. This person I can just calm down, relax, and be honest with.” I know. Sounds crazy. But we actually appreciate honesty more than anything. Don’t hide bad news from us. Don’t sugarcoat bad news. Don’t flimflam us. And if we challenge you on something and we’re right, don’t think that by saying, “You know what, that’s a really good point, you’re right,” that it makes you weak. It doesn’t. It makes us like you more. Save a certain tiny nugget of honest, normal you for us, and agent everybody else.
**John:** Part of that honesty is being honest about why a project is coming to you or why a project is not coming to you. And that’s a very difficult conversation to have.
Craig, you will be able to better articulate what the legal definitions and differences are between an agent and a manager. But my perception is that any time somebody comes to my agent with, “Here’s work. Here is work we would like John to do,” I think he’s legally obligated to tell me about it. Is that correct?
**Craig:** It is. Yeah. A lot of times they will glide over that, because they know that you’re busy and unavailable and wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t need my agent to call me up and say, “Hey, listen, we got an offer. You just started writing a script. We got an offer for you to do an episode of an animated program in Albania.” I don’t need to hear about it.
**John:** Yet I think one of the crucial things is – and this is the conversation I have quite often – in one of those sort of check-in calls, there will be like four things we’ll talk about, and the last thing will be, “Oh, and I got this thing for you. Here’s the project. Here’s the producer. Here’s why I think it’s a pass.” And that is just a godsend when you hear what that is.
Agents are fairly describing what it actually is and why it’s probably not interesting. And sometimes I’ll say like, “Actually, that does sound really interesting,” or like, “I’ve always liked that person, so I do want to take a look at it.” But a good agent is able to say, “This is why it’s probably not going to be right.”
In some cases, especially for a newer writer, they might say, “Okay, there’s this project over at this studio and they’re meeting with writers. They asked about you. I think it’s a fishing trip. I think they’re just basically bringing a bunch of people into the room and seeing what might stick. And you could be wasting a tremendous amount of your time.” I so appreciate that. And as a young writer, I might be panicked, like, “Wait, I’m not going to go for this job?” A smart agent might say, “You know what? I don’t think anyone is ever going to get that job. I think it’s basically just a let’s see what sticks kind of situation.”
**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. There’s another nice benefit to letting your clients know when you’re passing on things for them, in that it makes them feel good, that people want you to work for them. Look, if you say don’t do something, we’re not doing it. We’re very simple that way. We want to do everything. We want you guys to be able to help us say no to things. It’s obviously a very valuable part of this. Sometimes as agents, you will smell some blood in the water and we won’t smell the same blood.
I’ll get a call, “Something came up at the agency. Our biggest movie star is excited about doing this thing. It’s a book. And everybody is running around like crazy. But I put your name in and they really responded to that. This could be huge.” Look, again, we’re being agented there a little bit.
**John:** Yeah. But at least you’re being candid about what’s actually happening there.
**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And it’s good to know. And then if we don’t smell the same blood and we go, “You know what, I get why they would love that. I just don’t think it’s for me,” then you let it go. That’s okay. Just don’t jam us in, because we’re not dumb, we know how the agent business works. You guys make 10 percent of what we make. The person who makes the most amount of money, that’s the most important person. We know that. And it’s okay to shepherd us all together. That’s part of your job. But then if we don’t get it and we don’t want to do it, just be respectful and let us not like it. That’s okay.
**John:** That shepherd function is really crucial too. When Aline was on the show last, she talked about how her agent of many, many years, they were on a phone call and Aline was venting her frustration about this project and these people and the people being impossible. And the agent basically pulled her aside and said, like, “Get over yourself. Call me back tomorrow. And figure out how you’re going to actually do this project, because you’re being crazy.”
And that’s a crucial thing. That shepherding role of saying like, “You know what, you’re not actually being reasonable here.” It’s almost like a parent. Like, you know, reminding you, “You know what, this is your job. Your job is to write this movie. Write this movie. Get it over with. Get it done. And move on.” And that’s a crucial thing to have happen too. Sometimes you as the writer are the problem, and a very good agent can find the right way to tell you, “This is a you thing. Get through it. And let’s get onto your next project.”
**Craig:** No question. Yeah, Aline and I actually have the same agent, and I can hear him saying all that. And frankly, we want that specificity. It goes back that we want to be spoken to honestly and we want clarity. If the clarity is you’re being insane, if my agent ever said to me, “You’re being insane,” I would think I’m being insane.
