Candy Land

Good morning, Effers! I’ve decided that as ridiculous as that sounds, you guys know what I mean, I am NOT referring to you in a negative way. Right? Just Effers is too long. Justers is silly. And though there were many suggestions, Effers just feels right. You get it. You’re in on the joke.  Okay. So we got that out of the way.

ANYWAY.

So I have this friend, right? A really great action writer. Who’s a girl. Which is immaterial, it just makes the whole thing a little cooler. Anyway. So after toiling for years in Hopeful Writer Land, writing spec after spec, she finally got repped. REPPED. Right?! At ICM no less. No boutique for her, no never-heard-of-it management agency. She was transported into the Big Time, right across that swinging rope bridge from where you are, into CANDY LAND, where the writing gigs are hanging from gumdrop trees and there’s a river made of Hawaiian Punch and it’s good for you and you take a Red Vine cable car to your House in the Hills where you live happily ever after!

Well. Not exactly. She’s taken meeting. After meeting. After meeting. At big companies. With relevant people with Big Offices. Her spec went out. Wide. No bites. But more meetings. And yet more meetings. No worries, it’s all good!

But several months into this whole thing – my friend is feeling quite disillusioned. Hey, WAITTA MINUTE, she said to me the other day – I have a feeling that there are not nearly the writing jobs available that I had been led to believe! Well, actually, she said that with a lot of BLEEPS in-between but you get it. So I asked my friend Jason Scoggins, a lit manager at Protocol, just what is going on in the form of this question:

Do you happen to know how many OWAs* are floating around in a given month? And compared to that number, how many repped writers, guild and non-guild are vying for those jobs each month?  I have a friend who’s gone to meeting after meeting for months now, with no gigs being landed of the OWA nature and she’s beginning to wonder what the ratio is of jobs to writers. Do you happen to have a take on that?

*OWA = open writing assignment.

And here is what Jason told me:

First, here are a couple of SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess) numbers to mull over:

• There are between 500 and 600 OWAs on our grid right now.  Roughly 80% of those are from studios/buyers, and the rest are independent (i.e., may or may not be financed).
• I’m working on a side project related to OWAs and while I don’t yet have a good sense of the monthly churn (new OWAs added, existing OWAs filled), I will in another couple of months.  I know that a significant portion of the projects currently on our grid were there at the beginning of the year as well, so if I had to guess a percentage that gets filled monthly I’d put it between 5% and 10%.

I think the above numbers are immaterial to your friend, though; the ratio of writers to jobs is a meaningless number.  It’s not as if every eligible writer (WGA or not) is being considered for a given gig.  The actual number is probably no more than a couple dozen candidates per job, with each producer having a relatively short list that they go to for any given project (depending on the genre), plus a handful of outside-the-box suggestions from internal development executives and another handful of flavor-of-the-month writers.

Your friend shouldn’t despair, though, or even get discouraged.  The key to getting on those lists in the first place is all those general meetings she’s taking.  She’s no doubt getting invited to come up with takes for projects with various producers, and to bring her own ideas to the table for development with them as well.  She should just keep her head down and gut it out.  She’s got a seat at the table, and she just needs to hang in there until she gets her first (or second, or whatever) break.

My take is that we’re still feeling the aftereffects of the strike and the recession.  When development came to a full stop, slates got reevaluated all over town.  Plus, the recession has definitely impacted the amount of dollars available for development over the past year and a half.  It feels like producers and buyers are filling OWA slots according to priority right now, and just because something’s on the OWA grid doesn’t mean the producers and executives involved are hot and bothered to hire someone to fill it.  Finally, everyone got squeezed long and hard enough during the strike that the A-list writers who get offered every OWA when it’s first available started working their asses off once it was over.  Bottom line, it’s a supply and demand thing, and the outlook won’t improve until the recession really starts to ease and buyers start to push more projects into active development, which will have a trickle-down effect for writers like your friend, who aren’t at the top of anyone’s go-to list but who are viable candidates nonetheless.

My advice, in addition to the “hang in there” stuff above, would be to take seriously those producers’ invitations to develop something together.  The writing will most likely be on spec, but it’s worth doing for a number of reasons, not least because her reps will be able to point to it as an example of other people who have “hired” her to write something.  The perception that other people want to work with her is an important psychological indicator for other producers and buyers, as in, “Hell, if she’s writing something for so-and-so, I should definitely consider her for this post-apocalyptic romantic comedy I’ve got set up at Fox.”  I wouldn’t recommend starting writing without some sort of deal in place, but she’s going to be writing something without getting paid up front anyway, so why not make that work for her in the meantime?

Jason Scoggins is a lit manager at Protocol and the author of a MOST excellent blog, Life on the Bubble. Read it faithfully for the latest in the spec market round-up.