This is a transcript of the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast that takes you inside the screenwriting industry to talk with screenwriters, television writers, executives, and industry influencers. To listen to this podcast click here. To listen to other podcasts visit podcasts.finaldraft.com.
Pete D’Alessandro: Hello, I'm Pete D’Alessandro. Welcome to another edition of Insider View, a podcast that takes you inside the screenwriting industry to talk with screenwriters, television writers, executives, and industry influencers. Today we have guests Christopher Lockhart, who is a story editor at WME. His producer credits that he has done himself include 'The Collector' and the sequel, 'The Collection', but he's best known for reading a lot of scripts. Chris, thanks for joining us.
Christopher Lockhart: Thank you.
Pete D’Alessandro: Our other guest is Danny Vang from Benderspink. He's a manager there. Benderspink has produced some movies like ‘We're the Millers’ and ‘The Incredible Burt Wonderstone’ and the upcoming ‘Horrible Bosses 2’. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us.
Daniel Vang: Yeah, no worries. Happy to be here.
Pete D’Alessandro: So guys, what we're trying to do today is a little bit different than we've done before. I just want to have a roundtable discussion about what happens in the life of a script because I think for writers out there we all know that someone has to read our script and become interested in it, and then after that a bunch of stuff happens and we're never really sure exactly what's going on, and what real-world experience has taught you guys we'd love to hear. So to start us off, what happens when you guys first read that really exciting script? Let's say it's from, Daniel, maybe from somebody you represent or Chris, from somebody WME represents. You're excited about the script, it's great, and not only that but it actually really has potential to go somewhere. What’s the first thing that happens then after you put that script down?
Daniel Vang: For me, if it's my client, then I start dancing. If it's not my client, then I figure out, is this guy repped or is this woman repped, and then start hunting it down from there. See, when you have a hot script, the name of the game now, I think Chris you might agree, is how to package it and put it together so that when you bring it out to the studios you can make the biggest splash. So if you have a hot script hopefully other people will agree with you, and you send it to people like Chris, agents at his company, and they attach other big-time directors at his company, other big-time actors, and then you can go out to different studios around town and then make the biggest splash, maybe even a big spec sale.
Pete D’Alessandro: Chris, is that kind of your experience as well?
Christopher Lockhart: I'm sort of on that other side of it because I work with actors. I'm trying to find actors’ projects. So let's say that Daniel sends that script then to my office and he thinks it would be great for Denzel Washington, and if I read it and I think that it's great for Denzel Washington, then that starts a process within the office to get that script to Denzel Washington. Not necessarily just as easy as sort of knocking on his front door and saying, “Hey, here's a script.”
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] Right. I guess I would be curious, I mean, can you talk about what else that really entails to try to attach people? Because that seems to be what really gets a movie made.
Christopher Lockhart: Well, I think probably one of the most important things generally speaking is money. So if Daniel has a spec, he's obviously not going to be able to make an offer to a client.
Pete D’Alessandro: Okay.
Christopher Lockhart: Other scripts that are perhaps farther along that already have producers attached and maybe are fully financed, they’ll actually come in with an offer and say, “Hey, we want to offer the script to Client A. We want to pay him 10 million dollars for eight weeks.” That gets the ball rolling. So when you're dealing with these A-list actors, the ones that can really truly get projects green-lit, the thing that gets the attention of any agent or actor first would be an offer. That’s not always the case because clearly a lot of actors will attach to projects that don’t have any money involved.
Pete D’Alessandro: I guess…so there are two different courses of action that spec could then take. I mean, you can go out with no offer, which is probably less favorable, or you can say, “Well, we have things in place, we have money in place, here is some of that money that we think we could pay you to look at the script and to get involved.”
Christopher Lockhart: Right.
Pete D’Alessandro: So let's talk about some of those other attachments because money and producers and a lot of this stuff is going to be just as important. So Daniel, if we have this hypothetical spec, what’s the next step for you guys to get some of those attachments now? Can we get into the specifics of that?
