Note: We'll be metering out the rest of the studios' OWA scorecards over the next week or two. Sign up for one of our feeds to get notified when a new post goes up -- the links are all at the top of the left column.
2009 OWA Scorecard: CBS Films & Columbia Pictures
by Jason Scoggins
December 30, 2009
Since there won’t be much of a spec market to track for another month
or so, I decided to fill the gap with a series of articles looking back at
an arguably more important part of the film development business: Studio Open Writing Assignments, or
OWAs. Before I begin, here’s a
quick primer for those of you unfamiliar with the term.
OWAs are job opportunities for professional screenwriters. How writers become eligible for studio
assignments, and the process by which the studios go about “filling” their
OWAs, are topics for another day.
For the purpose of this article, you just need to know the following:
- When a studio or
a production company needs a writer for a given project, the project’s
producers and development executives put the word out to their friends.
- I use the term
“friends” here in its most Hollywood sense, since in this case it includes the
big agencies’ “covering” agents, whose jobs revolve around gathering as much
information as possible about potential open writing and directing assignments
at studios and production companies.
- The fruits of
every covering agent’s labor are collected in their companies’ internal
databases, and hard-copy printouts of the databases are circulated internally
on a regular basis. Those
documents are called “OWA grids,” or simply “grids.”
Now, hard-copied grids are poor tools for tracking client submissions or the
state of a given studio’s projects in development. Live databases are much better for this purpose, and
web-enabled databases are ideal (which is one reason my colleagues and I
launched www.itsonthegrid.com). That said, the physical documents are
fairly useful snapshots of Hollywood’s most active development projects at a
given point in time. So what I
intend to do in this series is examine one agency’s grid from several points
throughout 2009 in order to get a sense of how active the various studios were
in this arena.
Obviously, I’m focusing on
one agency’s grid for the sake of consistency. (I would have used the IOTG database, but it didn’t really
exist until November 2009.) I won’t name the agency
whose grid I’m using for my comparison, but I’ve chosen it for three
reasons: 1) It’s the most
comprehensive of the three or four agencies’ grids I see on a regular basis; 2) The company did not have a major structural upheaval during the year, which
would have affected the quality of the data; and 3) It’s the one for which I
have the most copies from 2009 (six).
The dates are well distributed throughout the year, too: Mid-April; early June; mid-July,
mid-August; mid-October; and the beginning of December.
A couple of final notes: First,
there are a number of reasons a project may have been removed from the grid for
a given studio: A writer may have
been hired, the project may no longer be in active development, the project may
have changed studios, and so on.
Therefore, to keep the stats concise and consistent, I’ve labeled any
project no longer on the unnamed agency’s grid as “Closed” rather than
“Filled.” Second, since there’s so
much ground to cover (over three dozen studios and other buyers are represented
on the grid), I’ll be publishing some of the articles in this series on the
IOTG blog here: http://blog.itsonthegrid.com Keep an eye on this newsletter as well
as the blog over the course of the next several weeks to get a complete sense
of 2009’s OWA Market.
CBS Films
|
Month
|
OWAs
|
Closed
|
New
|
|
April
|
3
|
|
|
|
May
|
3
|
2:
The Christmas Cookie Club
When Dads Were Men
|
2:
A Week With Will
Keystroke
|
|
July
|
4
|
0
|
1:
Big Brave Brian
|
|
August
|
6
|
1:
A Week With Will
|
3:
Ex-Files
The Best Mistakes
The Eternals
|
|
October
|
6
|
1:
The Eternals
|
1:
I Didn’t Like Him Anyway
|
|
December
|
6
|
0
|
0
|
In addition to the above 9 projects, “Assault on Pelindaba” was on the
grid for CBS Films since at least April.
Since CBS Films is such a new studio (they were formed in 2007), it was fairly
easy to compare the above with the company’s slate as listed in two of the most
frequently cited film development websites (FilmTracker.com and IMDb Pro). I had expected to see the two sites’
listings more or less mirror each other, since they glean their data in similar
ways (primarily from articles in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and the Los
Angeles Times). I was
surprised to discover they diverged significantly: Four of the ten projects on the agency grid are listed in
FilmTracker (“A Week With Will,” “The Best Mistakes,” “The Christmas Cookie
Club” and “The Eternals”), and a different set of five of the ten appear in
IMDb Pro (“A Week With Will,” “Big Brave Brian,” “The Christmas Cookie Club,”
“The Eternals and “When Dads Were Men”).
