Agents and the market for new work
The information presented here comes from our own knowledge as well as interviews with agents.
Some agencies like Alan Brodie, The Agency, Casarotto Ramsay and Peters Fraser and Dunlop have well-established and successful lists of clients. Others have long been established in other fields but have only recently set up departments representing dramatists. All agents will say they are always on the look out for new talent to add to their list of clients. The individual entries on the agencies are intended to give more specific information on their differing histories, interests and policies.
A writer can cost an agent about £1500 - £2000 a year to administrate. The agent therefore needs commissions worth at least £20,000 just to balance the books. At the same time the work of an agent can cost the agency anything like £45,000 per year. Therefore he or she may have to bring in £450,000 from all his or her clients to cover their own expenses. For this reason, an agent cannot afford to make glib decisions about which writers to take on.
"You take on a career, not one play. You have to intuit what the third play will be. And you have to be able to get on ... particularly as writers sometimes get more neurotic on their fifth play than on their first."
At base an agent may see their role as simply to ensure that the writer makes a living from writing. But with the opportunities shrinking for a young writer to learn from seeing their work actually produced, the newer agents have to be prepared to do not just the work of a personal manager and promoter but that of a dramaturg too; giving feedback, in some cases even arranging workshops or readings. In any case, the relationship between client and agent has to be based on trust.
A good agent will work with a writer to identify ways forward, building up contacts so that the latter can best realise the kind of work he or she wants to do. Sending out scripts, giving producers regular updates on the current work of their clients is the leg-work and it is "a mind-numbingly slow business." The agency itself has to plan for the long term. As one agent ironically puts it:
"In the end what you are actually doing is looking forward to the day when you don't have to deal with new writers at all."
In other words, the agent has established a successful portfolio of clients who are respected enough to generate their own work. Knowing the best means of plotting the development of each of their clients through the different opportunities the industry offers to achieve this blessed state is one sign of a good agent.
Radio
Radio often represents the most open market for new work. The great turnover of drama required means that most agents see it as the place for writers to learn their apprenticeship. As one put it:
"They are always genuinely looking for new work. There is a care and professionalism in radio which a writer needs to develop his or her craft. And where else could you hope to work with the most accomplished professional actors?"
Television vs Theatre?
With the focus on digitalisation and cheap product, the television market continues to be uncertain. With restructuring at the BBC and new bi-media initiatives, writers may be able to move more easily between radio and television. On the other hand, as producers become increasingly schedule driven, "gone are the days when a Dennis Potter play could just simply get done at someone's suggestion."
Perhaps the most certain trend is the demise of the single play for television, which now produces only 50% of output 20 years ago. If, on average, a third of plays commissioned by theatres don't make it to production, only 1 out of 25 commissions for television and film are screened. And in one agent's words "it is now virtually impossible for a writer new to television to have a single play produced." In its place are the short 5 - 10 minute slots (pioneered by Channel 4's "Short and Curlies") and series and serials. To meet the output television is hungry for writers; it may however be the wrong form of hunger and agents are often wary of its attractions. Yet there is a recognition that these forms do present their own creative challenges which demand and develop particular skills in a writer and these are prized:
"Some writers say to me: does working in television mean having to write The Bill or EastEnders? And I think: you should be so lucky ..."
On the other hand, there is a recognition that much television output is mediocre and that writers can be chewed up by being pushed in to it too early. One tells the story of one of his clients who had crafted an extremely realistic play set in a prison cell. The television executives, whom the agent had interested in the script, on finding that the writer was a middle-class young man with a Cambridge degree rather than the genuine ex-con they had expected, took umbrage and told the writer to write about what he knew. It is an almost universal complaint of agents that the industry constantly (and perhaps congenitally) fails to accord the respect to young writers it reserves for older ones.
Television then can be the last place in which the writer can build confidence. Theatre, many agents believe, is where he or she can develop a unique voice:
"If you can write a good stage play, you can write anything. It is very, very difficult."
Yet there has been a huge reduction in conventional outlets for theatre work. The older agents look back to a time when a marketable play could proceed along a chain from the fringe to rep to the West End, perhaps even to Broadway, then Hollywood ...? The job was therefore to negotiate the work along this chain. Nowadays, a repertory theatre will, if it produces new work at all, commission writers themselves rather than take a play on from another source. Meanwhile, the West End is now a terrifying financial risk for the producers of a new musical let alone a straight, new play. So now agents can be in the position of offering to drive West End producers to a theatre just to get them to see a client's work. The chain broken, as one agent put it, "the fringe and the West End are now annexed from one another."
One means of addressing the problem which is not surprisingly popular with agents is the refunding of the Arts Council scheme for second productions of new plays. There is also a call for more creative ways of widening the audience for new work (and maximising the return from a client's work): more co-commissions and collaborations between theatres with the possibility for the collaborators getting a cut if the play then gets a third production. More ambitiously, there is a suggestion for a publicly funded national second production company.
The current circumstances thus slew the balance of new writing towards the fringe. If this can be an environment supporting genuine innovation it can, in one agent's view, be exploitative in exactly the same way as television.
"The fringe has a mind-set which makes new writing the charity arm not the forefront of theatre; the psychological marginalisation of new work to studios. It can be snooty and totally unaware of its own audience. Can you blame young people for not going to the theatre? Film and television are generally more exciting for them."
The Up-Side
On the up-side, there is relief that the sanctimoniousness of the new writing lobby believing that new work should get done simply because it was new rather than good has disappeared, the threat of an auteur director's theatre has receded and that theatres are beginning slowly to respond better to writers. And after nearly ten years of little progress, there has finally been a significant improvement in the amounts paid for new work - an advance that some believe owns a great deal to the work of the PMA (Personal Managers Association).
The agent's market orientated view is of course a limited one. Yet it gives an informed sense of the potential for writers in the industry. You may think you are writing the kind of work that no agent would be interested in anyway. The most important thing to remember is that no agent can now promise to get your work on. In this context, examining more carefully your reasons for wanting an agent is the first step.
To go straight to the Literary Agents click here.
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