Daniel Vang: First of all, my job as a manager is to hopefully get the script in the best shape as possible before it hits the eyes of agents, producers, directors, etc. When the script we feel is ready, then there are a number of ways that it could go out to get to ultimately the Denzel Washingtons of the world or the big-time directors. One, it's definitely merely hitting up the director or the agents going through that route, agencies like WME, CAA and UTA. Sometimes they have managers that you might have a relationship with that you can funnel the script through.
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.
Daniel Vang: Or sometimes they might have production companies like, for example, Pete Berg has a great production company. If one of his execs finds a script that he loves, then that’s an easy channel to say, “Hey, Pete, read this. This is amazing. what do you think?”
Pete D’Alessandro: Well, coming back to that point about you trying to get the script in the best shape possible, can you talk about some of the stuff you've had to do with a script before it's really been ready even though you've obviously been excited about it, it's been good? What do you do next?
Daniel Vang: It ranges the gamut from totally reworking the script to maybe fixing first act, second act, third act. Sometimes you get internal read. I work at a company with a lot of really smart people, so I can get some internal reads to say, “Hey, you and the writer are way too close to it. You guys are missing this big aspect of it. Here's what’s not working." So I guess it's just typical development. Maybe there are problems with characters, maybe there's a problem with plotting, maybe just the marketability, the idea, and just ironing out those issues, making it the best that it can be and then taking out…
Christopher Lockhart: You know, because even though he gets it into the best possible shape it can be in, once they send it to a director he's now going to have notes, and then they get it into the best possible shape for that director, and then they send it to talent and the talent likes it, but he has notes.
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.
Christopher Lockhart: So that process never ends.
Pete D’Alessandro: This might even be before you've sold a script. I mean, that might not even happen yet.
Daniel Vang: Well, I mean, maybe I'm jumping ahead but I think it finally ends when you finally have a final draft, because a script is a living breathing thing as it goes throughout the different phases of making a movie.
Christopher Lockhart: And you know something, even when it's a final print, then let's say if you're going to start to shop around for distribution, now the distributor might want things changed.
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs]
Daniel Vang: Yeah, exactly.
Christopher Lockhart: And now you've got to go in and you've got to reedit and you have to do this, you have to do that. And then when the distributor has it exactly the way he likes it and then it goes out, but you know, maybe then when it gets to TV it gets reedited. It's really never sort of…it kind of just never ends, it seems.
Pete D’Alessandro: I'm kind of curious, I think I know the answer to this, but Chris, maybe you could elaborate, what kind of changes would a distributor want to make?
Christopher Lockhart: It could be anything from as simple as a change in the title of the movie because they can't sell it with that particular title, or it could be like certain elements. Maybe there's a subplot in the movie that just for whatever reason isn't going to play well overseas. Maybe they want to cut that. Maybe they want to reshoot the ending, leave it, let's say, open-ended for a potential franchise.
Daniel Vang: And sometimes what they might do is, I don't know if this is jumping ahead, but they’ll test it in front of an audience and then the audience will go, “Man, we really like that character,” and then the distributor might go, “Hey man, maybe we need to amp up those areas,” or it's playing too sad or it's not funny enough or whatever the case is. They get a lot of feedback from those screenings.
Christopher Lockhart: When we had an audience screening for ‘The Collector’, which was originally called ‘The Midnight Man’, there were things that the audience hated, and so we went back and we changed the things that we could change that were within reason because we didn't have unlimited finances.
Pete D’Alessandro: Can you think of one of the examples from Collector that you actually had to change that test audience saw?
Christopher Lockhart: I think some things sort of in the finale changed a little bit, in the climax. Maybe they were just some kind of brief edits, maybe some special effect that we took out. I don’t recall if we had anything massive. I can tell you though that we did actually reshoot the ending, but I don’t recall if we did that before or after the test screening.
Pete D’Alessandro: Okay.
Christopher Lockhart: But after the movie was done, we actually did go and create a new ending.
Pete D’Alessandro: You went back to the script and rewrote from there?
