

“Management has ‘The Three S’s of Management’. Veteran manager Jon Karas, a former attorney, and agent, explained:

The bigger the management company, the more like an agency it functions, the more staffing they do.” Managers also do staffing but it just depends on the size of the company. So for staffing you really ultimately want an agent. And they have a very formidable organized machine that does that. “Agents and then agencies are very helpful in terms of staffing, they track all of the shows that are getting ordered to series, they reach out to all of the showrunners, producers, network executives that are working on those shows and then they submit staffing samples for all of those shows. For this reason, agents tend to be more instrumental for television staffing which can become a numbers game.Īs hot, up-and-coming manager Jeff Portnoy told me when I interviewed him: They can only pursue employment opportunities for their clients on a one-off basis, facilitating introductions and submitting a writer of interest to a producer or a showrunner, rather than a packet of potential writers for a job. Unlike their industry counterparts, managers are not allowed to procure work for their writers, or, technically, to oversee or negotiate a sale (though that does happen with the support of a lawyer). That means that an agent is permitted to submit a stack of potential writers for a job, an especially important capability when it comes to television staffing, where agents take on the lion’s share of the work. Let’s break it down!Īgencies are legally allowed to procure work for their clients.
#Do screenwriters have agents professional
While there are certainly similarities between agents and managers (both advocate for their writers in the professional space, both seek to help their writers gain and maintain employment), there are also vast differences between the two. Basically, everything that comes to help guiding them in the right direction, keeping them on track-that’s what an agent does every day. “An agent guides someone’s career in the writing business, meaning that they will be helping the writer to choose the types of stories they should be telling, and then telling the writer what the marketplace is looking for, marketplace being the studio world, independent world… Making sure the writer is writing from not only a place of passion but a place that can hopefully further their careers, so a script that can help them generate opportunities to rewrite scripts. Super agent David Boxerbaum, who made the move to become partner at Verve earlier this year, told me when I interviewed him for BREAKING IN: TALES FROM THE SCREENWRITING TRENCHES:

#Do screenwriters have agents how to
(Previous installments in this series include: How to Get a Screenwriting Agent, How to Get a Screenwriting Manager, Getting Representation: Do’s and Don’ts, Screenwriting Representation: To Query or Not to Query and Screenwriting Representation: Payments, Commissions and Percentages). For this blog post, the 6th in the BREAKING IN: REPRESENTATION series, I wanted to take a deeper dive, in order to help bring some clarity. “Agents and managers pretty much do the same thing.”īut make no mistake about it: Agents and managers do have clear differences between them, in the job they do for their clients, and in the manner in which they operate. As you set out to find representation, you may hear a lot of conflicting, if not straight-out confusing, statements:
