Right now the film industry is in a massive upheaval. Or so I hear. Movie stars aren’t getting paid what they used to, low-budget indies are raking in more than would-be blockbusters and the mainstay distribution model is about to sail into a shitstorm.<\/p>\n
Now whether this impending distribution doomdom is the reason for the following observation or not, I can not tell for sure. This is because I’m relatively new at this sort of thing and don’t presume to know what is the norm. Regardless, the observation is as follows: There seem to be an awful lot of unqualified opportunistic hunters out there right now in the form of sales reps<\/em>.<\/p>\n Briefly, a sales rep is an agent (requiring no qualifications other than to announce to you that s\/he is a sales rep) who represents your film to distributors often in film market situations. I was once cautioned by a veteran film producer to avoid sales reps at all costs. Feeling ill equipped to handle my project on my own I ignored this advice and wound up flushing away a year’s worth of time by allowing someone even less equipped than myself to (mis)represent my project.<\/p>\n Taking what I could from a bad situation I now possess a weariness for this breed of huckster. And this weariness has served me well in recent times as a matter of fact. Beyond even the no-brainer deleted email solicitations. The time, for instance, a sales rep called me to tell me he’d see my film at a festival market and would love to represent it. Well, he said, I saw most of your film. Not all of it. But what I did see was really good. Remind me what it was about? I had to watch a lot of films at that market…<\/p>\n Another sale agent who had also seen my film (presumably) wanted to meet to discuss representing it. Skeptical as I’ve become I thought I’d test this campaigner by seeing how far she’d travel to meet with me. One block? Two blocks? Across town? As it turned out, not far enough. A simple test that told me exactly what I needed to know about this person’s level of interest and dedication.<\/p>\n Opportunists. The bad kind. These are people who don’t care about your project or about you. They care about having a roster of titles in their portfolio to justify their existence, their accreditation to film markets. If I’m going to hire someone to represent me, my work, then that person better love <\/em>that work. They better be ready to fight for that work. And they sure as hell better be willing to cross the street for it.<\/p>\n In whatever new landscape the entertainment industry takes I think these opportunists are going to feast on the chaos for a while to come. So be vigilant! It’s flattering when someone tells you they want to represent you film but it’s not a good enough reason to let them do so. An agent is someone who acts on your behalf, your best interest, so accept nothing less than a champion of your work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You poured blood, sweat and tears into your project so make sure your agent does too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-from-the-studio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}