Christopher Lockhart: The writers rewrote a final scene, the final image. We shot it in Griffith Park. The movie was actually shot in Louisiana and was kind of all done, and we actually shot the movie under the Dimension arm, the Weinsteins, and then they sold the movie to Mickey Liddell, and then Mickey Liddell, he wanted to put in some changes. He was actually responsible for changing the title from ‘The Midnight Man’ to ‘The Collector’.
Pete D’Alessandro: Let's pretend we've gotten through this process of attaching a producer, a director, we've got some talent attached now, we have some people that we want and we think can sell this movie, I assume we've got a distributor if we've sold the script, what’s going to happen now? I mean, are we ready to go to production?
Daniel Vang: I think if you have a project that the studio loves the script, they love the attachments, they love the director, the actor, etc., it fits their budget range before they even green-light a script, we're talking the major studios, they have a plan, the marketing people huddles up, they think they can sell it, and then you go out and shoot. And even during the shooting phase if we're talking about the life the script, especially if it's comedy, up until like a couple of weeks, it ranges from script to script, the writer is constantly working. There's a deal that you can make for writers called “all services deal” where you just might be hovering around set and like, “Hey, this line’s not working anymore because…” or “This actor’s not going to be in it,” or “Hey, I think I've got a funnier joke to go into this scene, why don’t we work it like this?”
So when you're shooting it, it's living and breathing and is changing. Right before you go into it, there are these things called roundtables where different writers will huddle up and try to punch up the script right before two weeks before you start shooting, and so there are multiple, multiple, multiple drafts of this as it goes right before production and during production.
Pete D’Alessandro: So the roundtable’s kind of a collaborative thing. I mean, we're not talking about getting rid of one writer and bringing in others…
Daniel Vang: Oh, a roundtable turns into almost like a TV writers’ room for a day where everybody has a script and then they show up for maybe six, seven hours, maybe longer, maybe shorter, and they go through the script and they go, “Hey, you know what? Instead of that scene, what if we did it this way?” and there's usually a system there. I've done this where you're just typing away and just recording everything that’s in the room so that you send this long document to the writers, the studio execs, the producers, the directors, the writers. They can choose what stuff that they might have liked in the roundtable or not, and it's just a collaboration of a lot of really smart, funny people or really talented people, depending on what the movie is, right before the movie goes to try to make…just to give it that last oomph to make sure we've got the best product as we're going…start shooting it.
Pete D’Alessandro: So I guess if we've survived the roundtables, we've done some edits on those and then we start getting into shooting, and I'm assuming that, I mean, if there's not an “all services” I'm sure there are some changes being made while were shooting, that’s always going to be true, right?
Christopher Lockhart: Sure. Yeah.
Daniel Vang: And also, you know, there's improv too, you know?
Pete D’Alessandro: Right. What’s going on when there's improv on set? I mean, is a writer capturing that or how does that work?
Daniel Vang: The director gives them that freedom and also it's usually in the hands of the, gosh, script, who’s the person, the script coordinator or the script supervisor? It's his or her job to just write down everything they're saying and kind of go from there.
Pete D’Alessandro: So as those changes happen in real time and that’s not coming from the script, it's going back to the script if you're someone like that.
Daniel Vang: Yeah.
Pete D’Alessandro: Alright, so what’s going to go on next? If we get through this production, we assume everything goes more or less to plan, we finish principal photography, what’s going to happen next with the script? Obviously, we're probably in post even while we're shooting or editing as much as we can up through that. What’s going to happen next with the script?
Christopher Lockhart: Well, at this point the script, it has metamorphosed, you know, because really now the film is written by the editor. Again, the script is sort of like a caterpillar and then the movie is like the butterfly, and so now you've got to work with the editor, and if things aren't working then perhaps the writers be called in to rewrite scenes that then could potentially be reshot. That happened with us on The Collection. Oddly, somebody didn't like one of—oh God, maybe I shouldn't tell this story.
