Life On The Bubble

Spec Market Roundup - November 2009

[Shameless plug:  All of the below projects, people and company links in the below report point to their detail pages in www.itsonthegrid.com.  Subscription required.]

Spec Market Roundup:  November 2009
By Jason Scoggins
December 2, 2009


Here’s the cliché you knew was coming:  Not with a bang but a whimper.  

As usual, the 2009 Spec Market effectively ended as of the week of Thanksgiving.  (There will be a few intrepid souls who take scripts out between now and Sundance 2010 -- as of this writing there are three in the marketplace for the week of November 30 -- but conventional wisdom says all thoughts of buying have been banished by visions of sugar plums and the Wailea Four Seasons.)  November’s numbers were on par with what we’ve come to expect from this discouraging year:

• 17 new specs hit the market, 3 of which sold
• 14 of the 17 went out wide, none of which sold
• 2 scripts from the ancient past (in spec market terms) also sold

It’s safe to say the fork has been well stuck in the tactic of taking a spec out wide.  The ratio for the year to date is 18 sales out of 369 scripts (5%), but that’s front-loaded by the numbers from January through April (15 sales out of 195 scripts, or 7.69%).  Since May 1, just 3 out of the 174 scripts that went wide have sold (1.72%).  I’ll update the stat in my year-end reports and continue to track it in 2010, but I’ll stop commenting until it becomes a “Man Bites Dog” story again.

Weekly Spec Script Breakdown:

Week of November 2:

• 3 scripts went wide, none of which have sold
• 3 additional sales were reported (1 recent, 1 from Feb 2009, 1 from July 2008)

Week of November 9:

• 8 scripts went wide, none of which have sold
• 1 script went direct to buyers and sold (to Summit, the week of Thanksgiving)

Week of November 16:

• 3 scripts went wide, none of which have sold
• 1 additional sale was reported

Week of November 23:

• No activity (week of Thanksgiving)

Genre Breakdown, Attachments

1 – Action
2 – Comedy
1 – Sci-Fi
1 – Thriller

Producers continued to be the common denominator among the month's sales -- the three that came out and sold in November each had major producers attached, and one had an up-and-coming star on board (Isla Fisher, to “Desperados”).  One of the two additional sales (“Dirty Old Men”) had Morgan Freeman attached to star and produce, in addition to a director/producer team in Peter Segal and Michael Ewing.
 

 
Buyers and Sellers

Three of the month’s five purchases were made by the major studios this year:

·      Lionsgate bought Andrew Knauer’s “Last Stand” from WME and Energy Entertainment for Lorenzo di Bonaventura to produce.

·      Universal bought Ellen Rapoport’s “Desperados” from CAA and Management 360 for Isla Fisher to star and Jason Blum and Mark Gordon to produce through Gordon’s eponymous company.

·      Warner Bros. bought Josh Cagan’s & Greg Coolidge’s “Dirty Old Men” from CAA and H2F for Morgan Freeman to star and produce with Lori McCreary through his Revelations Entertainment banner, with Peter Segal in talks to direct and produce with his Callahan Filmworks partner Michael Ewing.

“Dirty Old Men” originally went out in February 2009, at which point Freeman was already on board.  The sale was announced in The Hollywood Reporter on November 1, which means it actually sold in October, but for the sake of consistent methodology we’ll count it in November. (I'd link to the THR article but apparently they've put their archives behind their subscription wall.)

The other two purchases in November were made by other Buyers (I’ll probably bump Summit into the “major studio” category for 2010):

·      Summit bought Ben Magid’s “Invasion” from WME and Energy Entertainment for Eli Roth and Eric Newman to produce (presumably through their Arcade Films banner) with Participant Media, which is reportedly bringing production financing to the project.  

·      Phoenix bought Brian McGreevy & Lee Shipman’s 2008 Black Listed script “Once Upon A Time In Hell” from Paradigm and Mad Hatter Entertainment.  The script originally went out in July 2008.  This is Phoenix’s first spec purchase in 2009.

November had some highs and lows for McGreevy & Shipman -- Paradigm went out with their spec "Future Perfect" during week 2, which went into 8 territories through 5 producers, but hasn't sold as of this writing.

 

You can see the agency and management company breakdown from the above, but to recap:  On the agency side, CAA and WME had two sales each, and Paradigm finally got on the board for 2009 as well.  On the management company side, Energy had its first two sales of the year, H2F and Management 360 each had their second sales of 2009, and Mad Hatter had its first.

 

Clearly, the Mike Esola (WME)/Brooklyn Weaver & Jake Wagner (Energy) combination is as strong as ever.  Esola had a phenomenal month; in addition to being responsible for both of WME’s two sales, he set up an Alan Cohen & Alan Friedland pitch called "High School Reunion" at Universal, with Imagine producing.  Separately, Brooklyn told me a few weeks ago that his company’s focus on filling open writing assignments this year (as opposed to last year’s focus on specs) has worked out exceedingly well, too.  Congratulations to all.


About The Scoggins Reports:
The Scoggins Reports (Jason Scoggins’ monthly Spec Market Roundups and Spec Market Scorecards) are terribly unscientific analyses of the feature film spec script market based on information culled from a variety of public and non-public sources.  The numbers do not include pitch sales or the film rights to underlying material.  These are by no means official statistics, merely a fairly complete summary.  Past editions can be found in the archives of The Business of Show Institute as well as on Scoggins’ website: www.lifeonthebubble.com. 

Details on each person, project and company in the Reports can also be found at www.itsonthegrid.com, a subscription-supported, web-based database of feature film development information that Jason recently helped launch.  For daily posts of new and updated spec script, OWA and ODA information, check out the IOTG blog here:  blog.itsonthegrid.com.

About Scoggins:
Jason Scoggins is a partner at Protocol, a literary management and production company.  He manages writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol’s founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland.  Follow him here:  twitter.com/itsonthegrid.

Shameless plug: Check out www.itsonthegrid.com

I just posted the Spec Market Roundup for October, and since that always means a bump in traffic here, I wanted to post a reminder to check out www.itsonthegrid.com, the new feature film development website that launched last week.