A good agent should not be afraid of his client or her client. If you’re an agent and you’re worried that your client is not going to respond well to the truth, so your job is to somehow figure out how to hide the truth in a thing, like the way that I feed medicine to my dog by putting it in pudding, we’re going to know. Don’t be afraid of your clients. If your client can’t handle what’s true, then they’re not going to be able to handle it with their next agent or their agent after that. Truth is a great defense.
**John:** I absolutely agree. The last thing I would say about the great agent is, the analogy I think I’ve often made is that if you’re having heart surgery, you don’t want to go to the woman who only performs heart surgery three times a year. You want to go to the surgeon and she performs it seven times a week. You want the person who is the pro at doing this thing.
And sometimes as a writer you have to step back and realize, like, “Oh, you know what? You actually do this job. You’re actually the person who makes this deal. I’m not going to sort of worry about every little step of this process. I’m going to let you and maybe my lawyer go off, make this deal, figure out all that stuff, and then report back to me what the results are. And I can say yes or no.” But I see sometimes, especially newer writers, freak out about each little bit of a deal, and that’s not generally a helpful thing.
**Craig:** It isn’t. I totally agree. There are times when we have a disagreement. And what I end up saying is, “Listen, let me tell you why I don’t want what they’ve offered, even though you think it’s good, because of this and this. It’s important to me. It’s important enough that I’m willing to say, no, I don’t want to do this.”
And a good agent hears that and goes, “Fantastic news.” As long as you’re in sync with your client and they’re saying, “I don’t want to do it. I would rather not do it than this,” that’s empowering, and don’t fight anymore. Now just go with that, unless you feel that they’re being insane. Then tell them they’re insane. There needs to be that just honest communication. The most important advice I can give to you on your path to becoming a perfect agent is to not agent your client.
**John:** I think that’s great advice.
[Episode 7 Clip]
**John:** Question for you. When you get an email from somebody you don’t know, do you google them?
**Craig:** It depends on the content of the email. But if it intrigues me in any way, yes.
**John:** The reason I ask is because I wanted to start today with a question, and it’s clearly a genuine question. This person put in enough work to the question that I don’t think that this was any sort of scam deal or anything. But as I looked up this person’s name – I didn’t recognize it, so I googled it – it came up as an adult film star.
**Craig:** Oh, cool.
**John:** I don’t think it’s actually the adult film star who was emailing me. But it’s a person who, because of the nature of the question, chose to use a handle, which was the adult film star thing, so that I wouldn’t actually print it. But of course, it was a female adult film star, which I would have no idea if it was actually a female.
**Craig:** If you said the name, I would pretend that I didn’t know it.
**John:** Oh, very nice. That’s the lovely thing about an audio podcast is no one can see your facial reaction. I’m going to choose to name this person Tina, which is not the name that originally came on the email. Let me read it to you:
“About a year ago, a manager from a reputable company contacted me because they were a fan of my online videos,” which I presume were not adult videos. “I agreed to work with them. Unfortunately, this manager also represents people with lots of IMDb credits – big people, mostly actors though, a few writers. Over the last year it has become painfully obvious they have zero time for me and have put zero effort into helping my career get off the ground.
“Any general meeting I’ve gotten over the last year has been a direct result of my own efforts. I am beginning to realize that this manager and I don’t agree on anything creatively. Their notes are contradictory and vague. When they’re not, I find them to be flat out wrong.
“My question is, if I cut ties, I’m back to square one with no other representation possibilities on the horizon. At the same time, this manager has made it clear I’m last on their list of priorities. Even if I weren’t, the difference of opinion on everything seems counter-productive. Is it worth just keeping the manager or risk going it alone?
“I’ve actually spoken to my manager about this. I asked him if he had the time for me. He said if I didn’t, they could maybe pass me along to someone a little lower at their company who may be able to champion me a bit more.” It’s a confusing note. I think it’s actually the writer saying that, so the writer suggesting that. “They said, ‘No, no. I have the time. Don’t worry.’ Well, I’m worried.”
**Craig:** This is, talk about a softball question. 90 percent of the question is really an explanation of how poor of a job this manger is doing and how bad of a fit they are, and then 10 percent is generalized anxiety disorder. The answer is cut ties, of course.
**John:** I may disagree with you on this.
**Craig:** Let’s go. Let’s do this.
**John:** I don’t want to be the serial monogamist of these relationships, but I feel like it may be a situation where she needs to find the next manager before she leaves this current manager. I don’t know that being free and clear and floating in the Hollywood ether is going to help her any more than being with a manager who, while not helping her, isn’t an anchor in any way to her.