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs]
Christopher Lockhart: Yeah, I'll be more vague. In one of the movies that I produced there was a performance that one of the producers didn't like, and so the decision was made to cut that performance out of the movie completely and then replace that actor with another actor, and then shoot that actor in those scenes in a very creative way where then he was placed back into the movie and it seemed like he would have been there on the original set way back when. So that was kind of odd. And we also did reshoots to try to make some sense out of the nonsensical plot, and so the writers were called in to write some new scenes that were shot and then the editor had to try to work those out. But really, once the movie is in post, it's the editor really now is the writer, for the most part.
Daniel Vang: Yeah…
Pete D’Alessandro: Right.
Christopher Lockhart: Yeah, you know, the screenwriter’s job is kind of done now.
Pete D’Alessandro: So all the editor really has to go on is their instincts versus the script and they're going to try to make the best movie with what they have in front of them at that point. The script should be…it's almost kind of secondary at that point.
Christopher Lockhart: Yeah, because now they're working with the actual movie that’s been shot and, you know, the various takes and angles and this and that. The editor has a hard job. Editor’s kind of a hard job.
Pete D’Alessandro: So what else is going on concurrently then? Are we starting to get into cutting trailers at that point? What else is happening to the movie?
Daniel Vang: There are potentially trailers being made, teasers being made. Usually when a movie’s in the can, in the studio phase, the director has a director’s cut, studio comes in, weighs in, and then usually with studio movies they test it and they kind of see what the score is and how it's reacting with the audience, and based off of that they can reshoot stuff and call in a writer or they can just edit some stuff out or rejigger the movie, or they might get like a great score on these audience scores and kind of keep it the way it is. What typically happens with these big studio movies, because these movies can take let's say five, 10, whatever, years to get made…
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.
Daniel Vang: …with numbers of writers that work on these throughout the years, it goes into credit arbitration from the WGA. So if you're lucky enough to get a movie made, you might be in a collection of let's just say 10 writers and the WGA will assemble a bunch of other writers chosen at random to read those 10 drafts and determine who gets the credit for the movie. So when you watch these movies, you can pay attention to like, let's say, “Chris Lockhart & Daniel Vang” we're a team, or “Chris Lockhart and Daniel Vang,” so I came in and rewrote Chris. That can really make or break a screenwriter’s career.
Pete D’Alessandro: The fact that they get credit or not get credit?
Daniel Vang: Yeah, and monetarily you can also, you know, just, if the movie performs really well, they can…particularly getting the credit for it.
Christopher Lockhart: You know, writers get a bonus if they have the sole credit also.
Daniel Vang: Yeah.
Christopher Lockhart: But I think that’s created a lot of sort of strife within the Writer’s Guild and I think that's why so often people will say that the Writer’s Guild is sort of the wiggiest of all the trade unions because there's so much dissension within the ranks, and I think part of it is because of this arbitration thing. It does in many ways sort of pit one writer against the other. Some I think, you know, sort of really understand and it's just kind of like being a boxer. You know, you get in the ring, you really respect the guy, then you beat the crap out of each other, and then you still respect each other. But yeah, I know a lot of writers who are better at the process and other writers because they should have gotten…
Pete D’Alessandro: Well, that makes sense. So then the arbitration process winds up determining who gets royalties, I guess residuals, rather, and who winds up getting paid in the long run, right?
Christopher Lockhart: Yes.
Pete D’Alessandro: So I'm curious, how does the arbitration process actually work? In your experience how does that wind up working? What gets submitted and what gets included to determine who gets what credit?
Daniel Vang: I'm not an expert on it but from what I have seen I believe it's like a collection of writers. Let's just say it's three writers chosen at random, WGA writers, they get together, and the Guild I believe collects all the drafts of the script, so let's just say the first draft of the movie all the way to what was ultimately the shooting draft, and each one has a different name on it or the same name. Then it goes into a conference room, which I don't know what happens, and then somehow someone emerges with sole credit or shared credit or different pieces of credit.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s based on how much they contributed to that final script based on drafts they submit?
Daniel Vang: Yeah. It's a subjective call, I believe.