Spec Market Roundup - October 2009

Spec Market Roundup:  October 2009
By Jason Scoggins
November 5, 2009


The new normal.  That's how I've started to think about the state of the spec market.   Roughly the same number of scripts (44, on average) have come out in each of the last 5 selling months (that is, not including July and August), and roughly the same number (5) have sold (including the summer, interestingly) each month since May.  I'll have updated month-by-month breakdowns in the next Spec Market Scorecard.  For now, here are October's core numbers:

• 46 new specs hit the market, 5 of which sold
• 40 of the 46 went out wide, 1 of which sold

No surprise, the demise of the wide spec continues unabated.  Just 3 out of the 160 scripts that went wide between May 1 and October 31 have sold.  I'm getting as tired of that statistic as you probably are, but I'll soldier on with it through the end of the year.

What was interesting about October was the wild fluctuation in the number of specs that came out each week, as you can see from the below breakdown.  The trend seems to be continuing in November:  As of this writing, just 2 specs had come out in the first week of November, but I assume another dozen or so will come out next week (unless the holiday break comes early this year).

Weekly Spec Script Breakdown:

Week of September 28:

• 3 scripts went wide but didn't sell
• 1 additional sale were reported

Week of October 5:

• 16 scripts went wide, none of which have sold
• 1 additional sale was reported

Week of October 12:

• 4 scripts went wide, none of which have sold
• 1 script went to select producers but didn't sell
• No additional sales were reported

Week of October 19:

• 5 scripts went wide, none of which have sold
• 1 script went to select producers but has not sold
• 1 additional sale was reported

Week of October 26:

• 12 scripts went wide, 1 of which sold
• 1 additional sale was reported

Genre Breakdown, Attachments

2 – Adventure
2 – Comedy
1 – Thriller

Producers continued to be the common denominator among the month's sales, and two had director elements as well; see project details, below.


Buyers and Sellers

From the outside looking in, last month's purchases were fairly straightforward.  Each of the five purchases was made by major studios or their labels:  One each for Disney, DreamWorks, Fox, Paramount and Screen Gems.  The producers associated with each of them were, respectively:  Millar/Gough, Pariah, Chernin, Benderspink and Rainforest Films.  Of note was the Fox/Chernin project (Sam Laybourne's "Rehab," out from UTA), which was that production company's first since spooling up from scratch over the summer.

On the reps' side, the agents were the usual suspects:  One sale each for Gersh, Original Artists (which set up a pitch with DreamWorks Studios the same day they sold Richard Blaney & Alex Gregory's spec script "Someone In The Dark" to the company, with Gavin Polone and Marc Haimes producing and Carlos Brooks directing), UTA and WME. 

There was one newcomer to my managers' grid in October (Sukee Chew's Hopscotch Pictures, which set up Jordan & Aaron Kandell's "Doginson Crusoe" at Disney), along with two familiar names.  Circle of Confusion helped Gersh land Megan Hinds & Dave Lease's "The Black Phantom" at Screen Gems, with Rob Hardy's Rainforest Films producing and Doug Aarniokoski directing.  And Benderspink, along with WME, set up Marc Haimes' "Jitters!" at Paramount.  Benderspink and Haimes are on separate by equally impressive rolls this year.  In addition to "Jitters!," the company also set up a pitch at DreamWorks last month, which marks 13 pitches and specs they've set up this year as producers.  "Jitters!" is Haimes' second spec sale of 2009 (J.C. Spink and Charlie Gogolak sold his "Elevator Men" to Summit back in February).


About The Scoggins Reports:
The Scoggins Reports (Jason Scoggins’ monthly Spec Market Report and Spec Market Scorecard, as well as his weekly Spec Market Recap) are terribly unscientific analyses of the feature film spec script market based on information culled from a variety of public and non-public sources.  The numbers do not include pitch sales or the film rights to underlying material.  These are by no means official statistics, merely a fairly complete summary.  Past editions can be found in the archives of The Business of Show Institute (http://www.thebusinessofshowinstitute.com/newsletter/past-newsletters.html) as well as on Scoggins’ website:  http://www.lifeonthebubble.com.  Details on each person, project and company in the Reports can also be found at http://www.itsonthegrid.com, a subscription-supported, web-based database of feature film development information that Jason recently helped launch. 

About Scoggins:
Jason Scoggins is a partner at Protocol, a literary management and production company.  He manages writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol’s founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland.  You can follow his daily posts and tweets here:  http://twitter.com/jscoggins.

Reader question: Wide vs Naked Specs

It's been a while since I did a "What the heck are you talking about?" Q&A post.  I got a question via email from a reader today that I thought was worth echoing here.

I have a quick question regarding your analysis; you say “2 of the 140 scripts have sold” and then the chart below it shows that there has been many more sales since the beginning of May.  Is this only for “naked” specs?  And what do you mean by that?

Here is the text (for your reference), below.
--
The only reason to take a naked spec out wide right now is to introduce a writer to the
town on a wholesale basis (that is to say, there's no good reason to take out a naked
spec right now). The dismal statistic continues unabated: Just 2 of the 140 scripts that
have gone out wide since May 1 have sold. That's a ridiculously low percentage:
1.4%, not far off (statistically speaking) the percentage of scripts sold during the WGA
strike.
--

Good question.  Here's the answer:  

The key qualifier is "...that have gone out wide since May 1."  That is to say, specs that get sent out to the whole town, as opposed to getting slipped to select producers.  I started looking at that metric back in the Spring when I was wondering what the numbers suggested was the best strategy to sell a spec in this market climate.  It was the original impetus for my Spec Market Reports in the first place, hence all the chatter and ongoing numbers about wide versus select scripts in the marketplace.

To answer the other question, naked specs are scripts that don't have any attachments when they hit the marketplace.  Most scripts that go wide are also naked.  Regardless, whether a producer or actor or director is attached from the outset or not, the projects that have been getting set up this year have been narrowly targeted to specific buyers, and thus haven't hit the big, private or public, subscription-supported tracking boards at all until they're announced in the trades.  

