How to Get an Agent

“A referral is always great.  If a friend of mine says, “READ THIS”, I WILL read it.”

Agent Rima Greer

Above the Line Agency

“The fact is that every single one of us or our agencies take on new people. We have to. It’s the lifeblood of the business. I mean, things turn over. Clients leave, clients leave the business altogether — we do have overhead; we do need to pay attention to those clients who make a lot of money. But there’s always got to be room for the new people.“

Agent Lucy Stille/ Paradigm

Speaking at the WGA Words into Pictures Forum

Since I do not have an agent look at me as just a stranger standing on corner holding a sign which says “This Way” with an arrow for you to follow. Here’s what my sign says;

“The very third thing you should do (to get an agent) is get your script into the hands of someone who can refer you to an agent. The best, most common way to get an agent is by the personal referral of someone in the business. The second thing is to write a great script. Not a decent script. Not a pretty good script. A great script. An original and compelling screenplay that demonstrates excellent writing and a distinctive voice. The first thing is to read and follow the advice in Terry Rossio’s Wordplay column entitled You, the Expert.

See, I’m just the messenger. Oh, you want to know where I got that little bit of wisdom? You want to know if it came from a qualified source. Fair enough.

The above quote was cobbled together from the article How Do You Get an Agent? by Dan Petrie, Jr. Petrie is a former ICM agent, screenwriter (Beverly Hills Cop), and the former president WGAw, and his father Daniel Petrie Sr. directed the 1961 classic A Raisin in the Sun and won three Emmy Awards in a career than spanned an unbeleivable seven decades. So Petire Jr. has Hollywood pedigree and is a well qualified source.

And since his number one piece of advice on getting an agent is an article by Terry Rossio, in case you are not familiar with that name you may be familiar with some of his writing credits; Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mask of Zorro, and Shrek.

If you’re living far from Hollywood, working a day job you don’t care for and dreaming of a screenwriting career then Rossio, a former machine parts inspector from Kalamazoo, may just be your new role model. But I’ll warn you that Rossio and his writing partner Ted Elliot followed the tried and true process of writing screenplay after screenplay before they got an agent and sold a script.

“Here’s the story of how we found our agent. Ted and I, when we were first starting out, wrote the equivalent of 12 feature film screenplays. And we didn’t send any of them out. (I say the ‘equivalent’ of 12, because we wrote episodic TV specs, short films, half-hour comedies, etc., along with features.) That was FIVE YEARS of writing, where our self-assessment was that we weren’t quite good enough yet. Five years of study and training. Close to what it would take to get through med school.”
Terry Rossio

Of course, getting an agent shouldn’t be your end goal. Getting your script made into a movie is your goal. And there are many avenues that writers take to make that happen. You may be surprised to know that some successful screenwriters don’t even have agents. So beginning tomorrow we’ll look at Marketing Your Script and you can watch me sink or swim as I unveil my approach to marketing my recently completed script.

Resources:
Writers Guild of America, West— Agency List

Hollywood Creative Directory (Known as “the phone book to Hollywood.” Book form or monthly online fee. (The books are updated yearly and fairly expensive, but you can find older ones on eBay for as low as $1.)

P.S. To understand what an agent actually does check out the book The Real, Low Down, Dirty Truth About Hollywood Agenting by agent Rima Greer who founded Above the Line Agency in 1994.

Scott W. Smith