If you’re a screenwriter getting rejected from potential managers, please understand it isn’t personal: They get plenty of rejection, too.
“I like to tell people I get told no for a living,” literary manager Josh Dove explained Thursday, at a Flickers’ Rhode Island Film Festival panel. “That’s my job description. … I get 500 ‘nos’ for every one ‘maybe.'”
Dove, who worked at Stride Management and Circle of Confusion before opening his own Redshift Management, was one of the speakers Thursday on the informative and ambitiously named panel, “How to Rule the Film World: Successfully Navigating Hollywood.”
Sponsored by EJOYA Productions and the Rhode Island Film and TV Office, the panel covered a wide range of questions, big and small, but offered two major takeaways:
- Learn to be OK with rejection.
- Figure out how to use it to get your foot in the door. (Politely.)
“If it’s comforting, you’ll still see directors or writers at some of the highest levels still get rejected by studios,” said panelist Meena Harish, who works at independent production, financing, and sales company 30WEST’s studio division, where she finds and supports film and TV projects.
She said it’s important to learn the language of the industry, in order to see “every rejection as a learning opportunity.” Rejections can tell you how to improve a pitch, or how you might be able to collaborate with someone on something else.
For example: If a company rejects a particular pitch, but enjoys your writing, perhaps you can try to go out for open writing assignments.
“There’s sometimes opportunities to ask for those if you had a good general meeting, but the particular project wasn’t the right fit. So there’s other ways to reposition yourself for different opportunities,” noted Emmy-winning comedy producer, director and writer Emily Hason, who in 2022 partnered with Colin Jost to launch No Notes Productions.
She recommends balancing a lot of different ideas in your creative portfolio, and “not just having one creative baby that’s so important to you — and it’s this or nothing.” She urges creators to “have a lot of pots cooking,” so if someone doesn’t like your movie idea, they might be open to your unscripted series or podcast proposal.
And while you should have a lot of ideas, you don’t necessarily need to blab about them before they’re fully baked.
“I think that especially in L.A., there’s very much a culture of talking about what you plan to do versus actually what you’re doing,” said the panel’s moderator, Jack Greenbaum, who heads up the New York office of The Arlook Group, overseeing literary management and development.
He recommends that writers “stay quiet about the work until it’s ready… keeping your head down is sometimes the best thing to do, because if you mention it, others may go, ‘Oh, well they’ve already tried that and it didn’t work,’ or ‘I know somebody more famous is doing that now.'”
He says that if you commit to a head-down approach, you’ll be on to the next project by the time your current work is out in the world.
Some Dos and Don’ts of Writing a Query Letter
Dove also gave some very specific advice on how to query an agent. (A query, if you don’t know, is just an email asking a manager if they’d be open to representing your work.)
While Dove receives plenty of rejection as he advocates for his clients and their projects, he also has to do his share of rejecting writers who send him misguided query letters.
So he explained what he does and doesn’t appreciate in a query.
First things first: “An agent is more of a salesperson,” Dove explained. “They want something that’s ready to go now. They typically won’t sign you until you’ve got heat or things going on. A manager is the one who finds you early and really puts in a lot of the sweat equity to get you there. And managers are also allowed to produce, and agents legally are not.”
He added: “Agencies generally will not take queries. They just they go straight in the trash, 99% of the time. It’s just management companies that are open to taking queries, and a lot of them will say on their website if they are.”
So, Dove said, when it’s time to query a prospective manager, it’s important to craft “a very strong, very respectful query letter, and tailor it to the specific person you’re sending it too.” Communicate to a manager why you think you’d be a good match — perhaps they represent a writer whose style is similar to yours.
Also, use their name, correctly. No one likes to be one of 500 people on a group email to “Dear Industry Professional.”
Next, the logline.
“What I look for in a query letter is, first and foremost, does the logline appeal to me?” Dove said.
If it’s badly written, or fine but not to his taste, he moves on.
“If someone sends me a script and I read it and it’s fine, I have to ask myself: ‘If I were to work with this person, would I not only be willing, but excited, to call every executive I know, right now, and say, ‘You have to read this this weekend’?”
The next thing he looks for is evidence of normalcy.
“Does this seem like it was written by a person who is — I don’t know how to put this gently — not an insane person?” he asked. “You’d be surprised how many very weird, very crazy letters are out there.”
He also likes when “you’re respectful and you clearly know how to string a coherent sentence together, which is important for a writer.”
If those points seem obvious, well. Dove explained: “You’d be very surprised how how how common it is for those basic things to not be met.”
Greenbaum added that writers should remember to think about business, not just creativity.
“You’re looking at it from this creative perspective, and we’re trying to figure out how to best run our business,” he said.
So he encouraged writers to explain to prospective managers: “Here’s how you reading my script is actually going to make you money, make us all successful, and creatively further our endeavors.”
Harish said screenwriters will benefit from understanding how their projects fit into the overall landscape.
“What might be helpful for emerging filmmakers is also being mindful of the market. What is doing well at the box office? What is being bought at festivals? Because these are movies that financiers are looking for and production companies are looking for,” she said. “Not to say that your art can’t just be your art, but I think when you’re first breaking in and you want to make that passion project that’s a feature, how do you get noticed?”
She also urged filmmakers to be strategic. They should think about making, for example, “that punchy short that you can get out there that might be genre,” even if they aren’t big fans of genre.
Having “something sticky that project companies or financiers might be interested in” can lead to bigger projects closer to a filmmaker’s true vision.
On Patience
Hason, meanwhile, stressed patience — or at least acceptance of the fact that everything seems to take longer than it should.
“Everything takes forever. You think something is going to move and be done within a year, and things take three years, five years,” she said. “There are always going to be curveballs…. being ready for really long timelines for things is definitely a reality. There are instances where things get set up really quickly, and you’re surprised, and that’s delightful. But I wouldn’t say that’s the rule.”
One way to do things faster is to do them smaller, without waiting on a big company for a greenlight. Hanson encouraged filmmakers at the festival to look to the potential collaborators in their lives and figure out how to make their projects independently.
“What’s so great about being at a festival like this and working with people who are self-starters is that there are projects that are within your control. You can have shorter timelines on things, with enough enough initiative and enough people around you who are supportive of your vision and of you as an artist,” Hanson said. “So it’s great that you’re here and that you are making things. That’s that’s the most powerful tool in your belt.”
Projects also get made when producers and executives really believe in them, and keep pushing for them even during setbacks and delays.
“You’ll often see successful directors work with the same producers who believed in them early on, and you see those relationships last forever,” Harish said. “It’s always worth knowing that your faith in someone is important, and worth holding on to.”
You can learn more about Flickers’ Rhode Island Film Festival here and read more of our festival coverage here.
Main image: Josh Dove, Meena Harish, Emily Hason and Jack Greenbaum.