Pete D’Alessandro: Okay. If we do jump back for a second, we talked about this happening once a picture is locked, but what else would have to happen for a picture to become locked?
Daniel Vang: With certain directors, they get final cut. So if you are I would imagine someone like Clint Eastwood or something, probably gets final cut. Then, whenever the director says, “We're done,” then usually that’s the case. I think in a lot of cases it's a group consensus where like the producer, the director and primarily the studio feels good about it, and then you get going.
Pete D’Alessandro: Okay. Now, who from the studio would be making a call like that? That's something we haven't talked about, is the kind of executive studio site of this.
Daniel Vang: I would think sometimes it even comes all the way from the top. From my experiences, at these screenings you get potentially the heads of the studios. Especially if it's a huge movie, I mean, if it's a hundred-million-dollar movie, you can bet that everyone in the studio has seen multiple versions of it.
Pete D’Alessandro: Just because of the amount of money that’s at stake and all the importance that goes with that?
Daniel Vang: Yeah.
Pete D’Alessandro: Alright, so if we've locked our picture, we've got everything settled, where do we settle on a release date? When did that happen in this process?
Daniel Vang: Well, obviously that is a hugely critical decision to when to roll out a movie, usually on a release date. That’s why you see these movies getting released like Avengers 3 in, I don't know, 2017 or 2016, three years down the line or whatever the case is, because they just kind of want to plant their flag. If you look at what’s being released now, it's just like it's a very crowded marketplace and it can make and break a movie depending on what the movie is. Like the movies that we typically make are midlevel comedies, but you want to put it in its right weekend so it doesn’t get gobbled up by, let's say, you know, recently ‘Transformers’ just came out or ‘Planet of the Apes’. So there are a lot smarter people than myself who pick release dates and holidays and “this has historically performed well for comedies of this nature so we'll do this,” or “this is has historically performed well for this and we can count on this.” I'm sure it's some huge algorithm or, again, it's just much smarter people picking a release date, and a lot of times that can make or break whether the movie performs well in the theaters.
Pete D’Alessandro: And it may be set that far in advance.
Daniel Vang: Yeah.
Christopher Lockhart: You can set a big movie far in advance. So like ‘The Avengers’, you can set that far in advance and, like Daniel said, stick your pole in the date and that’s your date. Smaller movies can't do that because they could get usurped by that bigger movie coming in and stepping on them. When the distributor for ‘The Collection’, they chose a very unorthodox weekend, which was the weekend after Thanksgiving, which is traditionally the worst weekend to release a new film, because the weekends leading up to Thanksgiving are when all the big holiday movies are released. And so what happened to our movie, which was originally they thought that we were going to get into over 2000 theaters, we ended up only getting into about 1300 theaters because movies like ‘Skyfall’ and the ‘Twilight’ movie were doing so well that they held on to their theaters, and so we couldn't even get into any theaters. And the idea was that this is a horror movie that will be counterprogramming to all that other stuff. We were top 10 at the box office that weekend, but it was number 10. [Chuckles]
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs]
Christopher Lockhart: So the notion that it was going to be counterprogramming didn't work.
Pete D’Alessandro: Well, maybe it did work, just didn't get the chance to do it on enough screens.
Christopher Lockhart: No, because even the per-screen average was low. It was pretty disastrous overall.
Pete D’Alessandro: How does it get determined otherwise how many screens something is going to be in? Obviously, the bigger movies are going to be going for 4000 screens, but where does that shape up and where do those negotiations shape up to show this particular movie now that it's done, show it to who and where and when?
Christopher Lockhart: I'm sure that that has to do with the relationships of the distributor. I really can't speak too much to that. How about you, Daniel?
Daniel Vang: I would assume, you know, just as Chris referenced, like the release date for a movie can make or break it and that’s a big decision that like I would assume heads of studios probably have to weigh in on. Armies of marketing distribution people are probably kind of voicing their opinion about which weekend is best to open which movie.
Pete D’Alessandro: And where that’s going to play and how many screens that’s going to play on.
