When Brandon Barker was a child his mother read him bedtime stories. They were usually fairy tales, and Brandon was so captivated by these adventures that he would record the sound of his mother’s voice on a cassette tape.
“That was my first experience with filmmaking in a way,” he says. “I was trying to get the story on record.”
Now Brandon Barker himself is the story of the fairy tale come true. Last week his spec script Nottingham & Hood sold to Disney for six figures. A new take on the Robin Hood legend, Nottingham & Hood will be produced by The Picture Company, and the rumor is that Disney hopes to turn it into a new adventure franchise in the vein of The Pirates of the Caribbean. This is Brandon’s first spec sale, after coming close in his early 20s. Just after he graduated from NYU Film School, Brandon, now 41, signed with his an agent off his spec Jack and the Giant Killer, another spin on a classic fairy tale that ultimately never got made (another scribe’s version of the tale, Jack the Giant Slayer, was released by Warner Bros. in 2013).
“It got me my first agent and manager and I had a few meetings off it but it didn’t wind up selling. Looking back I can say that it wasn’t written well enough. I also sold a TV pilot in those days, which was about a sorcerer’s apprentice, but it wasn’t enough money for me to quit my day job.”
Today Brandon works at a financial software company in Pasadena, making training videos which allow him to flex his creative muscle. But he never stopped writing, and Nottingham & Hood is the 12th screenplay he has completed over the past fifteen years.
“I heard it’s rare for a writer to sell scripts 1 through 10,” he says. “Turns out it’s usually somewhere between 10 and 15.”
Brandon worked his writing around his full time job. He would write two nights a week at the Pasadena Library, then a full day on Saturday.
“I could complete about one script every six to eight months from outline to finished draft. It used to take me longer because I was still learning how to do it.”
Brandon would workshop his scripts with his wife, who is a novelist. “She’s a huge help to me. I’m always asking her opinion and running things past her. She always has great ideas.”
They say you should write the type of film you would want to see, and that’s exactly what Brandon did. “I wanted to do Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the middle ages. I love that movie and I’d never seen a buddy comedy in the middle ages, and that was a movie I really wanted to see. I started writing about a knight who arrests a rogue, then I realized this could be the Sheriff of Nottingham arresting Robin Hood. I was also inspired by the buddy comedy Midnight Run. My characters have a similar humorous tone.”
When Brandon was growing up it was the films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that most inspired him. “I grew up on films like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Star Wars is basically a fairy tale. That’s the first film I saw when I was four years old, and that had an enormous impact on me psychologically and is the major reason I’m pursuing this career.”
So how did Brandon get Nottingham & Hood noticed by Hollywood? Brandon submitted his screenplay to a service run by coverageink.com called Get Repped Now! This service rates screenplays and refers the best ones to industry insiders. When Nottingham & Hood was forwarded to manager Jake Wagner at Benderspink, Brandon had already sent out 70 query letters to agents and managers, with little to no response. He credits Coverage Ink with getting him noticed by Wagner at Benderspink, who is now his manager, and brokered the sale of Nottingham & Hood to Disney.
“When you enter a contest that has professionals looking at your scripts, that’s a real plus,” Brandon says. "I'm very grateful to Coverage Ink for all they have done for me."