There's an FAQ page on www.itsonthegrid.com itself, but it makes sense to include one here on the IOTG blog as well. Below are questions that we've either been asked by subscribers and potential subscribers or in interviews about the site. We'll add to it on an on-going basis, so keep those questions coming.
What
is IOTG?
www.itsonthegrid.com
is a subscription-supported website that provides competitive feature film
development information to entertainment industry professionals, as well as people
aspiring to break into the business.
It’s not unlike IMDb Pro or The Studio System, in that it’s a database
of movie projects and the people and companies associated with them. But instead of simply delivering
information about upcoming projects as reported in The Hollywood Reporter and
Variety, IOTG tracks development projects and makes the information available
to subscribers before it hits the trades.
The single biggest draw of the site, and the thing
that’s gotten so many people talking about it since we launched a couple of
weeks ago, are the listings of open writing assignments (“OWAs”) and open
directing assignments (“ODAs”). These
are job opportunities for professional writers and directors, and until IOTG
launched, this information was not available publicly in any form, let alone
the searchable and sortable database we built. Writers and directors had to rely solely on their agents and
managers to know about and put them up for potential. With IOTG, filmmakers now have more control over their own
careers.
As of today, our database includes over 400 studio
writing assignments in active development, over 150 independent features that
need writers as well, plus dozens of projects that need directors. In addition to OWA and ODA projects, we
have all of 2009’s spec scripts in the database (we’ll be adding 2008’s specs
during the Christmas break), plus a growing list of projects in active
development throughout Hollywood. There
are close to 1100 projects already on the grid, and it expands daily through
our tracking activities. The system
also includes links for nearly 3400 people (agents, executives, managers,
producers and writers, plus a growing list of actors and directors) and over 700
companies (agencies, management companies, production companies, studios and
other buyers). Basically, if
you’re in the film development business and you’re not already on the grid, you
will be shortly.
What
inspired the site?
Each of the IOTG founders got started at the big
agencies, where we were trained to gather information during every phone call
and share it with the rest of our departments. The way those agencies work is they gather all the collected
information into their internal databases, print out the “grids” (hence the
name of the website) on a regular basis, and distribute hard copies to the
chosen few (that is, agents on the Motion Picture Lit Department’s distribution
list). Those grids are jealously
guarded from being copied and shared with people outside the department (let
alone outside the company); some companies will fire anyone discovered to have
leaked a copy of the grid to outsiders.
As managers at smaller management and production
companies today, we all missed having ready access to all that data, so we started
to replicate the model for ourselves.
It may seem counterintuitive for competing managers to share information
with each other, but we all believe we can do our jobs better individually if
we collaborate to systematically gather competitive development information and
immediately share everything we dig up.
We end up submitting clients for the same jobs pretty frequently, but that
would have happened anyway. (That happens all the time at agencies not named
CAA, by the way; a couple of us used to joke that ICM stands for “I’ll Call Myself.”)
As we worked during the summer of 2009 to design the
website that would serve as the hub of our information gathering, we decided
there was no reason not to make our grids available to people outside our group. In fact, by doing so on a subscription
basis we could recoup the pretty heavy costs of developing and maintaining it. We knew instinctively that agents and other
managers would want access to the site for the same reasons we were building it
in the first place, but we quickly realized that the grids would be interesting
and useful to anyone whose livelihood (or future livelihood) revolved
around developing movies.
Ultimately, what started as a set of professional tools for our private
use became a general purpose, publicly-available website. We hope to make it one of the de facto official sources of information
on movies in active development in Hollywood, alongside The Studio System, the
Hollywood Creative Directory and IMDb Pro.
Who
is IOTG designed for? What are its uses?
We designed www.itsonthegrid.com
with four distinct audiences in mind:
- MP Lit agents and managers. As mentioned
above, the project started as a way for MP Lit managers to track specs, open
writing assignments and open directing assignments, so the site is primarily
designed this. Rather than having
to thumb through their instantly-out-of-date, hardcopy OWA and ODA grids (and
constantly having to copy private notes from grid to grid to grid), reps who
subscribe to the site have always-on access to web-enabled, constantly updated,
searchable and sortable versions.
The ability to attach private notes to every Project, Person and Company
record in the database is particularly helpful for this group, since they’re
able to keep track of their private data (client submissions and meetings)
alongside the public information. We
have a slate of future development plans already mapped out for the site, much
of which revolves around enhancing the site’s submission tracking features for agents
and managers in particular as well as producers and development executives (see
below).
- Professional filmmakers and screenwriters.