**Craig:** Well, here’s where I would disagree. It is difficult to switch representation without actively trying to do it. That is to say, without actively trying to get a new representative. It’s a very small community. As bad as a manager may be at their job, every manager seems to be amazing at sniffing out when their clients are trying to leave them. It becomes difficult to do a full-court press on your own behalf.
If there is any opportunity that this writer has to find a better manager, that opportunity doesn’t disappear simply because they don’t have this person. This person’s literally a zero. That’s what the question stipulates. In my mind, I think by cutting ties you give yourself every opportunity to get out there, do a full-court press and not run into anybody that said, “Oh, I would, but your manager is a friend of mine,” or, “We share a client,” or, “I don’t want to poach.” Just get rid of him. I don’t know, that’s my feeling.
**John:** Devil’s advocate, I will say that there’s other people who this writer could be bringing into his or her team who may be helpful, and the manager could actually be an asset getting them to it. I feel like you maybe go to your manager and say, “Hey, look, I really want to try to find an attorney. Can you give me some suggestions of people I can meet with who are good attorneys?”
It could help open the doors to some of those things which aren’t a huge burden on the manager’s time. Then you have a pretty good attorney. And then when it’s time to leave this manager, you have a pretty good attorney who can help make the next set of connections.
**Craig:** But it’s difficult to get an attorney if you’re showing up with no opportunity for lawyering.
**John:** That’s true. You’re not going to get a lawyer unless there’s actually some contract to negotiate.
**Craig:** Right, and that seems to be precluded by this relationship. I don’t know, I guess the underlying sentiment behind my advice here is that we as writers tend to project an enormous amount of power onto these representatives, fueled by our own anxiety that we will never love again.
But the truth is you’re not being loved now. It’s a bad marriage, get out of the bad marriage. Look actively and wholeheartedly for a new marriage. You found this person. You’ll find another one. I also feel like a bad manager is worse than no manager, because while you have your bad manager, you’re hamstrung and you can’t do better.
**John:** Craig, you are going to leave this manager. You’re going to advise Tina that she should leave this manager. What does Tina say to this manager?
**Craig:** Really simple. You call the manager up, no need to make a big production out of it. You lead by saying, “Listen, I made a decision to let you go. I’m going to end our professional relationship.” You start with that, right off the bat, really dispassionate.
Just say, “Unfortunately, things haven’t quite worked out the way I would’ve hoped. I had a certain series of goals for the two of us. They haven’t quite gelled, I’m sure you would agree. We’ve been together for X amount of time. It hasn’t resulted in employment. And frankly, it just doesn’t seem like you have the time for me or the attention that I would’ve hoped. The decision is final, but I do appreciate the fact that you took a shot with me to begin with. I wish you nothing but the best, and I hope you understand.”
**John:** That sounds reasonable and mature and grown up. I will say that when I left my first agent, I didn’t have that level of sophistication. I felt the need to actually pick a fight and be able to have the reason for why I was leaving. He was genuinely a friend. He was just simply the wrong agent for me to be with, and so I felt the need to pick some sort of fight that he wasn’t doing a good job with me, so he would get angry with me, and therefore I’d angry with him and say, “I think I need to go find another agents.” The whole time, I had actually already started the whole process of figuring out who I was going to meet with next.
**Craig:** Right, that works. Look, the most important thing is that whatever method you employ, you employ it post-facto to the decision. You don’t use this breakup speech to build up to the decision. You lead with it. The decision should be unilateral. It should be a fait accompli, and then you roll out your dismissal plan.
**John:** What I just realized is that I led this conversation with talking about googling people, and I just googled my old agent yesterday, because I was curious. Someone said, “Whatever happened to him?” And I didn’t know what happened to him, and he’s fallen off the radar.
**Craig:** You mean the Google radar?
**John:** He doesn’t seem to exist in the last several years.
**Craig:** Is it possible that he never existed and this is like a Beautiful Mind thing?
**John:** That would be kind of amazing if he never existed. You go back through all those old contracts and those phone calls, and you see the other side of it, and I’m just talking to myself. I basically rented this empty office, and I would go there.
**Craig:** This is the moment where Agent Kujan drops his coffee mug on the floor.
[End of Clips]
**John:** We are now back here in 2024, or whenever you’re listening to this podcast. It could be 2054 by the time you’re listening to it. My One Cool Thing is also time-travelly. This is the 25th anniversary of Go this year. GQ magazine had a great oral history retrospective of the making of Go. I was interviewed, along with Doug Liman, the director, Sarah Polley, many of the other actors. Desmond Askew I’ve not seen since we actually shot the movie. It was great to get this retrospective on how we got the movie made, how it almost didn’t get made. Paul Schrodt did a great job putting together this oral history.
