“All you need is a final draft and a dream”

Edited for length and clarity.

What do you actually do for a client?

Adam Kolbrenner: We do everything. You don’t have to do very much.

No — I think what we do, on the management side and the agency side both, is act as advocates for voices. That’s the key to finding good representation: people who recognise what your voice is and what stories you want to tell, and who will advocate for them in the marketplace.

For me a big part of that is development. Leaning into story. That requires patience, time and a lot of reading. We end up reading draft after draft after draft to make it right. You take it from the idea phase to production, if you’re lucky enough.

Kailey Marsh: I always think of my clients as my partners.

There’s no catch-all advice for how to work with a manager, because everybody’s different. Like any relationship — you have a group of friends, but you go to one friend for one thing and another for something else.

We read a lot of drafts and we’re in your corner at every step. If something personal is happening, we want to know, because it’s probably going to affect your work. And we care about you as a person — ideally, if we’re your manager.

It’s reciprocal. Tell me what you need. If you want another pair of eyes on a draft, say so. If you want to write the whole thing and not hear my opinion until the very end, I’d like to know that up front so I can cater to it.

Noah Ballard: The most clinical description of an agent is: we’re there to negotiate the best rate for the work you’re selling, and in failure to get those rights back as cleanly as possible.

On the ground it doesn’t feel like that. A lot of agents in my age bracket are quite managerial, thinking at a strategic level.

I run the IP team at Verve — book publishing, audio, media rights, digital, and whatever connective tissue those underlying rights have with our core film and TV business. So it often starts with a book, an article, a short story, a podcast.

Then the strategy comes in. What’s the goal? If we set your book up well and the publisher is excited, we can use the heat off that sale to get a studio interested in optioning the rights. If your goal is to be in a writers’ room, or adapt your own work, or start a podcast, or do a live tour — I’m there to give you the thirty-thousand-foot view. Here’s the menu. How do we put these together so your business can sustain itself?

What attracts you to material?

Adam Kolbrenner: Great ideas, but really great voice. Unique ideas. Stories well told.

The first draft I ever read of anything from David Guggenheim was Safe House. He was working at Us Weekly covering The Bachelor every week, his first child was on the way, and he was under immense pressure to deliver. So he worked fast.

We sold it in a seven-studio bidding war. The movie got made with Denzel and Ryan Reynolds, and it was in theatres within a couple of years. He did the development work quickly, the story was original and unique, and it lit the town on fire.

Noah Ballard: Voice, with a caveat — my job is to sit in the marketplace and know what people are interested in buying. But ultimately if something is really good and has a voice you can’t put down, that’s what gets editors, executives, talent and producers excited.

I work with a hospice nurse called Hadley Vlahos. Someone told me I had to read her essays. She also has a TikTok following in the millions — during the pandemic she’d talk direct to camera about the patients she’d been with, often in cases where families couldn’t be there because of COVID restrictions.

She put it into essay form: a collection about what she’d learned about being alive from being with people at the end of their lives.

We built the proposal together and sent it out. Eight publishers bid. Random House put it out and it sat on the New York Times bestseller list for months. It’s now working through the network system as an adaptation, and it’s opened doors for her to develop a nonfiction show and write another book.

An essay collection isn’t new. A memoir isn’t new. Hearing from a medical professional isn’t new. But I’d never heard from a hospice nurse before.

Kailey Marsh: I’d echo that, and add that the personal experience behind the writing matters.

I’m not saying that if you’re a nurse you have to write about being a nurse. But if I respond to something and then sit down with the writer, it’s about getting to know why they wrote it.

I have a client pitching something right now, and his preamble about why he’s writing it — growing up feeling othered, feeling like a nerd — I think that’s what’s going to sell the project. He’s great on the page and he has fans around town. But the personal touch, the authenticity, it seeps through.

You can usually tell in a page or two whether something feels fresh.

What skills does a writer need beyond the page?

Kailey Marsh: It’s shifted a lot in the past decade. You have to be a salesperson now, and I don’t think that was always true. Writers weren’t required to be extroverted and constantly selling themselves — on social media, or face to face with someone they’ve admired for years.

These days more and more, they are.

Adam Kolbrenner: The other path is being collaborative and understanding the development process. Which is hard, because if you’re an artist you think: I have painted this magnificent masterpiece, please sell it to the highest bidder.

You have to be able to recognise that your work needs more work. That’s essential for writers today.

Noah Ballard: The traditional studios, networks, streamers and publishers are increasingly just the distribution mechanism to get to eyeballs. Which puts the onus on the writer to create the following, the fandom, the excitement around their own work.

Look at Quinta Brunson, who came out of the digital space with a body of work that showed people: if we give you the keys, the car will drive and people will follow. Or Benito Skinner with Overcompensating.

They created a groundswell of interest, and then it becomes easier for a studio — which isn’t really in the business of incubating new people, but of distributing them.

For better or worse, and I know it’s a lot of work, and writers aren’t naturally extroverted people — but it means thinking of yourself as more than someone starving in a garret. It means building a body of work you can point to and say: if you give me this opportunity, it’ll pay returns.

Kailey Marsh: And consistency online. Benito and Quinta have been putting themselves out there for years. I was sharing Quinta’s videos without even knowing it was her. That consistency matters, if this is going to be part of what you do.

What makes you reconsider working with someone?

