Why Hollywood Needs Books More Than Ever

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0:31This episode of The Town is presented to you by AMC Networks. Billy Magnuson and Zach Galifianakis star in the new series, The Audacity, on AMC and AMC+. Influence rises, people unravel, and CEO meltdowns are business as usual among Silicon Valley elite. Executive produced by Jonathan Glatzer, a writer-producer of Succession and Better Call Saul. The Audacity premieres April 12th, only on AMC and AMC+. It is Wednesday, April 1st. What do four of the big movies of the year so far at the box office have in common? There's Project Hail Mary, Weathering Heights, Reminders of Him, The Housemaid. All four are high-profile book adaptations, continuing the long tradition of books to screen, going all the way back to the first Hollywood blockbusters like Casablanca 100 years ago.

1:22These days, every movie producer is on the hunt for material that feels theatrical. And if it's not a sequel or toy brand or pre-branded character, popular books are still the next best thing, arguably more important than ever, as we seem to be coming out of an era where superheroes were the big IP draw. Those stories, remember, were also comic books. Now, with the rise of female-focused authors like Colleen Hoover and Frieda McFadden, big audience aggregators like BookTok and the various celebrity book clubs, Craig's a big fan of the Reese books, the pre-branding of that built-in book audience can more reliably lead to a built-in audience for an original movie.

1:59That's giving more power to the book rights holders, according to the reps I've talked to. So it's time we did a check-in on that market. What genres and authors are hot right now? Maybe who's fallen out of favor? And some of the prices that authors can get to option their work. I've got Jason Richman on the show today. He's an agent at UTA, the big talent agency. And we're going to talk about it all. Today, it's the book-to-screen pipeline and the hot properties for movie and TV adaptations. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

2:34All right, we are here with Jason Richman, who is a partner and co-head of the media rights group at UTA. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Okay, I wanted to do this episode because obviously we've seen with Project Hail Mary and Housemaid and a bunch of other recent hits, this is not a new phenomenon. Books have been ripe for adaptation since literally the beginning of the movie business. But I do feel like books are kind of having a moment right now. And it's because this notion of what is theatrical and what can get an audience into a theater is changing. And if you don't have the pre-branded IP, you're looking at books.

3:19And you've been doing this for a while. Describe the market for adaptations right now. Yeah, I have. Well, and thanks again for having me. You know, literary adaptations are hot. They're white hot right now. But how is it different from this, the past 20, 30 years? Because books have always been hot. And book adaptations have always made good movies. I just think that because everyone's looking for safety, yet quasi-originality, it's lending itself to books being the kind of default. if you can find a hot book, or we'll get to this in a moment, if you can get in early on something that becomes a hot book, then you have a leg up not only in getting something made, but in finding an audience.

4:00Well, you know, someone has already anointed it. A book has been published. So there is an innate foundation, a readership there. But it's interesting, Matt, when I started at UTA many moons ago, our department was called the book department. We weren't in publishing at all whatsoever. But that term has evolved into media rights to, I think, really, really speak to the growth and what constitutes media rights these days. It's books, it's short stories, it's podcasts, it's life story rights, it's optioning a TikTok story down the line. It's a really, really exciting time to be in our business. Okay, so walk me through the process here.

4:42You are representing a rights holder. what could what is the going rate right now for a decent author to get an option from a producer matt you know we're not going to talk numbers here of course we are you don't have to give me names you know you don't have to give me names but we're aggressive agents and advocates for i know but like obviously andy weir had a huge hit with the martians so his next book is going to be a big commodity yeah but authors that maybe are not that what is the market like what genres are hot right now. Yeah. You know, so, so memoirs, I think it's, we're going to have a year of the memoir.

5:19So, you know, I represent a woman named Belle Burden who had a memoir called Strangers that was published in early January. The history in terms of how she came to me, I read a modern love column that she had written in summer of 2023. For the New York Times. For the New York Times. And it was, you know, it was evocative and moved me and I needed to meet this woman. She secretly made a book deal and spent the last few years writing that memoir. I got the opportunity to read it last fall, and it just, I inhaled it. It was so damn good. And I, you know, had the opportunity to meet with her, signed her, and, you know, it was a little bit of kismet in terms of the reaction, but we kind of knew it.