**Drew:** I loved hearing from William Fichtner. I know he’s in that movie, but he just seemed to have such love for it and such passion for it, even though he’s in it.
**John:** I was genuinely surprised, because I would say during production, he was just always annoyed by me. At least that was my perception, because it was a really chaotic production. If you read the piece, you’ll see that it was a chaotic production. I was always meddling with things, but I needed to meddle with things, because Doug always had the camera on his back. Conversations that would’ve happened over in video village had to be right in front of the actors, because Doug had the camera on his shoulder.
**Drew:** He was rigging a light on Breckin Meyer.
**John:** Yeah. But I’m glad he had a great time it. Actually, it was a very difficult shoot but a really fun shoot. It really captured the joy of making and putting that movie out there in the world.
**Drew:** Cool.
**John:** Cool. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew, thank you so much. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Llonch. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.
You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on my signing with a manager.
Now, Drew, before we go though, quite crucially, I wanted to talk about a traumatic experience you had this week and maybe talk through this a little bit. As everyone knows, we are a Highland house. All of our writing is done in Highland, which is the app that we make, and it’s what screenwriters should be using. But you this week, for a different project or something that’s going on, you had to use Final Draft. Tell us about Final Draft.
**Drew:** You don’t pay me enough. You don’t realize how good you have it until you go back to Final Draft, because god, what a nightmare.
**John:** You were discussing just putting in a parenthetical was…
**Drew:** Yeah. In Highland, all you have to do is type a parenthetical and it automatically formats. In Final Draft, you have to hit tab twice. If dialogue gets caught in an action line, you’re screwed. You have to retype all that.
**John:** It’s a really different thing. I’m sure if I had to do it, the muscle memory would come back, but I’m so happy not to be thinking about… Just don’t have to touch that tab key.
**Drew:** You’re very lucky.
**John:** Brutal. Thank you for all the hard work you did and in putting together this episode. In tribute to all your hard work, this outro is especially applicable.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** All right, Drew. We’ve talked about this on the podcast, that Craig and I have never had managers. We didn’t grow up with them. It wasn’t such a big thing when we started in this industry. Craig especially was always very suspicious of managers or the need for managers. I have always tried to keep a more open mind. But I definitely thought of managers as being a thing that newer writers might need, because they needed more hand-holding. They needed somebody to walk them through the process. They needed extra bubble wrap around them to help them do their thing. That was not what I needed, because I’m a very established writer. I didn’t need that extra point of entry. But as you, master of the calendar, saw, I ended up having six manager meetings and I went and met with a bunch of managers.
**Drew:** Yeah, six, which felt like a lot. Yeah, it’s surprising.
**John:** The reason why it ended up being six is, when I started making the decision to look for a manager, I went to Ken Richman, who’s my attorney, to get suggestions for who we should meet with. He had good names and good numbers. I couldn’t stop at one place.
But it also reminded me of when my daughter started looking for colleges, that yeah, you want to take a look at certain schools, but really you’re looking for types of schools. When we did our first college tour, we were looking for, okay, this is what it’s like being at a big school in a big city, versus a big school in a tiny town where the college takes over the town, or what it’s like to be a small college in a little, small town. What’s the right fit? What’s the right vibe gonna be?
These were actually six very different types of managers to meet with. I needed a sense of what is it gonna feel like, as much as how specific those individual managers might be.
**Drew:** Did you go into it knowing what you were looking for, or did you have an idea?
**John:** To get into it, I guess we should start with explaining why I was even looking for a manager, because I’m a very experienced screenwriter. I didn’t need a lot of help on the screenwriting front. But I’m not a very experienced or established director. One of my priorities the next couple years is to do more directing. I needed a manager, I felt, to shepherd that part of my career, and so really focus on that. That was one of the things I was really looking for.
As I was sitting down to meet with these managers, I would talk about what my priorities were for the next couple years ahead, what was working great and what I felt could work better. You sent through a list to all these managers beforehand of, like, “Here’s all the stuff I’m working on. Here are my priorities for what I want to spend my time doing.”
When I actually sat down to meet with these places, you realized they really were so different in how they worked and how they functioned and how they felt, because some of them were really small. One was a single manager. Some were really small, little, boutiquey kind of places. Some were producing shows and they were doing a whole bunch of stuff and they had a bunch of different clients. They had sports people, and they had their own research department and all this stuff. Some felt like they were as big as the big agencies, like the CAAs or the WMEs. There really was a huge range of things.
