A group of people connected with the sale of movie rights convened in PW's offices a few months ago to discuss the current state of that glamorous but somewhat arcane business. As it turned out, one of the participants was shortly to move on: Joel Gotler was at that time at Renaissance/AMG in Hollywood but, since the company was subsumed into The Firm, he has gone independent. Bill Contardi had just left William Morris and had also gone independent, as a literary and movie agent working with Brandt & Hochman. The other participants were Michelle Raimo of Miramax (the movie company, not the publisher), international scout Mary Anne Thompson and Tad Floridis of RightsCenter.com. The questioner was PW's John F. Baker.

PW: Is buying for the movies now moving away from New York?

Michelle Raimo: Definitely, compared to what it used to be. Every major studio once had story offices here, but that's mostly moved back to the West Coast now. Miramax is here because it's really based here, and L.A. is our second office.

Joel Gotler: I think the scouts have actually become the de facto studio people, and that the cutting of costs has been an important issue. I don't think any studio's missing anything, and the hot books still sell wherever they emanate from around the world. In terms of the amount of sales, they're making fewer movies, so the hotter the book, the easier it is to sell. They're maybe making as much TV or cable as ever, but with fewer movies, the studios can't afford to keep all those offices and readers going as they used to do.

PW: That brings up the question of the balance between movies and TV in terms of the interest in the properties.

Bill Contardi: In the past year, the effect of network TV flatlining, in terms of buying books, and doing those TV movies that are very much part of the programs, has been considerable. You can't easily sell books into that market anymore, though to offset that a bit, there are opportunities in cable—not just HBO, where you had quality, feature-type material finding its niche. There has been a general pulling back in the overall TV market, though some interesting opportunities came up in cable. But it's difficult to sell into the networks these days unless it's a very high-profile author or project., or something addressing soft issues for a female market, which CBS used to do a lot.

Gotler: I agree, but would add that Oprah and Hallmark have a lot of commitments for movies, which seems to shrink the playing field even more. No more disease-of-the-week book, no more woman-in-jeopardy book. If there's buzz about something like that, there may be a Lifetime show out of it, a Showtime. But the money has come down; it has to be a big event, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and there's also an increased hunger for nonfiction as opposed to fiction.

Contardi: And in that regard it doesn't have to be a brand-name author, but if it's particularly timely, like the Enron story breaking, with issues—it could only be at a proposal stage, but it could do well at cable or network. Didn't the Enron story get set up at a network, too?

Gotler: As soon as that happens, everyone is calling. If it's a headline, in the news, you may be able to sell it to TV. But features are a whole world unto themselves. My approach is, if you love something and can't understand why it doesn't sell, like, for instance, House of Sand and Fog now, hold it back, don't send it out for a while, don't waste it. On Angela's Ashes, I wouldn't submit it, you get all these ridiculous excuses, why it's wrong for this or that reason... why send it out? If I love it, I sit on it and wait for someone to come forward.

Mary Anne Thompson: And let the scouts do it!

Gotler: Sure, you guys can read, nobody else does!

What the Buyers Want

PW: Michelle, you do the buying. What are you looking for mostly these days?

Raimo: A book that has a chance to be a bestseller, but that's never the primary focus. Mostly I'm looking for something that really lends itself to adaptation, something you can visualize without necessarily having a screenwriter or filmmaker or a piece of talent attached. On a difficult piece of material, you get less willing to take the gamble without that talent behind it. You could spend a lot trying to get it set up. So you look for something with terrific characters, a great idea, something that will lend itself to a three-act structure.

Tad Floridis: I think it goes back to the question that when there were all these offices in New York, they were all in search of the magic bullet, the big blockbuster book they could put right in development to be a big blockbuster movie. But over time, the development people realized that the real quality was often in the undiscovered gems that were just lying around; so there was no need to spend all that money on infrastructure, when you can just take your time to look around and see what really works.

Contardi: Oftentimes it's best not to go direct to the studio with material, no matter how good or fresh. There's a lot to be said for bringing it direct to producers

Thompson: One bullet isn't enough to support an office any more.

Raimo: A few years ago, everyone was buying and buying, and then reality set in about what it took to really get the movie made. I had a very successful situation with Joel, a book that started small, and ended up really big.