Daniel Vang: Yeah.
Pete D’Alessandro: Alright. So, I mean, if the movie comes out at this point, and I guess there are a couple of different ways it can go, it can be very successful somewhere in the middle or not so successful, so what’s going to happen to the movie next depending on what it does there?
Daniel Vang: Franchise, right? That’s what everybody in Hollywood wants If it does well, I mean, immediately the execs are going, “Hey, how do we capitalize this? How do we build this brand up and make it…” you know, say, Furious, they make eight movies. So I think, if it does well, obviously there's that, maybe down the line you get television play for it. Obviously, the screenwriters who have gotten credit, benefits their career if the movie is a big success.
Christopher Lockhart: And that decision can sometimes be made earlier on, too. So as an example, Denzel Washington opens in a movie in September called ‘The Equalizer’, which is a modern retelling of the old Edward Woodward 1980s TV series, and that’s been testing through the roof. Like the studio says, it's the highest-tested film in their history. Now, I hear that a lot, but of course I believe it because it's a Denzel movie.
Christopher Lockhart: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly. I remember my old boss. Ed Limato. Every time there was a screening, he would come back from the studio and go, “It was the highest-rated movie ever! Everybody loves it!” Then the movie would come out and nobody would see it and critics would hate it. So I kind of take it with a grain of salt. But anybody who read Richard Wenk’s script for ‘The Equalizer’ loved it because it was really a lot of fun and the movie and the character, despite the character being pretty dark, has a lot of heart, and I think that's what kind of pushes it over. But the studio has already commissioned Richard to write a sequel to it.
Pete D’Alessandro: So that plan’s already in the works even though the movie’s not around the corner, even.
Christopher Lockhart: That’s right. That’s right. Now, it doesn’t mean it'll happen, maybe the script doesn’t meet our expectations, but the movie hasn’t been released yet and they're already talking about it. So that happens.
Pete D’Alessandro: What’s going to happen? I mean, we get through that stuff, we talked about getting into maybe a sequel, maybe there's other TV stuff, but what winds up happening after that? I mean, if the movie is done in theaters, it's done its run, I imagine it's going to go iTunes and everything else, and I hate to say DVD but what the equivalent of DVD would be today – who is involved at that point? Does the writer know anything that’s going on at that point? Are they completely divorced from this process now?
Christopher Lockhart: Yeah, they're all done.
Daniel Vang: They just hope to receive a check pretty much now.
Christopher Lockhart: Right.
Daniel Vang: Yeah.
Christopher Lockhart: And they're working on their next project.
Daniel Vang: Yeah.
Pete D’Alessandro: I'm sure they’ve moved on long before this step of the process.
Christopher Lockhart: You would hope.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah.
Daniel Vang: But look, if it's a franchise like ‘Fast and the Furious’, let's say you wrote that, you're going to be getting character payments every time there's a movie getting made, so that’s kind of nice, franchise.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah.
Christopher Lockhart: “Based on the characters by.”
Daniel Vang: Yeah.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s always going to be worth a few bucks. I think we've gotten through the meat of our process here. Is there anything that I've missed at least from a writer’s standpoint or from a script’s standpoint? What else has gone on during this process that we haven't talked about?
Daniel Vang: I think to sum it up for me is that a script is always a living breathing organism. Right when you sit down to write it, you'll have multiple drafts of it, your representative will work with you and have multiple drafts of it. Like Chris said, if we are lucky enough to get it to an actor who means something, they may like it, they're going to have notes, a director’s going to have notes, the studio’s going to have notes. You're going to be constantly…let's just say if you stay on through the whole process, there's going to be I would say dozens, maybe a hundred drafts of this that you're working through. And it's hard, you know. Like sometimes when you're a writer, you're trying to balance a studio’s notes, a director’s notes, an actor’s notes, and they're all coming at you at once and you got to make everybody happy. So I guess just keep in mind it's a living breathing thing and I guess it's not set in stone until I guess maybe until you get that DVD.
