Mason Novick’s client list reads like a who’s who list of screenwriters. Diablo Cody (Juno) and Jesse Andrews (writer of Sundance darling Me, Earl and the Dying Girl) are just some of the names on there. So sitting down with Mason to find out about his career and methodology represented a great opportunity to learn.

MN: I got into representation the old-fashioned way. I was an agent…I was an assistant first. I started as an intern. I was an intern at a management company when I very first moved out here. When one of the agencies, opened up, those guys said, “Hey, we have an intern,” and I went and I met over there and I got hired to be an assistant to a young agent. And then, at the time, there was a lot of turmoil in that agency, and so there was sort of a good opportunity for me to get promoted, so I got myself promoted and I was an agent. I was an agent for a little bit until I got fired for not being the best agent ever…

LJ: What’s the agency you worked with?

MN: ICM. This was 16 years ago, 15 years ago now -  a while ago. I came right after Endeavor had left but Jim Wiatt and Jeff Berg were both still there - so it was sort of that era. Then I got promoted to agent. I sold some excellent things when I was an agent. Snakes on a Plane was the first thing I ever sold as an agent. And I was involved with selling the Underworld franchise. Those were the two most notable projects when I was an agent that sort of got made and were still around. So then, I didn't get “thrown out of the building” fired, I just got “my contract wasn’t being renewed” fired. So I had friends who had a management company- they had an empty office-  and I had some clients and I said, “Guys, let me move my stuff in there. Let me come in and see if we can't make stuff work.” It was good for a little bit, and then eventually got to a place where it wasn’t good and I went out on my own. But that was sort of how I got started in all of this

LJ: In retrospect, was the move into management and away from agenting the right move for you?

MN: Totally. Totally. I wasn’t…

LJ: Why?

MN: Well, for me, I feel there's sort of like two different types of management out here. There's the places that are like little agencies, and then there's places that are more focused. I feel those are on the creative and less on the deal-making, and I would definitely say I tend to fall more in the creative “we’ll do five drafts with a client before we send it to the agents.” We'd rather make sure that a project goes to the right place for a little less money than, you know, you get the most money possible and the movie never gets made. That's why I think it's good to have a manager and agent. You want someone who's going, “Let's get all the money, let's get all the money, let's make this crazy deal,” but I think it's also good to have someone who’s saying, “Okay, creatively, is this the right fit? Is there a path to production? Is there a way that this becomes a movie as opposed to just an announcement on Deadline?”

LJ: What allows you as a manager that freedom to stay more loyal to the best interest of the project rather than the biggest paycheck?

MN: I think because there's someone else who can be looking out only for the money. I don’t report to anyone. I don’t have an agency agenda. I have only the client’s and the project’s agenda. I don’t have to justify my numbers to anyone. I don’t have to justify my expense account to anyone. Agencies are a big business and all my clients have agents. I don’t like negotiating—it's not something I enjoy—and they like doing that. I like knowing that there's someone out there who’s going to try to get my clients that extra little thing or that bonus no one’s ever gotten before. I get excited making movies, I get excited by working with writers, I don’t get excited about the deal-making part. There are people who do, so let them be excited about that and we'll try to get our stuff this way.

LJ: Let's talk a little bit about the making movies side. Obviously, you have a slew of producing credits. You're a manager who also produces some work. What is it like juggling both sides? Can you a little bit about that?

MN: I think it was harder at the beginning and I've sort of figured it out. It's something that took a little bit of figuring out and I would say certainly on the first couple of movies… it's hard to be in two places at one time. When I'm on set, I'm not directing the movie. I'm not moving the lights, I'm not picking the costumes. I'm not saying I'm easy to reach when I'm on set, but you can find the right balance. Also, we don’t have 500 clients, we have some clients, and I think we—there's a woman named Michelle Knudsen who works with me- are able to cover everything. So it's not like we have this giant list of a million clients. We work with people that we really like and enjoy. And so at this point, we have a pretty good working relationship and they know if they need me, they’ll get me. They all have my cell phone number. I haven't found it to be a giant problem, depending on where you shoot, but it feels like I'm able to do both and so it hasn’t really caused a giant problem.

LJ: I'm sure that your clients see it as a value add, the fact that you can shepherd the material all the way through to production.

MN: Half the movies I've made would be my clients’ movies and half are just the movies I put together myself where I don’t rep anyone involved. I actually know how to produce a movie, so I can be helpful with that. When I have clients who are up for open writing assignments or pitching projects, I have an idea of like, okay, if I'm a producer and I need to then go sell this to the studio or I need to go sell it to my financier, I need to make sure we hit x, y and z. I feel we're able to sort of get the clients ready. Whether we're producing the project or not, we have that sort of mentality of a producer, so we can help our clients get into the place of, “Yeah, here's how you're going to sell it, here's how you're going to go…” We can help them get their pitches ready and their material ready based on the idea that this is what producers need to hear, this is how they need to go and sell it, because this is what we would need to do if it was us.

