It's On The Grid

Jason Scoggins is a man wearing many hats. He's a manager:

Jason Scoggins is a manager and partner at Protocol, a Beverly Hills-adjacent literary management and production company. He represents writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol's founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland. After getting his start in the entertainment business as an assistant at ICM, Scoggins became a TV Literary Agent at The Gersh Agency, followed by a stint at Writers & Artists Agency and then several years in the wilderness. He returned to the business in 2007, just in time to be impacted by the run-up to the WGA strike.

He also has a great website called Life On The Bubble, which tracks movie box office and the spec script market. Now comes his latest thing: itsonthegrid.com. I asked Jason to explain this newest venture:

What information does www.itsonthegrid.com offer that can be of value to a pre-pro or working screenwriter?

Our mission at www.itsonthegrid.com (“IOTG”) is to democratize feature film development information for the benefit of everyone in the film development community, but especially aspiring and professional screenwriters. By far the most valuable information in the system are the studio open writing and directing assignments grids (“OWAs” and “ODAs”), followed closely by the aggregated data on the spec script market. And since we’ve linked every project with the people and companies involved, the site as a whole is a game-changing tool to help manage one’s career, whether you’re already a working writer or are still working toward your big break.

Keep in mind that we’re not trying to replicate The Studio System or IMDb, which focus primarily on movie credits and development information that has been reported elsewhere (usually by Variety and The Hollywood Reporter). Those sites are great at what they do, and we’ve provided links in our details pages to IMDb and IMDb Pro (we’d include The Studio System if it was more open) so our subscribers can see people’s past credits with a mouse click. Over time, our database will mature and start to overlap more with those sites, but our tracking efforts will continue to focus on projects that haven’t yet hit the trades. A big chunk of the projects in the database can only be found on IOTG, and of course the fact that a given project is OWA or ODA is simply not available publicly anywhere else.

At a high level, IOTG has three specific types of information. In descending order of availability, the database includes:

1. Companies: We have well over 750 agencies, production companies, management companies, studios and other companies in the movie business, including contact information (where available) and links to each’s IMDb and IMDb Pro page.

2. People: The database includes almost 3650 individuals, including agents, directors, executives, managers, producers and writers. Each person is linked to their companies (where applicable) as well as to the projects on the grid with which they’re associated, and we’ve included IMDb and IMDb Pro links as well.

3. Projects: So far we have 1200 projects in the database, and the list grows daily. We started with our 2009 spec tracking grid, which has all 420+ specs that came out this year, and then added the hundreds of active development projects from our OWA/ODA grids.

The above numbers are growing on a daily basis. Now that we’ve been live for about a month, we’re starting to track projects that appear daily in the trades (Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, plus other sources like the LA Times and Production Weekly), and once we’re fully up to speed we’ll start going backwards as well, adding projects that were formerly OWA or ODA in 2009, plus our 2008 spec grid.

We founders are already finding IOTG incredibly useful (it’s improved our management businesses in a very real way), and from here on out every person, company and project added to the database will enhance our subscribers’ sense of the development business as a whole.

And that’s the important thing here: As cool as the individual components of the database are to development geeks like me, the site as a whole is what’s so valuable to aspiring and working screenwriters. It’s like having Google Maps for your writing career, no matter what stage you’re at.

Why is it important to have this information in light of the current spec script market?

Let’s start with the obvious: In Hollywood, information is…pick a cliché -- a competitive advantage, currency, power (which equals money, which equals...well, you know), etc. No matter what you do in the business, no matter what stage you’re at, having the best, most complete and most current information is inherently important. Because if you don’t know what the guy next to you (in the staff meeting, in the pitch meeting, in the signing meeting, in the waiting room) knows, you’re toast. To use the Google Maps analogy again, how much easier is it to get where you want to go if you not only know every possible route to get there but what the traffic is like between here and there? With the spec market as tough as it has been over the past two years, the information on the grid has never been more important, for working writers as well as aspiring writers.

Most pros’ careers aren’t about the spec market in the first place. The bulk of a career screenwriter’s livelihood is made through paid writing assignments, and IOTG represents two crucial things to this group:

1. It’s literally a job board, the first of its kind, since it lists hundreds of open writing assignments at the studios, as well as financed independent projects; and

2. It’s a competitive research tool, since it shows the history of a given project, including every person involved in its development, as well as competing projects set up elsewhere.

The fact that the grid shows what’s in active development at each studio as well as what specs have and have not sold is advantageous to pre-pro and pro writers alike, since the last thing you want to do is develop a pitch or a spec that is either already set up somewhere or has been seen and passed on by everyone in town.

