The Strike (And Me) Part One

As the WGA strike enters its 4th week, things get more and more interesting around here. And by “here,” I mean the fringes of the business. With the strike, writers can’t write or submit anything and studios can’t read or buy anything. So… where does that leave all the agents?

If no deals are getting done and no money is changing hands, agents are starting to feel the squeeze. After all, 10% of nothing is nothing. But agents have one thing to look forward to: the after-strike euphoria. The longer the strike goes on, the longer there is nothing getting produced or bought or scheduled, the bigger the vacuum that is created. And once the strike ends, there will likely be this huge frenzy of buying and shooting as studios try to fill that pipeline with quick and constant product before dead air hits the TV and multiplex. At least, that’s what everyone is counting on.

So if you were an agent, and none of your existing clients will write anything new during a strike, and yet you want to accumulate as many scripts as you can to have ready to feed to this hungry beast once the fast is over, what do you do with all this free time brought to you by the strike? You go look for new writers to represent. And that means… Robb (and a hell of a lot of other writers on the fringes of legitimacy).

Since the strike began on November 1, my script downloads on inktip.com have picked up a little. I am sure there is a ton of increased traffic on the site, and I am getting a modest number of eyeballs. I’d been keeping an eye this and didn’t see anything to get excited about – until today. William Morris – one of the biggest and most powerful agencies in the business – today downloaded both my scripts on the market, Aftershocks and I Hate That Guy!. This is easily the biggest player to check out me and my stuff in quite a while, probably ever. This could be good – Supervillain is still under option, which looks good on my inktip resume as people check me out. And as Supervillain’s producer told me the other week, a financing deal for Supervillain may benefit from the building vacuum as well. The key is that these two sides could feed off each other, each one creating heat and legitimacy for the other. We’ll see.

Could be good.

Now, to bring myself down from this nice moment: Just imagine if I had more COMPLETED scripts to put up on inktip… like Psycho Ex or Dead Guy…

Sigh.