Pete D’Alessandro: And Chris, one of the things we didn't talk about, and I apologize for skipping over this, but you have kind of an unusual position. You're not agent at WME, you're a story editor. What exactly does that mean for someone who doesn’t know?
Christopher Lockhart: I don’t have a clue. [Laughs]
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs]
Daniel Vang: I'll tell you what it means when I worked with Chris. He was the trusted reader for a lot of high-profile actors. If Chris liked it, that meant a lot, you got a lot of weight to bring it to certain actors.
Christopher Lockhart: Yeah, I think that at one time I had the ear to the king when I was at ICM. I was working with Ed Limato and he discovered and built the careers of people like Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Denzel Washington, Steve Martin, Richard Gere, I can go on and on, and yeah, you know, I was kind of his creative left hand. I didn't get involved in much of the business stuff, but I was really sort of a script consultant to him. But over the years I developed a relationship with the clients. I've been doing this now for 17 years. So somebody like Denzel, who I still work with now at WME even though my former boss had passed on, Denzel can't read everything on the planet. He's off making movies, he's off on Broadway, he's busy, and so stuff comes in and I look at it first and then I make recommendations to him as to whether or not this is something that I feel is worth his time, and since we have danced to this dance for so long, it's pretty second-nature to us now, and including the agents that I work with as well. So there's a lot of trust there.
Pete D’Alessandro: I'm curious, this is just kind of from the outsider perspective, I mean, the cliché is, how do I get an agent to read my stuff? But I'm imagining that there are agents right there that work with you that go, “How do I get Chris to read my stuff?” Is that something you actually have to fight?
Christopher Lockhart: I like to keep a very low profile at work. I think I've survived in this business for so long because I really like to keep a very low profile. My job is to service the clients, first and foremost. So I'm not there to make agents happy, I'm there to make clients happy, and I think when clients are happy agents are happy, so I make them happy in an indirect way.
Yeah, you know, it's fun when I find a script that I really love and say, “Listen, this could really be Denzel’s next movie,” and then a couple of months later there it is in the tray, it's Denzel’s next movie. But you know, he can only make one or two movies a year. I might like five or six scripts a year for him and he's only going to do one of those. But I can say for the most part over the years he's never made a movie based on a script that I didn't like, only one, only one script, and that was John Q. I hated John Q. But you know, there are lots of factors that go into an actor choosing a project, lots of factors, and quality of the script is not always the prime factor. Money could be a very, very big factor.
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.
Christopher Lockhart: Let's say that a client who usually gets five million dollars a movie for some reason is being offered 10 million for this particular project, he might hate the script but he's going to do it because now his quote will be 10 million.
Pete D’Alessandro: Quote, that basically means future going forward he can use 10 million dollars as a negotiating tool to lever in farther than that, right?
Christopher Lockhart: Yeah, you know, when people call the agency to check, let's say, the availability of an actor for a particular project, they might also ask, “What’s his quote?” So they I know what they can go in on with an offer. If they were planning on giving Joe Blow the actor an offer of 250,000 dollars and his quote is three million, then the producers know this is a long shot and maybe we should go look elsewhere or maybe we should try to raise more money or, you know, etc., etc. So actors have a quote as do directors, and actually just about anybody does. DPs have quotes, but everybody does. As a producer you often want to know what those quotes are, and as talent of course you always want to try to elevate those quotes.
So there are a lot of things that go into the consideration like, who’s the director attached? It's possible that the actor loves the script but doesn’t like the director. Now, if it's a big enough actor, he can often boost a director off the project. I've seen it happen many times. But sometimes it's not a politically savvy move to do that, so it's wiser to just move the actor to another project. Maybe the actor doesn’t like the costar who’s attached. That could be an issue. Maybe he doesn’t like where the movie’s going to be filmed. So there could be a whole lot of things involved. I've seen actors pass on projects for lots of reasons and it's not always the script.
Pete D’Alessandro: That makes great sense. That’s really enlightening. Before we sign off, I'm kind of curious, where do you wind up getting the volume of the stuff you have to read and go through?