Scoggins Endorses: www.phonesheet.com

I've mentioned this in passing a few times over the past couple of months, but I want to haul out the megaphone to promote a friend's product:  www.phonesheet.com.  If you make or receive more than a handful of phone calls a day, you're going to want to sign up for this service.  And if you do, be sure to enter the promo code "scoggins" -- you'll get 10% off the already-so-low-you-won't-believe-it monthly fees.

Those of you already working in the entertainment business will know exactly what the site is/does just from the name.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, phonesheets are the tools everyone in Hollywood uses to keep track of incoming and outgoing phone calls.  Back when I started as an assistant at ICM, the old school paper-based phonesheets were just getting converted over to electronic (usually FileMaker Pro-based) versions.  Lots of us assistants still had to keep track of calls with pen and paper and various colors of highlighters, believe it or not -- hundreds of marks and codes per day indicating "left words" and "returns" and so on.  (Ah, the joy of call dumping at the end of the day so your boss could start the next day's phonesheet with a clean sheet of paper.)

One of the guys who designed and built those FileMaker Pro phonesheets was Jan Zands, who earlier this year launched his new service.  www.phonesheet.com is the supercharged, web-based version of your now-old school desktop-based phonesheets.  I've been beta-testing it for the past six months or so, and it's totally badass.  Here are some of the things I love about it:

1. Since it's web-based, you can access your phonesheet wherever you are.
2. More than one person can access a given phonesheet simultaneously (no charge for additional users of a given phonesheet), which means my assistant can update it for me as well.
3. Its color-coding is completely intuitive (watch the demo video on the site to see the thought process behind it): red = incoming calls I need to return, blue = calls I've made/returned, green = outbound calls I want to make.
4. If your contact list is in Outlook or Entourage, it's easy to upload your whole address book.

PLUS...there's a mobile version of the service for Blackberries called Phonesheet2Go that's a game-changer (the iPhone version is already in the works; in the meantime, you can access your phonesheet with your iPhone through Safari).  Every call I make or receive gets logged right there on my phone and automatically syncs with the web-based version.

There's a lot more to love about www.phonesheet.com than just the above, but you should check out the demo yourself.  Regardless, the pricing is pretty perfect:  $6.95/month (when you sign up for 6 months; $9.95/month otherwise), plus $2.95/month if you use the mobile version.  Again, if you enter "scoggins" as the promo code you'll get 10% off those prices for the first year.  And there's absolutely no downside thanks to the 30-day free trial they're currently offering.

Bottom line, whether you're working in Hollywood or not, if any part of your day is spent working the phones, you've at least got to check this thing out.  Trust me, you'll thank me later.

Spec Market Roundup - September 2009

Spec Market Roundup: September 2009
By Jason Scoggins
September 30, 2009


The spec market returned to form in September after the summer break, but not in a good way, unfortunately. The number of new specs on the market was on par with May, but only half as many scripts sold. Worse, not a single spec that went wide this month sold. I feel obligated to trot out the now-familiar statistic: Only 2 out of the 119 scripts that went wide between May 1 and September 30 have sold.

I know from reading a number of those specs that not all of them were good enough and that a big chunk probably wouldn't have sold even in a healthy market. There were also two or three that had significant attachments and were building momentum toward the end of the month and therefore may well get set up in October. But still -- 1.7%? What a let-down. Here are September's core numbers:

• - 39 new specs hit the market, 4 of which sold

• - 33 of the 39 went out wide, none of which sold

• - 1 additional sale was reported (a spec that went wide in March)

For those of you checking my math, 38 specs are accounted for below (32 wide, plus 6 select, not including the sale last week of "Rubicon," which came out in March). The final script was the only one that went out wide on Tuesday the 29th. Since Monday the 28th was a company-town holiday (Happy New Year, everyone) and the spec market has been very slow this week, I'll include its breakdown in the October Roundup instead.


Weekly Breakdown:

Week of August 31:

• - 1 script went wide but didn't sell

• - 1 script went to select producers and sold

• - No additional sales were reported

Week of September 7:

• - 6 scripts went wide, none of which sold

• - 1 additional sale was reported

Week of September 14:

• - 13 scripts went wide, none of which have sold

• - 1 script went direct to buyers but has not yet sold

Week of September 21:

• - 12 scripts went wide, none of which have sold

• - 1 script went to select producers but has not sold

• - 3 additional sales were reported, including one that went wide in March

Genre Breakdown, Attachments
1 – Action
1 – Drama
1 – Sci-Fi
2 – Thrillers

All of September's sales had producers of various stature attached, but none had heavyweight director or actor elements.


Buyers and Sellers

Two major studios made spec purchases in September: Paramount, its third of the year, and CBS Films, its second. Relativity, Mandate and Gold Circle Films were the other three buyers, with one each. Gold Circle's purchase ("Mercy," by Chris Sparling, from UTA and Kaplan/Perrone for The Safran Company to produce) was its first in 2009, as was Mandate's ("Dream On," by Jason Ubaldi, from ICM and Tom Sawyer Entertainment for Laurence Mark to produce). Relativity, by contrast, has now purchased 3 specs this year, on par with DreamWorks and Paramount (in fact, fewer than only Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros., each of which has purchased 5 specs this year).

ICM had a good month, with one out of their three specs selling ("Dream On," mentioned above), plus the sale of a script that originally went wide in March ("Rubicon," by Ric Roman Waugh and Michael Lerner, to Relativity for Atlas to produce). The three other usual suspects each had one sale as well: CAA (1 out of 3 in September), UTA (1 for 1) and WME (1 for 6).

Three management companies were involved in three of the five sales in September. "Dream On" was Tom Sawyer's first spec sale in 2009. Kaplan/Perrone had its fourth ("Mercy," mentioned above), which ties the company with Benderspink for the most spec sales by a management company in 2009. And Circle of Confusion had its second for the year in "Sleeper Spy," which CBS Films bought for Arnold and Anne Kopelson to produce. Even though Kopelson reportedly purchased a previous version of the script in 2008 (the then-titled "Advanced Placement," by the WME- and Circle of Confusion-repped Tony Jaswinski), they apparently redeveloped it so extensively that it qualifies as a new sale.


