Archive for the ‘Jewerl’ tag
Silent R Management’s Jewerl Ross: The Next Greatest Thing
It was his senior year at Yale University when Jewerl Ross decided he should be a representative in Hollywood. Ross had grown up in L.A., but left the area to study political science at Yale. Back in L.A., he pursued his new goal, working entry level positions for a few agencies before joining APA as an agent in 1999. Later, Marathon hired Ross as a manager. In January of 2006, Ross left to form his own company, Silent R Management.
Q: What’s important for a writer to consider in choosing a story to write?
A: Writers need to know what is going on in the business. They need to have read scripts that have sold. They need to have read movies that have gotten made. If a writer reads one third of the scripts that have sold around town, they’ll a get a sense of what they should and should not be writing.
If I go talk at any college, panel or screenwriting festival, ninety percent of the people I encounter are writing dramas. Of all the screenplays that sold last month or the month before or the year before, how many of them were dramas? Two or three? Yet, ninety percent of everybody at any school or screenwriting conference is writing a drama. That’s a mistake. Maybe one of those dramas is the brilliant next thing, but likely, that’s one in two thousand. I had a better chance of getting into Yale than you have of selling a drama. And I thought getting into Yale was pretty hard.
If someone has read and knows what is selling, they will have a pretty good idea about what to write and what not to write. Passion is really important. Writing things that people have seen before is really important–not writing something so different that it is not accessible to anyone. Great screenwriting is taking all the conventions of Hollywood–don’t kill your lead, root for your main character, have a three act structure–and putting them in a box and then taking that box and elevating it, making it the best representation of those conventions anyone has seen. That’s one way to go and that’s hopefully what most of my clients are doing. The other way to go is writing things that are just so different they catch my attention. I was talking with a friend the other day about a screenplay about a guy that has a relationship with his hand puppet and how funny and endearing and tragic the screenplay was. And it’s something that I’d never seen before. It was weird, it was different and it caught my eye.
I once read a screenplay that had all the conventions of a typical buddy/action “Lethal Weapon” kind of movie. The only difference was his partner was a monkey; a monkey who had a heroin problem; a monkey who had an anger management problem. He talked to his monkey like another guy and the monkey talked back. No one could understand the monkey but him.
Q: How brilliant!
A: It was LAUGH OUT LOUD FUNNY! It didn’t get made, but I was able to send it to 100 people. My qualification for wanting to get involved with a screenplay is “This is so good, I can send it to 100 people and 200 people will feel great about it.”
Continued online (WBW Subscribers only):
http://www.moviebytes.com/wbw/HollywoodIQ.cfm
