Agents

Getting an agent is perhaps the first validating event of a young writer's career. But agents have changed with the marketplace, and in recent years you see more project-to-project agents than career-nurturing agents.

I've had too many agents in my ragged career, perhaps a dozen. Only three bring fond memories.

• A woman at Fifi Oscard took me on as a playwright early in my career. She loved my small town Oregon dramas but had a tough time getting NYC to agree with her. She was supportive, flattering, nurturing, everything a young writer would want. She's the one who visited me in Portland and said how much the northwest neighborhood reminded her of what Greenwich Village used to be. "Don't let it change," she told me. Yeah, right. She saw and didn't like the changes happening in the performing arts in the 1980s and left the profession. The best this agent ever did for me in practical terms was get the Actors Theatre of Louisville, then the center of new plays in the U.S., to commission a one-act from me. It got a showcase production and died. Another agent at Fifi took me on after she left but we didn't get along at all. He kept trying to get me to turn my Oregon dramas into HeeHaw. I couldn't take it and left.
• A woman at Abrams took on my screenplays, and she too was supportive, flattering and nurturing. But she didn't sell anything, and when she got stolen away by Wm Morris, I wasn't making enough money to go with her.
• In mid-career, a small indie agent repped my screenplays. He was especially enthusiastic about my screenplay about Moliere but couldn't find the producer who shared his enthusiasm. This was the last major fan of my work in the agency world. Others since then repped individual works but didn't have much endurance once initial pitches went nowhere. They weren't career-nurturing, just trying to sell a project quickly.

Of the half-dozen screenplays I've optioned (back in the days when you could make a real buck doing this), only two were arranged by agents. I found the other producers myself with blanket pitching. Even with an agent, you need to work hard at marketing yourself. I currently have a screenplay optioned with a producer an agent hooked me up with a decade ago. Networking. It's an old script I don't care much for any more but the producer wants to direct it himself, so he's working hard to make something happen. In fact, he's been trying for about five years now. Producers have more patience than I do. I move on to something else. I like writing, not marketing.

But I'm not in a place now, nor have I been for a while, where an agent is useful to me since I'm no longer focused on financially viable projects. I've thrown every measure out the window except my own personal aesthetics; I just try to be as good as I can according to my own literary values. All the same, I have a pile of earlier screenplays, many of which are still marketable stories, but I have no energy to market them myself. If an agent wants to pick any of them up, and one now is looking at five of them (his request, not my solicitation), well and good. Today I'm a passive marketer, not an active one.

Young writers need to play the agent game. It's important validation if nothing else. But I have no practical use for an agent any more. Ten percent of zilch is zilch.