About The Scoggins Reports:

The Scoggins Reports (Jason Scoggins’ monthly Spec Market Report and Spec Market Scorecard, as well as his weekly Spec Market Recap) are terribly unscientific analyses of the feature film spec script market based on information culled from a variety of public and non-public sources. They do not include pitch sales nor the film rights to underlying material. These are by no means official numbers, merely a fairly complete summary. Past editions can be found in the archives of The Business of Show Institute (http://www.thebusinessofshowinstitute.com/newsletter/past-newsletters.html) as well as on Scoggins’ website: http://www.lifeonthebubble.com.

About Scoggins:

Jason Scoggins is a partner at Protocol, a literary management and production company. He manages writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol’s founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland.

Teaser: Spec Market Roundup for September

Just finished writing the September Roundup, which will publish Friday in the BOSI newsletter.  Here's the lede:

The spec market returned to form in September after the summer break, but not in a good way, unfortunately. The number of new specs on the market was on par with May, but only half as many scripts sold. Worse, not a single spec that went wide this month sold. I feel obligated to trot out the now-familiar statistic: Only 2 out of the 119 scripts that went wide between May 1 and September 30 have sold.

Check back Friday afternoon for additional details...

Spec Market Roundup - August 2009

Spec Market Roundup: August 2009
By Jason Scoggins
September 1, 2009

It’s no surprise, but August was far and away the slowest month of the year for the spec market. In fact, July and August combined saw less overall activity than the next slowest month (January, which didn’t even really get started until the 21^st, after Sundance ended). Here are August’s numbers:

• 8 specs hit the market, 3 of which sold

• 4 of the 8 went out wide, none of which sold

• 1 additional sale was reported (see below)

Before getting into the rest of the Roundup, let me take a moment to note a sale from early in the year that I hadn’t captured until it was brought to my attention last week: Jonathan Herman’s “Rites of Men,” which Universal bought in March from WMA and Luber/Roklin. I hadn’t yet locked down my system back then and simply missed this one. Consider this an open invitation to let me know if you are aware of any projects that haven’t made it into my grids. That goes for future projects, too, and if you’d prefer not to have the details public until they’re reported in the trades (if ever), I’d be happy to keep the information private. Contact me at jscoggins@lifeonthebubble.com.

Finally, the obligatory depressing-spec-market-stat update: Only 2 out of the 85 scripts that have gone out wide in the last four months (17 weeks, since the end of April) have sold. That’s just 2.4%.

Weekly Breakdown:

Week of August 3:

• 3 specs went wide

• 1 spec went to select producers

• 2 additional sales were reported (including 1 that went direct to buyers in July)

Week of August 10:

• No specs went wide

• 2 additional sales were reported

Week of August 17:

• 1 spec went wide

• No additional sales were reported

Week of August 24:

• No spec activity whatsoever

Genre Breakdown, Attachments
3 – Comedy
1 – Action

Note: The one Action script is Mike White’s action-comedy “Babe In The Woods” (sold to Sony by UTA). I’m torn whether to list it as Action or Comedy here; suggestions are welcome.

On the attachment front, two of August’s sales had significant attachments:

• “Change Up,” by THE HANGOVER writers Jon Lucas & Scott Moore (out from CAA), sold to Universal with David Dobkin (also repped by CAA) attached to direct and produce along with partner Jeff Kleeman through their Big Kid Pictures.

• “Central Intelligence,” by Ike Barinholtz & Dave Stassen, out from APA and Principato/Young, was a particularly large package. Not only was Ed Helms attached to star, five of P/Y’s staff were attached to produce in some capacity. P/Y reps the writers and Helms. APA reps the writers; CAA also reps Helms.

Buyers and Sellers

With its two spec purchases in August and the one I missed in March, Universal is now tied with Warner Bros. for the most spec purchases in 2009, with 5 apiece. That said, when you combine the major studios’ various labels, Sony leads with 7 (having purchased 1 in August), and Fox also has 5. (Among the majors, Paramount trails badly, with just 2 spec purchases so far this year.) Montecito was the third buyer in August, its first in 2009.

UTA had another great month, grinding out 2 sales despite everyone seeming to be in the Hamptons over the past several weeks. As I mentioned in the Spec Market Scorecard in mid-August, APA had its first sale in 2009 as well, the above-mentioned “Central Intelligence.” And CAA continued its implacable charge with the sale of “Change Up.”

In addition to the aforementioned Principato/Young, Rain Management was the other management company involved in one of this months’ four sales. The firm sold its first spec of 2009, Steve Leff’s “Doc & Howie Whack A Granny,” to Montecito, alongside UTA.

About The Scoggins Reports:

The Scoggins Reports (Jason Scoggins’ monthly Spec Market Report and Spec Market Scorecard, as well as his weekly Spec Market Recap) are terribly unscientific analyses of the feature film spec script market based on information culled from a variety of public and non-public sources. They do not include pitch sales nor the film rights to underlying material. These are by no means official numbers, merely a fairly complete summary. Past editions can be found in the archives of The Business of Show Institute (http://www.thebusinessofshowinstitute.com/newsletter/past-newsletters.html) as well as on Scoggins’ website: http://www.lifeonthebubble.com.

About Scoggins:

Jason Scoggins is a partner at Protocol, a literary management and production company. He manages writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol’s founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland. After getting his start in the entertainment business as an assistant at ICM, Scoggins became a TV Literary Agent at Gersh, followed by a stint at Writers & Artists Agency and then several years in the wilderness (Park City, Utah, to be specific). He returned to the business in 2007, just in time to be impacted by the run-up to the WGA strike.  

Teaser: Spec Market Roundup for August

The August Spec Market Roundup is done and will be published in the BOSI newsletter on Friday.  In the meantime, here are the usual teaser stats:

• 8 specs hit the market, 3 of which sold
• 4 of the 8 went out wide, none of which sold
• 1 additional sale was reported (see below)

More to come...

Who does Scoggins think he is?

A commenter posted a series of questions/comments about my Spec Market reports from a friend (I think the person is a screenwriter, based on some of the comments) on the July Scorecard that I thought warranted a separate post in response.  The commenter edited the friend's emails to keep company- and person-specific information out of the conversation, and I've edited a bit further for clarity in this context.  I'm not trying to sugarcoat anything, though, and you can read the original post here.

