Agency Pitches

I'm back in Los Angeles after two weeks in Hawaii. I had a great time, got some writing done, browned a bit, ate a ton of tropical fruit, and started planning for my next big trip sometime this summer. Don't know where it will be, probably Italy since I haven't been there yet. ANYWAY....
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and she mentioned attending an agency pitch session. Agency pitches are meetings in which executives and agents play speed dating with writer/director/actor careers. Basically, the agency comes over en masse to meet with all the executives at a network/studio and they "pitch" clients for various open assignments. These meetings typically take place monthly for film studios, and roughly quarterly for television.

In the case of a film studio (although it works exactly the same in television), the head of the studio and the head of the agency talk in advance about what projects are a priority. Then, the agents all come to the lot, sit down and pitch their clients. If an agency doesn't have a strong client list, then the meetings are icily polite. For the A-list agencies, the biggest agents don't typically show up with all the minnows, but they will send a number of senior level agents over to play footsie. When the agents come, they bring some kind of resume book with each client's credits and sometimes a short bio (especially for less established talent).

That part is pretty dry, but the real purpose of these meetings is to get good gossip: Who is dating whom, who just got divorced, which writers/directors/actors are recovering from drug addictions. Assignments do get filled this way, an executive makes a comment, an agent remembers a client's words in passing about a love of ballooning, or time spent as an arctic explorer and the next thing you know... summer home in Crete! A girl can dream....

Sorry for the sparse posting. I got back from Maui and have been immersed in putting together information for the short film I'm producing which is finally SHOOTING in two weeks. I can't wait!!! I'll blog about the process this month starting later today!

First post: herding cats aka how to get disparate folks on the same page during production. Mmm, producer fun.