Columbia Pictures
|
Month
|
OWAs
|
Closed
|
New
|
|
April
|
36
|
|
|
|
May
|
31
|
8:
A Butler
Well Served by This Election
Angelology
Gidget
Meet
John Doe
No
Impact Man
Socialite
Rank
Total
Recall (Remake)
Unt.
Columbus Short/Channing Tatum Project
|
3:
Destination
Wedding aka Honeymoon
Unt.
Indian Baseball Project
Venom
|
|
July
|
30
|
8:
A Capella
Beautiful
Dreadnaught
My Wife Hates Your Wife
The Reliable Wife
Unt. Indian Baseball Project
Uprising aka Alien Prison
|
7:
Bad Boys
3
Grand
Prix
King
Dork
No
Impact Man
Shell
Game
Unt.
Somali Pirate Rescue Project
Unt.
Maguire True Life Thriller Project
|
|
August
|
27
|
9:
American
Neurotic
Foundation
Trilogy
Grand
Prix
Me and
My Monster
Metal
Gear Solid
Sisters
of Mercy
The
Lords’ Day
Unt.
Maguire True Life Thriller Project (changed to Indie)
Venom
|
6:
End of
the Road aka Unt. Tough Sexy Crime Chase Film
Hothouse
Flowers
J-Mac
aka Unt. Jason McElwain Autistic Basketball Player Project
Maximum
Ride
Stealing
Time aka Anakythera Clock
Unt.
Natalie Portman Project aka The Devil Wears Oxfam
|
|
October
|
25
|
8:
Bad Boys
3
Hancock
2
Jerry
the Giant Killer aka Jack The…
J- Mac
aka Unt. Jason McElwain Autistic Basketball Player Project
Stealing
Time aka Anakythera Clock
The
Billionaire’s Vinegar
Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
Vitus
|
6:
Cooked
Eat My
Dust
Grayskull: The Masters of the Universe aka
He-Man
Modern
Love
The Last
Pharaoh aka Taharqa
Working
Mom
|
|
December
|
24
|
8:
End of
the Road aka Unt. Tough Sexy Crime Chase Film
Ghost
Rider 2
Hothouse
Flowers
King
Dork
Shell
Game
Unt.
Allen Counter Project
Unt. Natalie
Portman Project aka The Devil Wears Oxfam
Unt.
Somali Pirate Rescue Project
|
7:
Cities aka Extreme Cities
Flowers for Algernon
I Dream of Jeannie
Real Genius
Risk
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
The Lost Symbol
|
I have to admit, before I did this exercise I didn’t have a true sense
of the scope of the studios' active development slates. I assumed every major studio had hundreds of scripts sitting
on the proverbial shelf, but like my spec market analysis this year, I couldn’t
see the forest for the trees until I started breaking down the data. The above grid represents just the 60+
projects at Columbia that actively sought writers during 2009, and it doesn’t
even include the projects that were too high level to make it onto the
grid (e.g., Spider-Man 4) or already had writers in place. That’s a lot of material, all of which
is supervised by a relatively small group of people. I have a new appreciation for the workload of studio
production and development executives.
Also, I previously had no sense at all of how many projects were added to or
removed from the grid on a monthly basis.
Sony hired writers for at least 40 projects in 2009, and the real number
is no doubt upwards of 50 (I really wish I had good data for January through
mid-April now). That’s roughly ten
times the number of specs they bought in 2009 (five, as of December 16), and
it’s much clearer now why Sony publicly stated toward the end of the year that
they intended not to purchase much original material for the foreseeable
future. Given how few movies the
studios now finance and produce in-house each year, Sony really does have
enough projects in the hopper to get through several years’ worth of production
if they wanted. (Let’s hope their
outstanding year at the international box office results leads to an investment
in new material anyway.)
Compared to CBS Films, more of Columbia’s OWAs showed up in FilmTracker and
IMDb Pro on a percentage basis (two interesting ones that I haven’t seen
discussed publicly so far are the remakes of “Grand Prix” and “Real Genius”),
though this is probably to be expected given how long most of their projects
have been in development. “I Dream
Of Jeannie,” for example, hit the grid in December again; according to
FilmTracker, the project has had at least seven different writers/teams to
date.
About The Scoggins Reports:
The Scoggins Reports (Jason Scoggins’ Spec Market Roundup, Spec Market
Scorecard and now this OWA Scorecard) are terribly unscientific analyses of the
feature film development business based on information culled from a variety of
public and non-public sources. 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://bit.ly/2HRZ67) 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 recently launched by Scoggins and several other literary
managers. For daily posts of new
and updated spec script, OWA and ODA information, check out the IOTG blog
here: http://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: http://twitter.com/itsonthegrid.
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