Where's/how's [Scoggins] getting his data?  Our own management company isn't on these charts, so we know there are at least 4 more specs than recorded, right?  With 0 sales.  What about the 100 other management companies their size, [A, B and C] for example (all small 1-3 person lit management companies)?  And those are just the three that I've personally worked with.  Did they not send out a single spec?

I collect and confirm my data from a bunch of sources:

• tracking boards, including www.trackingb.com (which I highly recommend) among half a dozen others; 
• the trades; 
• several sites that boil down the trades, including DoneDealPro.com and FilmNewsBriefs.com (which I also highly recommend); and 
• personal conversations with agents, managers, producers and executives.  

Based on those conversations, I'm pretty confident I'm collecting information on basically all the scripts that go wide, but I know I miss the bulk of those scripts that get slipped out to just a few people and don't hit the bigger boards.  This is the reason I started separating the numbers for specs that go wide from the others:  The sales percentages for the latter are meaningless, since I don't have enough data on the ones that don't sell.  I've been pretty up-front about this in several of my Spec Market articles, in particular the June Scorecard.

Regarding specific management companies that haven't made the Scorecard, the point of the Scorecard is to list the studios and other buyers who have bought specs this year, and the agents and managers involved in selling those scripts.  It doesn't list companies who haven't sold or bought anything this year, so if the management companies this person references are in this category, they would by definition not be included in the Scorecard.  That said, the grid I use to pull my numbers together includes the information for hundreds of such scripts, including who sent them out.  If the material these companies sent out hit the boards, chances are I've captured it.

It's hard to imagine he's tracking every spec that "goes out".  And what is "going out"?  Submitted to all major/mini-major buyers?  Or one manager giving one spec to one friend (maybe even a producer, not a buyer), in which case it COULD sell, right?  This data is not making the charts...except, my guess is, only in the rare occasion that it sells...creating a bias toward good news...

Again, I think I'm getting more or less every script that goes wide to producers, and I trust people will point out the few projects I miss.  But I definitely can't capture the scripts that stay below the radar unless the rep contacts me directly to let me know.  (And by the way, I wish more reps and assistants would do this; I'm perfectly capable of keeping the details on the DL, and it would be great to have a better dataset to mine for insights into the market.  Email me directly at jscoggins at lifeonthebubble dot com.)  Often, the first time I hear about a script that went directly to just a couple of people is when news of the sale hits the trades.  I wish I had a better window on this part of the market, but it is what it is.

I don't think I'm biased toward good news; if anything I've been pretty pessimistic about the numbers.  You only have to read the opening remarks of my articles to get a sense of this.

Which is only to say those companies (including the one WE work with...)  ARE submitting specs (the three above all did for me, some of them multiple times...)...but are below the radar...and the numbers are FAR worse than we imagine. 

I think the numbers are pretty solid for the the stuff that goes wide, but yes, it stands to reason that the bulk of the numbers I don't have are for scripts that go out to select producers/buyers and then don't sell, which would mean the sales percentages are much worse than the Scorecard shows.  

Where's he getting his numbers?  Reverse engineering from sales?  TrackingB?  Well, two of our acquaintances' screenplays were [on TrackingB] and not included on these tables, so he's not getting his numbers there, right?  So, he's probably just counting on data he collects personally from agents and managers?  He could be going from sales recorded in Variety and Done Deal, etc., but then how does he capture data on "non-sales"?  Voluntarily submitted by agencies and managers?  That would be suspect (though you think it'd be higher with self-reporting).  Tracking boards?  That'd be best, I suppose, but what about things that didn't make tracking?  What about submissions by companies/individuals below the radar?

Again, I'm covering all of the above sources pretty thoroughly, but I welcome additional input from the community to make sure the numbers are as complete as possible.  If the two acquaintances' scripts went out wide but didn't sell, I'd bet I have them on my grid.  If they did sell and I haven't included them in my numbers, I'd like to hear about it.  There was a case a week or two ago where a script that sold in March, before I locked down my methodology, didn't make it onto my grid.  I've since corrected that and will make a note of it in my next Roundup and Scorecard (sorry, Luber-Roklin), and I invite anyone else who thinks their script sales aren't in my numbers to let me know so I can fix the problem.

What's the difference between "Wide" and "All Specs"...what category(ies) are being added to "Wide" to get it to "All"? 

"Wide" is any script that gets sent out widely to the town.  Admittedly, this is pretty subjective, and I basically have to rely on the reps themselves to label their strategy appropriately.  For example, if a script is said to be "out to select producers" or goes "direct to buyers," it's not being sent "Wide" (even though everyone who wants it will eventually get their hands on it) and I keep it out of the "Wide" numbers.  "All Specs" means those that went Wide plus the rest (projects that get reported as sold in the trades, plus those few scripts each month that hit the boards or come up in conversation that aren't going wide).  If I had better data for "Select" scripts, I'd list those numbers in their own grid, but at this point those numbers are meaningless, so I simply list "Wide" and "All."  

If you go through the 7 months he's tracked the average sale rate is 20.7% which seems WILDLY high to me and is skewed by the 1 in 5 sale he lists for the first half of July...which seems more like 20% than 33% to me...and the asterisk doesn't seem to explain that deviation...this is the only math I checked, but only because it stood out as highest, but maybe there's something in the numbers I don't get.

There was definitely an error in one "Wide/Percent Sold" cell in the July Scorecard (it should indeed have been 20% instead of 33%), and by the time you read this I'll have fixed it.  I can't tell where the above 20.7% number comes from, though. The two sets of numbers seem pretty straightforward to me, but if that's just because I'm familiar with them and other people are confused at how I've laid them out, please don't hesitate to suggest alternative ways to go.

Lastly, I think there's not really enough data here to constitute a statiscally significant sample -- 304 specs might be large enough, but the ones that sold...may not be really.  When we say 30% of those sold are comedies, we're talking about a very small number of screenplays (14).