Christopher Lockhart: Because I'm dealing with A-list actors, people like Denzel or Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, Hugh Jackman, a lot of stuff is coming from the studios, a lot of stuff is coming from very established producers who can play in the sandbox with these guys. I'd say probably 80% of the stuff that I look at is coming from established people. That doesn’t mean that everything has money attached. If Daniel were to send a script in, he's established, he's with Benderspink, but I also read stuff sometimes that kind of I don't know how it gets in there, you know? Like I'm reading this and I'm saying, “Boy, this writer knew somebody, managed to get in here.” But yeah, so the majority of the stuff is coming from very established sources.
Pete D’Alessandro: And Danny, is that basically your experience as well?
Daniel Vang: I'm a little bit on the other end. I'm probably more on the ground floor as I'm a junior manager always looking for writers and directors and new guys to kind of get out to people like Chris. For me it's a lot of referrals, could be colleges like USC. They could be a screenwriting contest where I can read the winners. It's just going out and really trying to find writers and directors that you love, throwing it onto my tablet, just plowing through a bunch of scripts, and hoping you come across something you really love and then grooming them until they're ready to really take onto the marketplace.
Christopher Lockhart: What I'll say is that new writers who are looking for representation should definitely go for managers. I think maybe now more writers are becoming educated about managers, but I know that there are a lot of writers who are confused between agents and managers, and basically what I would say for new writers is to really look for a manager because managers do what Daniel has been talking about, trying to find new talent and then nurture that new talent. Maybe Daniel reads a script from a contest and he loves the script but there's no way that script’s ever going to sell, but he asked the writer to pitch him some other ideas and he says, “I love that idea. Do you want to write that? Let's develop that together.”
You're not going to get that with an agent. I'm generalizing, but for the most part agents are about the deal. They're about the business. They're not so much about the creative. Now, I know plenty of agents who will give notes to writers, but they're not going to sort of dive into it the way somebody like Daniel would. So I think that probably most writers need to start with a manager, and then when the manager gets the writer to where the writer needs to be he then makes introductions to agents. Now, if a writer wins the Nicholl Fellowship, he's probably going to be courted by a lot of agents and he's probably going to be signed. I know some writers who have won the Nicholl and maybe didn't get an agent but they at least ended up with a manager. So put a lot of your pursuits, when it's time, when you're ready to share your script, really look into managers first and foremost.
I think you can also, if you want to send queries to agents, I think that’s fine too, but I think that the ponderance of your efforts should really go toward managers rather than agents. And then let me say that you should most certainly send your stuff to Daniel, but only if it's good. Only if it's good.
Pete D’Alessandro: Only the good stuff.
Daniel Vang: [Laughs] Exactly.
Christopher Lockhart: Because I know Daniel.
Pete D’Alessandro: Oh, that’s great. One last thing before we go, guys. Is there anything that…I know you're both very passionate about what you do and the projects you get involved with, is there anything you'd like to plug, anything we should see coming up, anything from Benderspink or Chris, stuff that you've had a hand in?
Daniel Vang: For Benderspink, oh yeah, ‘Horrible Bosses 2’ coming out soon. I don't know the release date of that but go check that one out.
Pete D’Alessandro: Chris, anything from you?
Christopher Lockhart: Well, you should definitely check out Denzel in ‘The Equalizer’, which comes out in September. And I have a Facebook page, it's called The Inside Pitch, and it's Facebook.com/groups/theinsidepitch, or if you just do a search for The Inside Pitch. It's a closed group, so you have to like sort of be let in.
Pete D’Alessandro: You got to go by the rules, right.
Christopher Lockhart: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just because, you know, there are a lot of schmucks out there. But I pretty much let in every schmuck, and then we kind of weed them out, but we have some good people on there. We have some really good writers who are contributing. And I'm there to answer your questions and I'll look at your log lines and stuff. So, come on over.
Pete D’Alessandro: Well, guys, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.
Christopher Lockhart: Thank you.
Daniel Vang: Thanks a lot.
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