Noah Ballard: Expectations that aren’t realistic, or aren’t lined up with what I can actually do.

The dirty little secret is that I work really hard, but I don’t have any special sauce that lets me open a door someone else couldn’t open for themselves. What I can offer is relationships, connections, insight, and a gut feeling about things.

Earlier in my career I worked with clients who expected the carpet to be rolled out at the slightest bite of interest. The truth is a lot of the onus is on you to be your own best advocate.

Where’s the market right now?

Kailey Marsh: It’s exciting that specs are selling to studios again, because that took a second. There have been a couple of articles saying it’s the best spec market since 2017.

Staffing has been brutal. But here’s a story. I have a client getting staffed right now — I’ve worked with them for eight years. They’d had a great meeting about a show, and something came up in conversation with the showrunner where they went: oh my gosh, I forgot this huge part of my past, I never mentioned it because I didn’t think it was important.

That’s what put them ahead of everyone else for the job.

You never know. Since going back out on my own it’s been so hard, but the reason I keep doing this is that when you get the win — you get the person staffed, you sell the spec — I’m producing an independently financed movie in three weeks with a client I’ve worked with for fourteen years.

It really is like playing the lotto. A lot of people don’t play. I do, every time. You never know when you’re going to win. I know that’s corny, but it is what it is.

How does a project actually go out?

Adam Kolbrenner: All you need is a final draft and a dream.

Nothing is ever finished in the screenplay format. It evolves right up until the film is shot, posted and in theatres. It’s never done.

But at that point the job is figuring out how you climb Mount Everest with your story. You need base camps along the way, and those base camps are the right passionate people to help tell it. We have to know who those collaborators are, get them on board, get them invested. Then they take the reins to the next base camp.

Every step is hard. But that’s the process.

Kailey Marsh: It depends what you’re going out with. If it’s a buddy comedy with two clear lead roles, you see whether you can attach the best talent possible.

One of the most fun specs I ever sold started with a client and me coming up with an idea. He wrote it on spec and said, you know who’d be perfect? Chris Hemsworth.

So I said — let’s just get it to Chris Hemsworth.

I’m an optimist. You might as well shoot for the stars. We got him, and it went to something like a ten-way bidding war because people loved him. We got Tiffany Haddish too.

Directors are harder. People say attach a director, and I think: which one? Any huge director is busy for the next couple of years. They want to do it, but they’re not available, and they can fall off after eighteen months. Speaking from personal experience.

Adam Kolbrenner: Attaching elements is tricky, because what works for one buyer doesn’t work for another.

But it comes back to finding people who are crazy passionate. When you find the right director you know they want to tell this story, they’ll stay involved, they won’t give it up. There’s value in that. Even if it takes eighteen months or two years — if it’s Ridley Scott, you wait. Those are the risks we take.

Noah Ballard: What your reps are doing when they submit is chasing that passion.

For me it’s often finding the editor at a publishing house who I know will make an impassioned plea to their corporate bean counters to spend more on a particular book, or bid at all.

And the other thing a rep is good for is being somewhat dispassionate about the rejection you will receive. Someone has passed on even the biggest projects I’ve ever sold. Not taking it personally — though I do take it incredibly personally, I just don’t tell anyone.

Then, if you have multiple interested parties, working out who you should actually go with. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve advised clients before that a particular editor, or a particular studio, is the better choice even though they’re offering less money. Because I think it will actually get made and actually be successful.

How do you handle rejection with a client?

Noah Ballard: It only takes one.

I had to tell a client that recently. We went out with a book, there was a lot of interest at first, and it ended up being one place that put together an impressive offer. In his mind he wanted to be able to pick. But sometimes it really is one — one publisher, one studio, one lead producer. At some point that makes itself obvious.

A good rep can also give you perspective on why it didn’t work, and read the tea leaves on what’s an executive being polite versus real constructive feedback.

I have a client who made the rounds with the traditional places for a television project, and now a brand is interested in financing it. That’s still a great option to get it on screen. It may be different from what you imagined, but it’s no less impressive that someone sees the vision.

You want to be in business with the people most passionate about your story — not the people defensively bidding because someone else might get it.

Kailey Marsh: There’s so much rejection that I try to hide it from clients. Telling them about every single producer who passes wouldn’t be healthy. We do it constructively. Sometimes executives write out their thoughts, which is enormously helpful and more than we expect, given how much they have to read.

And on passion — as someone who works for herself, and did for years before joining a prestigious company, I’m so thankful for the clients who took a risk on a young woman working out of her apartment. I got a show on the air with two of them that ran twenty-six episodes.

So if there’s a producer with fewer credits but a lot of passion, it’s genuinely up to us and the client to decide whether they’re the right person. It’s very rare that I fall for the shiny coin. We’ve seen too many times who actually gets things done.

The big agencies are great. But there are boutique agencies just as good, and it really depends on the individual. Is the story editor I’m sending you to meet someone you think is beneath you? Well — that person’s a star and will be running a studio. Whereas the SVP who’s in your DMs every day wanting to golf with you is not going to be helpful. I’m telling you. I’ve worked with them on four projects.

Nothing is ever finished in the screenplay format. It evolves right up until the film is shot, posted and in theatres. It’s never done.

Adam Kolbrenner speaking on stage at State of the Story, DGA Theater, New York