I totally agree, the dataset is not a statistically significant sample, with the possible exception of the "Wide" numbers, since I think I have pretty good underlying data for that category. Regardless, the "About The Scoggins Report" blurb at the bottom of my monthly articles specifically acknowledges that it's a "terribly unscientific analysis."  I do think the numbers are interesting in and of themselves, and I think one can draw some conclusions about the market as a whole from them.  But I wouldn't decide to sign with one agency or management company over another, for example, just because one had a higher spec sale batting average.  I might take into consideration a total lack of sales in 2009, perhaps, but that number really doesn't paint the picture of the agent's or manager's or company's capabilities.

I'm glad he's doing this, and even if it's invalid, it's better than nothing as far as guidance for what to write and what representation to seek or sign with.  And maybe it IS valid, but...what can we really learn from it?  WGA stat:  40,000 scripts registered annually (and that's if all are registered which they're not), so...75% EVER get circulated..."20%" of those circulated ever sell...meaning... .15% sell, I think?  1.5 in every thousand written?

I don't think it's useful for aspiring writers to consider the total number of scripts registered with the Guild as a baseline.  Relative quality varies so widely among that cohort that in many cases you might as well be comparing a child's drawing to a Picasso.  Or at least, a 2nd Grader's self-portrait with that of someone who had been to art school for a year or two.  Don't get me wrong, the numbers are definitely daunting, and breaking into the business as a writer is still a crapshoot.  But there are screenwriters and there are screenwriters, if you know what I mean.

So?  What if we like the odds?  We write.  What if we don't?  We still write.

Well said.

Spec Market Roundup - July 2009

Spec Market Roundup - July 2009

By Jason Scoggins

August 3, 2009

Talk about the dog days of summer:  July's spec market activity was the slowest of the year by a lot (50% below January, even).  Slow enough that I'll mostly dispense with the commentary this month and just focus on the numbers:

• 14 specs hit the market, 2 of which sold
• 10 of the 14 went out wide, 1 of which sold
• 1 additional sale was reported (see below)

The market remained brutal for scripts going out wide.  To update last month's depressing stat, just 2 out of the 80 scripts that have gone out wide in the last 3 months (technically, the last 13 weeks) have sold. 

Weekly Breakdown:

Week of June 29 (included July 4 holiday)

• 1 spec went wide and hasn't sold
• 1 additional spec went to select producers and hasn't sold
• 2 additional sales were reported

NOTE:  This week's activity was included in the June Roundup and thus will not be included in this month's numbers. I've only included it here because July began mid-week.

Week of July 6:

• No specs went wide
• 1 additional sale was reported

Week of July 13:

• 6 specs went wide, 1 sold
• 1 additional spec went to select producers and hasn't sold
• No additional sales were reported

Week of July 20:

• 1 spec went wide and hasn't sold
• 1 additional spec went to select producers and hasn't sold
• 1 additional sale was reported

Week of July 27:

• 2 specs went wide, neither has sold
• 1 additional spec went to direct to buyers but has not yet sold

Genre Breakdown, Attachments

1 - Comedy

2 - Thrillers 

Buyers and Sellers

With the two projects it picked up in July, Lionsgate joined an exclusive club:  They're one of only three buyers who have purchased two or more specs in a given month this year.  (The other two are DreamWorks, with 2 in March, and Warner Bros., with 3 in May.)  Alcon was the other July buyer.  Neither company had purchased a spec previously in 2009.

Three agencies had one sale each:  UTA, ICM and WME.  Two management companies were involved in one each of the three sales:  Madhouse ("Prisoners," with WME) and H2F ("Vatican Tapes," with UTA).

"Prisoners" marks WME's inaugural spec sale, though one could argue it should be tallied under Endeavor's numbers for the year, since it went out long before the merger.  The script, by tyro scribe Aaron Guzikowski and out from Madhouse (Adam Kolbrenner) and Endeavor (David Karp, Rich Cook & Adam Levine), originally hit the market in late February, riding TAKEN's box office momentum.  Over the course of the next few weeks, Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale and Bryan Singer had attached themselves to star and direct, respectively.  By the time the project sold to Alcon (for a widely discussed $600,000 against $1 million), however, all three had disengaged.  Regardless, the project is reportedly on the fast track, with production tentatively scheduled to begin in January for a November 2010 release. 

About the Spec Market Report and The Spec Market Scorecard:

The Spec Market Report and the Spec Market Scorecard are terribly unscientific analyses of the feature film spec script market based on information culled from a variety of public and non-public sources.  They do not include pitch sales or the film rights to underlying material.  These are by no means official numbers, merely a fairly complete summary.  Past editions of the Report and the Scorecard are collected at http://www.lifeonthebubble.com and in the BOSI archives at http://www.thebusinessofshowinstitute.com/newsletter/past-newsletters.html. 

About Jason Scoggins:

Jason Scoggins is a partner at Protocol, a literary management and production company.  He manages writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol's founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland.  After getting his start in the entertainment business as an assistant at ICM, Scoggins became a TV Literary Agent at Gersh, followed by a stint at Writers & Artists Agency and then several years in the wilderness.  He returned to the business in 2007, just in time to be impacted by the run-up to the WGA strike.  

Teaser: Spec Market Roundup for July

The Spec Market Roundup for July won't publish until Friday, so here are a couple of teaser stats.  July was the slowest month of 2009 for specs so far, by a lot:

• There were 14 total specs, and 3 total sales.
• Ten specs went wide, one of which sold.
• There was one additional sale of a script that went to select producers.
• And there was one additional sale, of a script that originally went wide in February.

Additional details to come...

Spec Market Roundup: June 2009

June was yet another tough month for the spec script market.  There was a small uptick compared to May in the number of scripts on the market as sellers rushed to beat the traditional Summer slow-down, but the results were even worse than May's.  Here are June's raw numbers:

• 39 specs went out widely to producers;
• None of those sold; and
• 7 additional spec sales were reported.

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but just one out of the 70 scripts that went out widely in May and June has sold.  Let's pause for a moment of silence as we remember the spec market of years past.