Generally speaking, professional writers and directors have never before
had steady access to the kind of data www.itsonthegrid.com provides (by the way, we’re often surprised by how many
literary clients don’t really understand how integral the OWA and ODA grids are
for what their reps do on a daily basis), so the site has the potential to be a
game-changer for them. Writers and
directors who are currently well-represented still use the site on a daily
basis, since knowing the history of a given project (plus everything else that
exec or producer is working on) before going in for pitches and meetings can be
a real competitive advantage. Those
literary clients who feel lost in the shuffle use the grid to “agent” their
agents and managers and get themselves in the game. And this entire group uses the grid as a competitive
development tool, the same way producers and development executives do (see
below). After all, knowing what not
to write or develop can be just as important as coming up with a great concept
in the first place.
- Producers and development executives. Producers
and development executives (and their assistants) use the site as a competitive
development tool in a number of ways.
First, making sure every project on their slates is accurately
represented on the grid helps inoculate against competing projects being put
into development across town (or even at the same studio). Second, by researching other studios’
and producers’ projects, they save their own time and development dollars by
not developing projects similar to those already in the pipeline. Beyond simply protecting themselves,
though, they also use the site to keep track of their thoughts and notes on the
specs and samples that flow across their desks every day. We’ve already gotten feedback from people
who’ve used the grid to make themselves look like the most plugged-in people in
town by doing a quick search of the grid while on a phone call or in a
development meeting.
- Aspiring filmmakers and screenwriters. If
you're serious about breaking into the film industry, you need to know as much
as you can about how the business works; what's in development around town;
who's where; and what they're working on or whom they represent. IOTG is a window into the world of
feature film development that has been all but unavailable to outsiders until
now, and aspiring writers and directors in particular have been using the site in
two primary ways since we launched recently: First, as a way to decide what spec projects to work on (or
not to work on) next, the same way the professionals do; and second, as a tool to
help achieve that most elusive of prizes:
Access. With a few
clicks of the mouse, future screenwriters and directors can figure out which
managers and agents would be most receptive to their material, thus increasing
the chances of being asked to submit their stuff for consideration for
representation.
To
be very clear, however, THE LAST THING this group should do is use the grid to
submit material directly to studios and production companies for a given open
assignment. Gatekeepers are built
into the system for a reason; one goes around them at one’s peril.
How
can aspiring writers use it? Can beginning writers benefit from it?
Beginning writers can DEFINITELY benefit from
having access to the grid. If we
were a aspiring writers, we’d use the grid in a couple of ways.
First, we’d use it as a way to study how the business
works. There are plenty of places
to learn the craft of screenwriting, but comparatively few on the business side
of the business. Even the trade
papers (The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, plus the Los Angeles Times’
“Company Town” column) usually don’t get sufficiently granular about the
development process for an aspiring writer trying to grasp how all the pieces
fit together. Between the main
site and the free section (blog.itsonthegrid.com,
where we post teasers of updates and new projects in the database as well as
news and other online articles on about the movie business), IOTG is like a graduate
class on movie development. Over
time, the database will provide a snapshot of the entire life cycle of a movie,
from spec script to development hell to greenlight to production and release.
Second, we’d use the site to study who’s developing
what around town, for several reasons:
A) To avoid writing a script too similar to something already in
development; B) To learn which executives seem to work on which kinds of films,
and which agents and managers seem to prefer material like our own; and C) So
that when we finally get our big break, we can sound like peers, rather than
someone who just got off the bus at Hollywood and Highland. Not that there’s anything wrong with
being green; we all got our start somewhere. It’s more a matter of fitting in and having things in common
with a group of people who eat, drink and sleep the film development process.
Third, we’d use www.itsonthegrid.com
to help track down copies of scripts in active development. After the writing process itself,
there’s no better way to learn the craft and refine one’s material than reading
as many professionally-written screenplays as you can get your hands on. If we can figure out the rights issues,
we plan to start an IOTG script library in the next few months. In the meantime, it’s not at all hard
to find up-to-the-minute material if you know where to look (and IOTG can point
you in the right direction).
Finally, we’d use the site to fine-tune our sense
of the marketplace. We don’t advocate
of chasing the market with one’s material (we always recommend writing that
script you absolutely HAVE TO write, as opposed to writing something because a
particular genre is the current flavor of the month), but it’s nevertheless
helpful to understand the commercial prospects of a given piece of material, as
well as the most likely potential homes for it.
Any
success stories of stories of people using the product?
We’ve only been live for a week or so, but we recently
learned that one of our studio exec subscribers used IOTG to quickly look
up a project at a competing studio during her weekly development meeting. Since the project hasn’t been announced
in the trades yet, it’s not in The Studio System or on DoneDealPro, so having
access to IOTG made her look like the smartest kid in class.
Closer to home, having access to the grid has already
improved our own productivity and efficiency. Collectively, we’ve literally made about ten times more
submissions since we launched the site than any of us had in any other similar
period this year, specifically thanks to how easy it is to see all the projects
a given producer or executive is working on. We’re big fans of the product, and it’s been great to hear
the enthusiastic response it’s been getting from everyone who tries it out.
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