Okay, so I wouldn't exactly call this advice, but I would call it a reflection of what I've experienced over roughly 8 years looking for a rep, based on the way I view the film industry as it relates to what I’m actually seeking from my own career. And I've had a beer or 6, so...

Whenever I’d list my produced/sold/paid writing resume with someone and say I was unrepped, their response was always, "How is that possible?"

The best way to explain how it’s possible, I think, is to tell you about every “potential rep” I’ve ever spoken to. No names obviously.

Every rep I've ever spoken to has come through some form of networking in LA, minus those few who reached out to me after a Nicholl Semi-Finals placement.

Each read came as more of a, "here's the one rep that I know," rather than a, "here's the one who I think is right for you."

Also, I didn't query. Nothing against it, just not for me. So I don't think I'd even been read by more than 10 to 15 reps over 7 or 8 years. So the sample size I'm going to discuss here is small.

The only other reads came from the Nicholl placement: "Love the logline, pls send."

For the record, I think 3 or 4 reps reached out after Nicholl. Never heard back from any of them after sending the script. But that script was about a Black woman who fed abusive white men to each other and made a career of writing about it, so maybe I had that coming.

Anyway…

Every rep who did reply pretty much had the same reaction to my work. Either: "I like it but I don't love it enough to champion it," or some version of: "Love the writing, but I can’t sell this."

All reasonable replies. One led to a meeting which I'll get into later.

Quick aside to those who have also been in this position... this can feel like failure, but it's REALLY not. People are reading you and enjoying the read. Whether they like it or love it or want to open doors for you is on them. But this is you making progress, on the right path.

As for me, when a reply like that came in, I could've responded with something like, "If you didn't love that one, you might love this other one," or, "Here's something that's more commercial," or, "That's nice, but none of them are for sale, I'm a director," etc..

But I didn't.

Something about the idea of chasing you down to give you a car-salesmany pitch about why you should let me give you a piece of what I'm already earning just doesn't sit right with me.

So if you expressed no interest, no hard feelings, thanks for the read, I wish you the best.

The one that actually resulted in a meeting was with a very well-known management firm, and his conversation was hilarious.

They were reading a feature that you can think of as a "Moonlight meets The Place Beyond The Pines," written pre-Moonlight.

They (allegedly) LOVED it...

But I started to notice something weird about the conversation. They were dancing around something, afraid of something.

The script's protag was a 16 year old black kid whose stereotypical "kind heart" helped him evade gang violence. That's not important, but... then it hit me.

They didn't realize that the kid in the script was not me, and that it was complete fiction. I found that a lot funnier than they did.

Anyway, they ended up passing with a version of, "We really love your script, but we want people who are further along in their career."

This was after I wrote 2 theatrically-released features and directed 2 award-winning shorts, while a white filmmaker fresh out of film school with no credits was having their first feature funded by the production arm of this very company at literally that exact same time. Cough.

Here's something you can take as advice: If someone wants to respectfully pass, you can respectfully let them without feeling insulted, or feeling "less than" in any way.

But if someone wants to spew bullshit in your direction, leave the room before it hits you.

Now, I know what you're thinking, and...

Yes.

Every single one of these reps who read me up to this point was a white male. But that's not where I'm going with this.

Because you may have noticed another pattern here, one that I consider to be more important, which is...

Not a single one of them ever asked me a question about anything else I was doing outside of the one script that they read.

Not one.

It was like they had blinders on.

And honestly, that was always a deal breaker.

There are two reasons why I would never try to send a followup sample to someone who "liked but didn't love" the first one. Either could be met:

1) I didn't see diversity or see the career I wanted reflected in their current clients
2) They didn't ask.

Well, none of them asked.

So when they didn’t ask about anything beyond the one sample they read, I didn't volunteer that information. Whether it was a deal I'd already been offered, or a new spec I was even more excited about, or a project that already had financing attached, if they didn’t ask, the end.

Yeah that might've been counter-intuitive, but the way I’ve always seen it, if I’m going to be “represented” by somebody, I want them representing my entire self. Not just the one piece of me they think they can mold into something more marketable. I don’t really care about that.

I’ll be the first to tell you I’m a filmmaker for very selfish reasons. I just want to know what’s possible.

Where the line is, what the limit is, what I can come up with, and whether I'll be able to pull it off.

That's FASCINATING to me. That's why I'm here. The rest is noise.

And as weird as it sounds, THAT'S the thing that I want represented.

So to rep me, I’d want you to know what you were getting yourself into, and be even more excited in that than you were in any one writing sample.

You might be thinking, "Okay, but is that gonna work?"

It did.

But we'll get to that later (this is a semi-coherent rant after all).

Now I imagine some of those reps who passed on me could be reading this now and thinking they dodged a bullet, and they would be right. But that’s kinda the point.

That pass was the best thing for both of us.

That's why I don't correlate those passes with the fact that those reps were all white men. I'm absolutely not everybody's ideal client.

And I certainly won't say that a Black male or female rep would necessarily "love" my work either, or think they could sell it.

Every script I've ever written has had a protagonist of a different demographic, so to say that I'm explicitly reflecting a "Black" experience in my stories would be false.

I'm kinda just doing whatever the fuck I want, and content with whatever that's going to bring me.

Twitter apparently doesn't understand the concept of an endless old man rant, so I had to split this into two threads. Here's part 2: https://twitter.com/CoreyDeshon/status/1319845294184361987