 

Weekly Breakdown:

Week of June 1: 

• 6 specs went wide, none of which sold
• No additional sales were reported

Week of June 8:

• 6 specs went wide, none sold 
• 4 additional sales were reported

Week of June 15:

• 15 specs went wide, none sold
• No additional sales were reported

Week of June 22:

• 11 specs went wide, none sold
• 1 additional sale was reported

Week of June 29:

• 1 spec went wide and had not sold as of July 1
• 2 additional sales were reported as of July 1

 

Genre Breakdown, Attachments

 

There was a counter-intuitive development in the genre breakdown as of the end of June:  Despite the widely-reported death of the adult drama in 2009 and the undeniably impressive box office returns of Star Trek and Transformers 2, Buyers have now collectively purchased more Drama scripts (5) than Sci-Fi/Fantasy scripts (4).  Here's the breakdown:

 

1 - Action

3 - Comedy

1 - Drama

2 - Thrillers

 

On the attachment front, just two of the 7 sales had meaningful filmmaker elements attached, and a third had Ron Howard reportedly interested in directing ( "The Originals," by Bryce Dallas Howard & Dane Charbeneau, which Imagine bought from ICM and Management 360).  None of this month's sales reported multiple bidders, and only one was a reported preemptive purchase ("Hellified," by Andy Burg, which Paramount bought from ICM and Justin Silvera Management for Lorenzo di Bonaventura in the same week as his "Transformers 2" crushed its opening box office, and just days after a regime change at the studio).

 

Buyers and Sellers

 

No one buyer bought more than one spec script in June.  Of the studios, CBS Films, Paramount and Screen Gems each bought one.  The other buyers were Chockstone, Imagine, Intrepid and Relativity.  This makes three months in a row that Intrepid has bought a script, a virtual buying spree in this market.

 

Of the agencies, CAA and ICM had the best month, with 2 sales each, though ICM had the better on-base percentage (2 sales out of 2, compared to CAA's 2 out of 4).  The other agencies with reported sales in June were The Alpern Group and Original Artists.  Both of the latter are testaments to perseverance:  Original's sale ("Tapped Out," by James Sommers & Grace Church, to Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz's Chockstone Pictures) was of a script that originally went out wide in February 2009.  Alpern's ("Divers," by Diane Ademu-John, to Intrepid) was based on the writer's unproduced spec pilot script.  Elsewhere, WME had trouble getting out of the gate in its first month post-merger -- the firm sent 5 scripts out wide, with no takers -- and APA continued its dry spell, going 0 for 4 (2 went out wide, 2 went just to select producers).

 

Four management companies were involved in June's seven spec sales:  Justin Silvera Management, Kaplan/Perrone, Management 360 and Underground Films.  Undergound's ("The Wedding Doctor," by tyro scribe Jonathan Abrams, to Relativity with Dark & Stormy Entertainment producing) was the only one sold without agency involvement.

 

 

About the Spec Market Report and The Spec Market Scorecard:

The Spec Market Report and the Spec Market Scorecard are terribly unscientific analyses of the feature film spec script market based on information culled from a variety of public and non-public sources.  They do not include pitch sales nor the film rights to underlying material.  These are by no means official numbers, merely a fairly complete summary.  Past editions of the Report and the Scorecard are collected at http://www.lifeonthebubble.com and in the BOSI archives at http://www.thebusinessofshowinstitute.com/newsletter/past-newsletters.html. 

 

About Jason Scoggins:

Jason Scoggins is a manager and partner at Protocol, a literary management and production company.  He represents writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol's founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland.  After getting his start in the entertainment business as an assistant at ICM, Scoggins became a TV Literary Agent at The Gersh Agency, followed by a stint at Writers & Artists Agency and then several years in the wilderness.  He returned to the business in 2007, just in time to be impacted by the run-up to the WGA strike. 

Another depressing spec market stat

Just finished writing the June Spec Market Report.  I have to wait to post it here until after the BOSI newsletter publishes this Friday, but here's a tear-jerking teaser stat:

Out of the 70 spec scripts that went out wide in May and June, only 1 has sold.

Unbelievable...

Spec Market Roundup: May 2009

Spec Market Roundup:  May 2009

by Jason Scoggins

June 1, 2009

Thanks to the feedback we received from last month's Spec Market Roundup, we refined our methodology in a couple of ways this month:

• We're now differentiating between sales of specs that went out widely and those that did not appear in the marketplace prior to selling.  Not only does this provide another lens through which to view the state of the marketplace, it keeps those hand-sold projects from skewing the data for the scripts that go out wide (since we're not in a position to know about every script that gets slipped to just a couple of buyers).
• We've broken Buyers into two categories:  "Studios" (for lack of a better term), which we think of as the Majors, Mini-Majors and their various studio labels; and "Other," for everyone else.
• We've also broken Sellers into two categories as well:  "Agents," and "Managers" (for obvious reasons).

Together, we think these refinements help provide a clearer picture of the spec marketplace as a whole.

At first glance, May's spec script sales numbers seem to be yet another month-over-month improvement:  10 out of 39 specs sold in May, compared to 9 in April and 8 each in February and March, for a sales percentage of 26%.  That's the highest number of monthly sales so far this year, and easily the highest percentage.  

However, 9 out of May's 10 sales were scripts that went directly to buyers, as opposed to going out wide to producers in the usual spec fashion.  In other words, just 1 of the 30 spec scripts that went out wide in May sold ("The Gunslinger," out from UTA & Benderspink, which sold to Warner Bros. for Andrew Lazar's Mad Chance).  That's a shockingly low sales rate of 3%.  In this month's Spec Market Scorecard we'll be breaking out the numbers for previous months and rolling them up for the year-to-date figures.  Suffice it to say here, though, that the state of the marketplace is not pretty:  Just 6% of specs that have gone out wide this year have sold.  We wish we had access to the total number of scripts that went out narrowly last month for comparison.