Gotler:Chocolat, you mean. There are other things going on. Studios are doing a lot of remakes and sequels, which limits their attention to the new stuff, and they also have so many properties that they own outright. They're also very interested in equity partners, so the money has become important; I would put my money on the people who actually have production partnerships with a studios. There are also so many independent producers, all over the world, so it's a problem with contracts, it's a problem with getting paid. The tributaries are drying up.

Early Warning Systems

PW: Have things changed in terms of how soon you find out about a likely property? We've all heard stories of publisher mailroom boys being bribed to get an early look at a manuscript.

Thompson: I've never done that! Usually, the earlier the better. But I think things are getting out there way too early sometimes; that can be a real problem, and it's very hard to control. It's changed the nature of our jobs, especially in the past eight years or so. PW online is a godsend for getting us information early, the Deals column, even the gossip, getting the reviews early.

Floridis: The people who get our RightsCenter service get early PW reviews, too, and rights information on the titles.

PW: Is it helpful to note on reviews that books have movie possibilities?

Thompson: Well, Kirkus and PW sometimes say whether a book lends itself to adaptation, and that can be helpful, as a post-it. And we read some things early in partial form, but the edited version may be much better, and you can pick that up in a review.

Contardi: The frenzy to be early can lead to decisions being made too early, which is unfortunate. But there's another go-round, when the book is finished. I'll go out first in a careful, selected way, to a handful of people, and if it seems like it's not happening, pull back, and then revisit when it has early reviews.

Pet Peeves

Gotler: My biggest problem is a term called flipping. If you have something great and you send out the first few pages, whoever gets it is going to flip it to the studio. Now they're on record, and if the studio says no, we want to wait till the manuscript comes in, then somebody else sends it to them and the studio says no, we can't buy this, the other person already submitted to us. This creates a problem, there's a cloud on the property.

Raimo: It certainly can be a problem. It depends on who that first person was and who the second person was.

Gotler: There are some people who will read your book and not do anything. Others will flip them. They don't even wait until it lands of their desk. It's already got another postmark on it, off to the studio. When I started, Swannie [the late agent W.H. Swanton] was submitting Elmore Leonard manuscripts to everyone in town, and the producers would figure out who was the best producer. Now it's this proprietary thing. That's really annoying.

Contardi: But the studios have that person in New York, and that's the scouts, and they're going to see that material whether it's flipped or not, and they can say they already saw it without you.

Raimo: Miramax is kind of an anomaly because we don't have those producer deals, or very few. When I was doing that, I got a lot of material submitted directly to me.

Gotler: What's also annoying is that a producer will track a book, and even before they read it they ask, "Can I have a free option and take it to four studios?" What about the guy who wrote the book? You think he'd like to get paid, so you can go out and get yourself a million-dollar deal? They don't think that way any more. There's this greediness for more territories. Their rationale: if you get two studios involved, maybe they'll have an auction. Can I tell you how many times that's happened in my 30 years? Maybe once. It's the Wild West when it comes to properties. Guy comes through with stagecoach with a partial, flip it under the door and get off the lot. I'd be very careful about sending partials. The more you sequester properties, the more mystique you build about them. Another thing I hate: you have a hot book, you send it out, you send out 10 copies to everyone, so far it's all at your expense, then you get maybe three calls to say they love it, they're halfway through it, and the seasons go on, the years go on, you never hear another word!

The best one, happening more and more, is that someone will make the offer and long before there's a deal memo they're out shopping the project, and five weeks later they haven't sold it and now they decide they don't want to do the deal. What are you going to do, sue them all?.

Floridis: It seems as if the studios are cutting down on the personal deals they do. Their mantra was to throw it at the wall and see what sticks so it's good that's being weeded out.

Gotler: And thank God I have a backlist so I don't have to worry about each hot new book. We have 53 contracts on my desk for new options right now. They're buying.

Backlist and Children's Books

PW: But how do you reconcile that with the decline in buying?

Gotler: That was frontlist. The bigger the backlist the easier it is. William Morris, for instance, is always selling options on estates, and so on.

Raimo: It gives you more breathing room, doing backlist titles. With frontlist, you often have to read something in six hours overnight. With backlist, it gives you a little time to decide what you want to do with it. There's something very appealing about finding a great backlist title and not worrying about seven other people all over it. You can make a reasonable deal and actually develop it, without having this albatross.

Contardi: Another aspect of the backlist thing is the real interest in family films and children's books. If you go to the rights people in the children's division, people doing young adult fiction, they have a wealth of information. And some of the stuff is unagented too.