I asked similar questions of all the places, but it was also fun to hear their explanations for why they were set up the way they were set up. The places who don’t produce would say, “We don’t produce because we want to focus entirely on client service, really that old agency model, just focusing on what our clients need.” The places that did produce would say, “Because we’re out there producing, we actually know what it’s like to produce, and we actually get a lot of firsthand experience on what it takes to make something this year, next year, or the year after. We’re much more in contact with the places that you’ll be working with.”
**Drew:** What is the argument for the client services then? Because as we just talked about in the episode, I know there’s a workaround, but managers can’t legally represent their clients in a contract situation. What would they be doing? How would that be working?
**John:** I’m so happy we’re recording this without Craig, because right now Craig would be tearing his hair out, because one of Craig’s great frustrations is that managers should not, under California law, be doing some of the stuff that they end up doing, which is figuring out what the actual deal is. Managers can put you in the room, but in theory it should be your attorney and your agents who are doing that stuff. Some of my big writer colleagues don’t have agents anymore. They just have their managers, and it’s working out great for them. So it’s certainly a possibility.
I did think about, if I were to have a manager, would I still need an agency? Some of the conversations I would have with these management companies is, “How do you work with agencies? What is the overlap?” because there is overlap. Different explanations, but some would describe it as being like the manager is the general leading the charge, but you need the army, and that army is often the agency. The manager might be the person who’s saying, “Okay, there’s these 15 calls we need to make. I’m gonna make these 10. Can you make these five?” They can be the CEO of the representation of that one client.
**Drew:** Does that make it in any way awkward with your agents?
**John:** It can, and so I had conversations with agents too about, “How do you feel about working with managers?” Some, they would say, in quite polite ways, that there are certain managers they love getting on the phone with and certain managers they dread getting on the phone with, and that sometimes it feels like it’s interfering with their ability to represent the client.
In most cases though, managers represent many fewer people than an agent would. An agent might have 100, 150 clients they’re supposed to be repping, whereas a manager is focused on just a much smaller list, and so they can provide a little bit more direct attention to what that person needs that day and the day after and be thinking about a year down the road, what’s best for the client.
**Drew:** You picked a manager. How’s it going so far?
**John:** Good so far. What I would say is I found that the manager is more likely to be on Zoom with me. For example, we had a Zoom with the foreign finance people at the agency. It was good to have that manager there to ask the extra questions that I wasn’t thinking about.
It’s been nice that they have different connections than my agents might. Even just on an email chain, a manager could say, “Oh, we rep them,” or, “I know that person, and so let me make that introduction, and that’s a thing that could work,” or, “It’s not public knowledge yet, but they’re gonna be busy for the next 18 months, so I don’t think that’s a good person for us to pursue next to direct this project.”
That has been good and useful to have one outside person and an ability to reach outside the silo of… Part of the reason I was looking for a manager is because if you’re at an agency, yes, they in theory could work with everyone, and they should have information on all the stuff, but it’s hard for… If you’re at CAA, it’s a little bit weird for them to reach out to WME about one of the WME clients, whereas a manager can just pick up the phone and do it.
**Drew:** That seems like a huge… Obviously, you have a giant contact list, but your contact list expands exponentially, and knowledge too with that.
**John:** Yeah. All that said, it’s new and it’s different and it’s a little bit weird. As we established on the podcast, I kind of like being a little bit uncomfortable and trying things that are outside of my comfort zone. For me, for that, it’s been good. It’s a change. It’s a development. It’s fun that we’re doing this episode now, looking back 12 years to when we first started the agent and manager conversation, for me to suddenly have a manager, which I’ve never had before.
**Drew:** I’m excited. I think it’s a cool new chapter.
**John:** Cool. Drew, thanks for getting this episode together.
**Drew:** Thanks, John.
Links:
* [Episode 2 – How to get an agent and/or manager](https://johnaugust.com/2011/scriptnotes-episode-2)
* [Episode 172 – Franz Kafka’s brother, and the perfect agent](https://johnaugust.com/2014/franz-kafkas-brother-and-the-perfect-agent)
* [Episode 7 – Firing a manager, and trying new software](https://johnaugust.com/2011/firing-a-manager-and-trying-new-software)
* [How ‘Go,’ the Wildest, Druggiest, Horniest Cult Movie of 1999 Got Made (And Almost Didn’t)](https://www.gq.com/story/how-the-craziest-cult-movie-of-1999-got-made) by Paul Schrodt for GQ
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* This episode’s segments were originally produced by [Stuart Friedel](https://stustustu.com/). Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/643standard.mp3).