Here are May's raw numbers:

• 30 specs went out wide;
•   1 of those sold; and
•   9 additional spec sales were reported

Weekly Breakdown:

Week of May 4: 

• 8 specs went wide, 1 of which sold
• 3 additional sales were reported

Week of May 11:

• 10 specs went wide, none sold 
• 1 additional sale was reported

Week of May 18:

• 9 specs went wide, none sold
• 2 additional sales were reported

Week of May 25:

• 3 specs went wide, none sold
• 3 additional sales were reported

May 25 was Memorial Day, which helped make the last week in May the slowest of 2009 since Sundance.  We'd bet the impending completion of the William Morris/Endeavor merger was a factor as well (see below).  In any case, since that last week of May was such an outlier, the weekly average number of new scripts (7.5) is meaningless.

Genre Breakdown, Attachments, Etc.

Collectively, the Buyers seem to have bought their fill of Comedies over the past several months, since not one sold in May.  Instead, they switched to Dramas, a genre in which not a single spec had sold in the first four months of the year.  Here's the breakdown:

1 - Action

4 - Drama

2 - Sci-Fi/Fantasy (including one animation project)

3 - Thriller

On the attachment front, four of the 10 sales had significant filmmaker or actor elements attached.  Two of those four had Hugh Jackman on board as producer and/or star, one had Jim Carrey as producer and star, and the fourth had John Lee Hancock writing and directing (plus Overbrook producing).  None of this month's sales reported multiple bidders, and only one was a reported preemptive purchase (Intrepid's purchase of "Childhood Heroes" from Abstract Entertainment).

Buyers and Sellers

Warner Bros. was the big spender of the Studios in May, purchasing 3 of the month's 10 scripts.  The other two studio buyers were Fox and Sony, with one each.  Among the Other buyers, each of the following companies bought one script each:  Beloved, Intrepid, Relativity, Reliance and Starz Media Animation.

Of the agencies, CAA had the best month, with 3 sales; the firm also took 2 scripts out wide, neither of which had sold as of this writing.  UTA was in second position in May with two sales, one of which was the sole sale in May that went out wide, out of 3 wide attempts last month.  Endeavor, Gersh and William Morris each sold a spec script as well, none of which went out wide.

Eight management companies were involved in the ten spec sales in May:  Abstract Entertainment, Anonymous Content, Benderspink, Category 5, The Gotham Group, Kaplan/Perrone, The Radmin Co. and Marty Shapiro Management.  Of those, two sold their projects without agency involvement:  Abstract Entertainment ("Childhood Heroes," to Intrepid); and Marty Shapiro Management ("Umbra," to Relativity).

On a side note, neither WMA nor Endeavor sold a spec in May after the 5th, just as the rumors of WMA's layoffs began to mount in earnest.  In fact, all of WMA's and Endeavor's sales from mid-April to the end of May fall into the "direct to buyers" category, where the scripts did not appear widely in the marketplace prior to the announcement of their sale.  It's a safe bet that those sales got started well before the merger was confirmed and the writing was on the wall about which agents would be joining WME and which would not.  Regardless, there's no doubt that the merger has been a distraction for both companies and an opportunity for their competitors.  We wonder how badly the situation affected WMA's and Endeavor's TV Lit staffing efforts over the past few weeks as well. 

About The Spec Market Roundup:

The Spec Market Roundup is a terribly unscientific analysis of the feature film spec script market based on information culled from a variety of public and non-public sources.  It does not include pitch sales nor the film rights to underlying material.  These are by no means official numbers, merely a fairly complete summary.  

About Jason Scoggins:

Jason Scoggins is a manager and partner at Protocol, a Beverly Hills-adjacent literary management and production company.  He represents writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol's founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland.  After getting his start in the entertainment business as an assistant at ICM, Scoggins became a TV Literary Agent at The Gersh Agency, followed by a stint at Writers & Artists Agency and then several years in the wilderness.  He returned to the business in 2007, just in time to be impacted by the run-up to the WGA strike.

Spec Market Roundup: April 2009

The Scoggins Report

"Spec Market Roundup:  April 2009"

By Jason Scoggins

Compared to the previous two months of 2009, April was a good time to take out a spec script especially if you were an agent at WMA, CAA or Original Artists.  For the four weeks ending May 1 (not including the week of March 30), the total number of new spec scripts on the market dropped considerably month to month (46, compared to 77 in March and 62 in February), but a much higher percentage of them sold (9, or 19.6%, compared to 10.4% in March and 12.9% in February).  Additionally, 1 script taken out in March sold in April. 

The weekly breakdown (specs/sales) is as follows:

-       Week of April 6:               7/1

-       Week of April 13:            13/4

-       Week of April 20:            15/3

-       Week of April 27:            11/1

The above breakdown is somewhat misleading, since 2 of the sales in the second week were preemptive buys (where the scripts did not appear widely in the marketplace prior to their sale) and thus went out in the preceding weeks.  Nevertheless, the average weekly number of scripts out in April was 11.5, significantly lower than the previous weekly average (16, through the week ending April 3), and the week of April 6 was the slowest week of the year since the market revved up post-Sundance.

The 10 total sales included 4 Comedy, 4 Thriller and 2 Action projects.  Interestingly, more Thrillers sold in April (4 out of 16) than in March and February combined (1 out of 9 and 2 out of 12, respectively).  Surprisingly, none of the 10 sales included a major star or filmmaker attachment (with apologies to Elizabeth Banks, who was attached to star in and produce "Forever 21," out from CAA and purchased by Dreamworks).  Between 3 and 5 of April's sales were ostensibly preemptive, and just one reported multiple bidders ("Odysseus," out from CAA, which Warner Bros. secured over Paramount).

Each of the sales went to a different buyer.  Of the major studios, Paramount and Universal did not buy a spec in April (though the buyer for "Family History," a script by Michael Punke supervised by The Wibberly's, was unconfirmed at the time of this writing).

In the rep race, William Morris had the best month, with 3 of the 10 sales (out of 5 scripts taken out), followed by CAA and Original Artists, with 2 each (CAA took out 6 scripts, and Original just the 2 it sold). Art/Work Entertainment and Brillstein each had one sale, as did ICM (out of 4). 

About The Spec Market Roundup:

The Spec Market Roundup is a terribly unscientific analysis of the feature film spec script market based on information culled from a variety of public and non-public sources.  It does not include pitch sales nor the film rights to underlying material.  These are by no means official numbers, merely a fairly complete summary.