LJ: You have a very respectable list, to put it mildly. How do you juggle your more in-demand clients with clients that are a little earlier on in their careers that they naturally require a little bit more handholding and nurturing?

MN: All people need different things. There are clients who are younger clients who are super-prolific and write a ton of stuff and it's about, okay, how do we manage the stuff you're writing? There's more established clients that only want to work on this thing or only want to work on that thing. The interesting thing about management is that every single person that you work with has a different response. Some like to get notes, like written notes, some only want to get on the phone. You have to just deal with every client as their own individual. Some baby clients need more handholding, while some are like, “I'm going to go write the script, I'll tell you when it's done.” Some writers just want to send you every 30 pages when they are done. Some writers say, “Great. This is the idea. Here's my pitch. Great. It's a good idea? I'm going to write it. I'll let you know when it's finished.” So it's always different.

LJ: Speaking of baby writers, how does a baby writer get your attention? Clearly you're not adding to your list left, right and center. I'm sure once in a while somebody captures your attention. What does it take to get your attention and to get your interest?

MN: I like young writers. A a lot of our business is breaking writers, so every script that like someone randomly sends me I hope is the best script I've ever read so I can go help sell it and get it made and launch their career. It usually doesn’t work out that way but, you know, I'm excited when I get things or someone calls and says, “Hey, I have this new young guy.” We get excited about that. To get our attention it's usually about voice, and I know it sounds super-cliché when I say that, but I can help with structure. I can't help you write better characters or better dialogue, but I read something that’s got an amazing voice and some of the structure beats aren't quite where they should be, I can help you formulate a structure. I can't make the characters pop off the page. I can't make the jokes funnier. So it really is about what makes your writing unique and special, and we'd much rather get this amazing voice and the script and the plot be a mess because we can come up with a new plot. That’s something we can actually help writers with, whereas make it interesting, that's something that no one can help with. Either it's on the page or it's not.

LJ: Is there any sort of work ethic to look for or…?

MN: Some writers take a long time to rewrite, some rewrite really fast. So when we read stuff that we like, we usually give notes. We tell writers that we'd rather have something in six weeks and have it be great than have someone take my notes over a weekend and turn them around and then you're like, “Okay, you didn't put any effort.” It's not a race, and sometimes I feel that writers get super-excited and they're like, “Okay, this will be done in three days,” and this shouldn't be done in three days. To make up all these notes took me more than three days. You shouldn’t be able to implement them in three days. So every writer, again, works at a different pace and has a different process, but I think when we give people notes you want them to thoughtfully go back and think about them and see if they can make them work. And sometimes some of the stuff we say is really helpful, some of the stuff we say is not that helpful. We hope it's more helpful than not helpful and the script becomes the kind of script that either sells or gets people’s attention so the writer can get other jobs and other opportunities. We take blind submissions. We get, I don't know, probably 25, 30 queries a week of, “Hey, we need my script.” We don’t take them all but we definitely, if the logline sounds interesting and if the query is well-written, we will take a look. If you write a funny script, write a funny query letter. If your query letter isn't funny, I don’t imagine your script is going to be funny. It's harder to write an action query letter. If the query letters are so dry or the logline is so bad … I think if in these two paragraphs that you sent me of your logline, it sounds horrible, why do I want to read a hundred pages of this? I was going to say I try not to troll the people who send me query letters too much but it does happen occasionally.

LJ: You have the very unique perspective of having been in this industry for a period of time. How has breaking writers changed from the time you sold Snakes on a Plane to today?

MN: Look, I'm not saying it used to be easier but there certainly used to be a lot more jobs and I think money was a lot more freely spent when I first started. I'm sure if you talk to someone who’s been out here longer than me, they're going to say money was a lot more freely spent even before then. The studios have definitely tightened up. When I used to cover Warner Bros., there were 25 open writing assignments at any given time. I don't think we live in that world anymore. When I first started there were a lot of guys who made a lot of money, had big quotes and had never gotten movies made. These guys made a really good living rewriting scripts and then they wouldn't get made, and they'd go and rewrite something else and it wouldn't get made. If you have a big quote today, it's probably because you deserve it. The people who make a lot of money today writing are people who have consistently delivered movies that have gotten made. I don’t feel there's too many people with $800,000 quotes who are unproduced writers anymore.

LJ: How has TV changed for new writers from your perspective?

MN: Now I think they realize there are a lot of interesting young people with good voices and you can sell a TV spec that just becomes a show. It’s less, “Well, what have you done before? You haven't worked on staff for 12 years?.” Before, you had to have this pedigree, and you had to have worked for this person for this long. Whereas now it's like, “Great, this is a great script. We're going to make this a show. Here we go.” And so I feel people are a lot more gung-ho to buy things from younger writers. If you look at the shows on the air, a lot of them someone has written a spec and now it's a show, and I don't think that used to happen at all before. Now I think it happens. It's not a one in a million. You can probably point to three or four shows that are on the air that were just from writers who wrote a cool spec and somebody went, “Okay, it's a show.”

LJ: Yeah. Has your list diversified with the changes in the industry where you have more television writers than you had before or has it stayed about the same?

MN: Our clients do a little bit of everything, and there's a lot of crossover. We're taking a lot of people who do both now. I still think the easiest way to break into the business in general is to write a feature spec, because with a good feature spec, I can get 40 people to read a new writer overnight. The spec market isn't what it used to be, but if you have a script with a good idea I can get people to read that. So, to me, for people wanting to break in, I always suggest that they write a feature script first because there's a clear path to how to get sort of discovered as a writer that way. What’s great about features is it's 90 pages or it's 100 pages and that's it. There's a beginning, a middle and an end. If that person never writes anything else again, you could still make that great movie. If you write a great TV pilot, it's still like, “Okay, now we need a hundred more of these.” With a feature, it's like, “We have it. We can make it…”

LJ: Once you sign a writer, what can they expect from you? What should they expect for you to do for them, to not do for them?

MN: Here's what you can do for them. You can call the right people. You can get the scripts into the people’s hands and you can get them to read it. I can't get them to like it, I can't get them to buy it, but I think if it's good I can get them to read it… I think that’s what managers can do. I can get it into the right people’s hands and hope that they respond the same way that I do. Obviously, anything I'm excited about I’m going to send to people and hope they're going to be excited about it. So I think that’s a realistic expectation - we can get it to a lot of people. I don't think any manager can get you a job automatically. The clients have to go in and win the job. I think what managers are good at doing is opening doors and presenting opportunities, and then it's really up to the clients. I can tell clients: “These are good people that you should meet,” and then they  have to go in the room and be personable and be good and hopefully that will get the job done.

LJ: How important is it for writers to live in Los Angeles if they want to work in this industry?

MN: I don't think you need to live here to work here. I think you need to be willing to jump on a plane and come out here a couple of times a year. If you're starting out, it's good to be here because the opportunities are all mostly in Los Angeles and it's a lot easier to say, “Hey, great, can you meet next week?” “Sure.” We work with Jesse Andrews who just wrote Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and he lives in Boston right now. People hire him if they want to hire him, but he has to come out sometimes to meet people and to be face-to-face. I would rather send clients who can be in a room than over the phone or over Skype. I feel something always gets lost in that. If you have to pitch a movie or if you have to pitch a story, it's always better to be there and connect and be able to read the cues in the room and see how it's going and get a feeling for things, as opposed to just being on the phone or being on Skype. I think if you live somewhere else, you could write those specs. You could get launched from anywhere as long as you can find a way to come out a couple of times a year so you can get in those rooms.

LJ: That’s great. I'm sure a lot of people would love to hear that. You gave us a lot of information, so I'll ask you our last question and then I'll let you go about your very busy day. Any advice for baby writers who haven't broken yet who are trying to break in?

MN: I would say focus on features. Start with a feature spec because they're contained in the idea. If it takes you a year to write a great feature, it's still a great feature after a year and I feel features have a little longer shelf life. You always hear that story about that movie that got made. It's been sitting around for five years and it finally got made. Or someone was looking for a specific type of script. For example, all of a sudden everyone wanted zombie movies for a while, and so if you had a zombie script you've got a better chance to sell it. I would say don’t write for the market. I would say write your passion as opposed to saying, “Oh, everyone wants scripts about this, so I'm going to write one of those.” Because I've yet to hear any story of someone trying to write something for the market that turned out good. You just don’t hear it. If you look at Juno, it wasn’t a super-commercial. It's a movie about a pregnant teenage girl. You don’t go, “Yeah, that’s a big commercial movie,” but it was what the writer was passionate about and that’s what made it a good script. And so I would recommend to people to write the story they're passionate about, if there's a story they personally connect with. I don’t mean personally as in you have physically dealt with this world. You can write a sci-fi movie- if you're super into sci-fi, you should write a sci-fi script. Because that’s what you love, that’s what you should write. And I think trying to write for the market or saying, “Ooh, everyone wants low-budget horror, so I'm going to write a low-budget horror movie” - it's never going to be good. If you don’t love contained horror, you're not going to write a good version of that movie. So you shouldn't try to write for the market. You should always find what are you passionate about, you should write that script.