Which brings me back to the spec market itself, and to aspiring screenwriters in particular. In addition to the competitive landscape element I mentioned, the grid is also an important way for new writers to target their first agents and managers, since it’s now possible to see at a glance all the projects a given rep took out this year. For example, knowing that John Smith at Acme Management Company only took out big action scripts this year would be helpful whether you write big action (in which case, send him a query letter immediately) or intimate family dramas (in which case, don’t waste your time).

More importantly, though, I think the death of the spec market is going to have an interesting impact on who is eligible for studio writing assignments next year. Since so few spec scripts have sold since the end of the writers’ strike, an aggressive agent can now make the argument that just because her hot new client, Sally Jones, hasn’t sold a spec or a pitch doesn’t mean Sally shouldn’t be considered for a particular gig. After all, on a percentage basis, almost no one’s sold a spec in two years.

All of which is to say, the OWA information on the grid can be as valuable to new writers as it is to existing writers.

Let's say I've got a strong story concept for a spec thriller. How could I use IOTG to help inform the development and writing of that script?

If I were you, the first thing I’d do is go to IOTG’s “Advanced Search” page and do a search of projects in the “Thriller” genre. I’m looking at the results for that search right now, and the system tells me there are:

- 94 open writing assignments in that genre around town;

- 87 unsold specs in that genre from 2009 (we won’t have 2008’s unsold scripts in the database for a couple more weeks, but for this scenario that doesn’t matter); and

- 53 other thrillers in active development that aren’t looking for writers at the moment.

Obviously, there are more than 147 thrillers in various stages of development around town, but these projects are the ones particularly active at the moment. Regardless, that’s still 234 thrillers to scan through and make sure aren’t too close to the concept you’re thinking of writing.

The search results page is pretty cool for two reasons: 1) The search results are sorted into separate tabs for “OWAs,” “Specs” and “All Projects,” and you can click from tab to tab without having to re-do your search; and 2) You can expand and collapse each individual record to see the logline and project notes without navigating away from the search results page itself.

So to get back to your question, what I’d do next is start with the OWAs tab and expand each listing to see what the project is about. If it’s something close to my concept, I’d control-click on the name of the project to open its detail page in a new window and come back to it later.

Once I was done going through the projects I’d have a pretty good sense of whether my concept was already set up somewhere or had recently been taken to market as a spec. If so, I’d have three choices: Skew my idea away from the existing ones; throw caution to the winds and write it anyway; or stick it in the drawer and move on to my next concept. No matter which choice I made, I’d be in a much better position from having done my research on IOTG.

With other subscription-based online information sites available that cover spec script sales, why is IOTG a smart choice?

Frankly, if keeping an eye on the spec market is the only thing you’re interested in, IOTG may not be the best choice for you. TrackingB.com, for example, does a really good job of staying on top of that information, and their site is a bit less expensive than our “Basic” subscription, which limits your view of the database to just specs (plus every Person and Company in the system, of course).

That said, what sets IOTG apart from the others in that particular space is its underlying technology and how we’ve designed the user experience: The site is basically a front-end for a very powerful database, and each page is built around the search box. So rather than having to struggle to find the information you’re looking for, with IOTG it’s very quick and easy.

In and of itself, the fact that the site is so data-driven is a pretty significant differentiation. And when you add in the OWA and ODA information we’re actively tracking as well, we think it’s self-evident that IOTG is a resource that simply hasn’t been available previously. As I mentioned above, our database has scores of projects that haven’t hit the The Studio System’s radar yet, which is saying something given their dominant position in the marketplace.

Anything else you’d like to add?

One additional point I’d like to make is that the site is really an outgrowth of a project we started internally, in which we set out to build a web-based tool we could use to collaborate amongst ourselves to “cover the town” – that is, to systematically capture the data we each gather on a daily basis when we do our jobs as managers. In other words, it started out as a tool designed for industry professionals, and we’ve expanded it to make it accessible (literally and figuratively) to people who haven’t yet broken into the business.

We’re really proud of the results so far – the search and browse features are really fast and powerful, and the breadth of the data itself makes my job as a manager easier and more satisfying than its ever been before. It’s great to be able to drill down into the data so quickly, clicking on a project to see who’s working on it, then clicking on one of those people to see what other projects are on their slate, selecting one of those projects to see what it’s all about, and so on.

Again, the idea is to have a grasp of the entire film development business. And if there’s one group who could benefit most from that 35,000 foot view, it’s the people whose work is at the center of it all: The screenwriters themselves.

I subscribe to a bunch of Hwood info sites, some of which I detailed here. Compared to Baseline, IOTG represents a great value and is focused on information that is directly relevant to screenwriters.

The website is here. Check it out.