Thompson: And until recently, they haven't had a lot of phone calls. Something that amazes me is that there's really no one scouting international children's books. It's something I've been thinking about.

Gotler: Also the illustrators that come along with these books are very important. Children's books are hot, several six-figure options out there. Lots of people looking for family stuff.

The Question of Screenplays, Tie-Ins

Floridis: Do any of your authors get seduced by the Hollywood thing into wanting to write screenplays?

Gotler: Not at all. I forced three authors to write screenplays, but the others, no. I don't encourage it, and I don't want their New York agents to think I'm trying to get them away from writing books, and most of them can't do it anyway. They think they can do it, but most of them can't. I don't even like to read them, don't understand them.

PW: What's the impact of book tie-ins on the movie?

Contardi: Usually we try to freeze that, because you don't want anything to compete with the book. Sometimes it will slip through, and you'll see a tie-in get shelf space that should have gone to the book. It's a fight sometimes, but worth waging.

Gotler: When Irwin Shaw had his big miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, the paperback sold 400,000 to 600,000 in six weeks after the airing. Today, my guess is that A Beautiful Mind or something like that, the average novelization or tie-in, would sell maybe 30,000 to 40,000 copies. So that market has changed.

Contardi: I remember in the '70s, the market for novelizations was huge, but that's completely gone away. When you're selling books to the film world, you have to keep them from doing a novelization because not only might it take away sales from the book, it might compete with the underlying publishing contract.

Gotler: Right. No novelizations, no coloring books, no graphic novels, no nothing! The problem of holding onto character rights now is becoming a nightmare. Often, someone who options the first book in a series wants the character rights for all the books, and that can be a problem. For instance, Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch character was sold to Paramount, except I got the right that someone else could do one movie for a period of time. But no one else would want to do it under those conditions. The only way to do it is give them the rights, but if they don't keep making movies every two or three years, that's it—a clean reversion,no strings attached.

Contardi: It's a branded property in a way, so it has to be done as a rolling reversion, where the buyer has to be doing something with that property within a certain amount of time.

Gotler: We also have fidelity clauses in all the series books, which means the studio cannot alter the destiny of the characters and cannot play with the plot; they can't make anything that is disparaging or denigrating to the original character. But you can't get this rolling reversion a lot.

Contardi: We got them on all the mystery series deals we did last year. If your client writer stands by their guns and understands the important issue here, you have all the leverage in the world.

PW: On an outright purchase, is there a time limit in which the studio has to make a movie?

Gotler: If they buy it, you can say you want it back in five years. I hate those buyouts because it's tougher to get those reversions when they pay the money up front. I like options better sometimes. People think there's so much money in buyouts. There used to be, but would you rather take 250 up front, or 70 against 700?

Nonfiction in the Movies

PW: Are more nonfiction properties being bought today than there used to be?

Gotler: I think so.

Contardi: Nonfiction is very strong, narrative nonfiction, even historical, if it reads like good fiction.

Gotler: Also, exhibitors make more money on the big pictures—Richard the Lionheart, and so on.

Contardi: There are also more things that can help build interest in nonfiction pictures.

PW: Do you find that publishers tend to hang on to film rights?

Gotler: Yes, they do try to hang on more, but it doesn't affect us, we like to represent publishers. They're nice, and easy to deal with.

PW: How important are actors in getting properties bought?

Gotler: Two examples. James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand. Couldn't give the book away. Bruce Willis read it, wanted to play the character¸ and it sold immediately to HBO for 10 hours. Empire Falls by Richard Russo, couldn't give it away, then Paul Newman read it eight months after it was published, wanted to do it for TV, so we sold it for three hours. Without those actors, I'd have had no shot. Actors are more important today than any writer or director you can name. There are some now who legitimately read and legitimately have production companies. Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, has his own company, and I'd rather go to him than Martin Scorsese.

What of the Future?

PW: How do you see the future of the movie business?

Gotler: I'd duck that, other than to say it's healthy right now, very healthy.

Contardi: It's cyclical. In New York, things are very subject to change. I could imagine it expanding, because someone says there's no one there now.

Gotler: The movies for TV business will come back in a couple of years.

Raimo: People right now may be buying a little less, but we're making as many movies, and soon or later someone is going to say, Wow, we need some new material, and it will pick up again.

Floridis: For the past 10 years, at least one of the best picture nominees for the Oscars has been based on a book, so people will keep making movies out of books.