6:04You know, we have to have so much conviction as we're reading things so, so early before they become I'm a number one New York Times bestseller and created a stir in the marketplace. Right, and that's what I want to get to here is this frenzy to get books way before the public has read them. Yeah. I mean, Project Hail Mary was acquired before it was even finished. And The Housemaid was a very early pickup. Like, what is the process now for getting these books for producers? Are you getting emails from producers that hear rumors that someone is starting to write something, or if there is a column in the New York Times that could eventually become a book, is their activity that early now?

6:48Very, very early. You know, there are products that we've sold in book proposal form. You know, I sold hidden figures when it was just a book proposal. You know, they had to rush the manuscript to be delivered and published by the time in advance. So they had some leeway in advance of the movie. We're reading things at every step of the way. I think it's a conversation that we're having with our partners and with the authors and rights holders at the end of the day. When is the moment to strike? You know, we knew with Strangers that there was going to be a lot of great press. And, you know, we thought the reviews were going to be brilliant, which they ended up being.

7:24And that really helped us with our sales process at that time. But there are plenty of others. You know, I just got back from the London Book Fair a few weeks ago. and there's a book that we're handling that kind of became the media rights book of the fair called White Smoke. It's written under a pseudonym of Nick Brucker. The real life author is Nick Binge, who I do believe is kind of the next Andy Weir who specifically really writes in the genre space. But this one, it's a great heist thriller, super character forward that's almost Ocean's Eleven and the Vatican. Okay. It's a fun, fun excitement across the film and television industry right now.

8:04Okay, so besides the boosterism, I want to get to some nitty gritty here. Like, what can an author who has some heat around an idea or a book proposal or a manuscript agent approaches and says, I can get you this. What are producers paying for rights? Because I've heard that you, it's sort of a volume game now, if you're a producer. You're just trying to scour and find whatever you can to option. And then it's like playing the lottery. Maybe some of these books don't become phenomenons or become popular. Some of them do. And then you hit, and then there's a frenzy for a studio that wants to make it.

8:44When you're doing those option deals, what can an author expect to get? And how early would you recommend they do one of these deals? It's such a range. I think we are typically selling projects probably just in the lead up to publication. If it's being published, it's almost, you know, you've almost missed that moment of reviews hitting and the excitement. And any producer worth his salt has already heard about the project and evaluated it and decided to either go for it or pass. The smart producers out there who are really tapped into the book game and the media rights landscape, you know, know what they're doing.

9:22We're in touch with them constantly. And that was always the thing about Scott Rudin, the producer, before he got like quasi canceled. He would have relationships in the publishing world in New York, and he could get access to things way before others, at least back in the day. I imagine many producers purport to or even actually do have those kinds of relationships now. Well, and also, Matt, like every studio and production company out there has a what's called a book scout who were out there scouting material across the global landscape. So a hundred grand, 200 grand. What's like a good book option.

10:00It's such a spectrum. And at the end of the day, I think we are, you know, especially with the changes going on in the film industry right now, you know, our goal is to get it made, not just like we can continue optioning books until the cows come home. Like I think, I think our prerogative is setting it up for the best, runway so that it will ultimately make it to the screen. And what's the dichotomy right now in the market between fiction and nonfiction? Is nonfiction still hot? There was a time when everybody was looking for a rip from the headlines. Yeah, nonfiction is still hot. I think we represent a lot of publications that either retain or the journalists themselves who retain the derivative rights to their world.

10:43Well, it used to be that the journalists could get a lot of rights if you wrote for big magazines. and they changed all that. I went back when I was writing for magazines, like I sold, I sold a small article that I did for details magazine, which does not exist anymore to a producer. John Davis bought this article and he only liked the title and it was called whale hunters. It was about Las Vegas concierges. Yep. And he loved the title. He thought it would be a good dirty, rotten scoundrels movie. I got 10 grand and then they re-upped the option. This was tiny, but this is 20 years ago. And nothing ever came of it.

11:25But that used to be a good market for journalists where you could retain the rights. Now these magazines keep a lot of the rights. They try to have businesses built around these rights. Sometimes they kiss in the journalists. Sometimes if you're a big name, you can negotiate that. But it's not really the same. These magazines and newspapers that have tried to create businesses around their nonfiction offerings, that doesn't seem like a great business. Hey, you know, we're lucky enough to represent a lot of journalists who still have the ability to retain their derivative rights. And so that's been very fruitful in terms of our positioning for their articles and their narrative nonfiction.

12:04Well, that's good. Which I think is really, really exciting. So those opportunities still do exist. Did you see this Atlantic piece about the cartel Olympics? I didn't. Oh, my God. It's a hilarious article. McKay Coppins wrote it. And it was basically about how this journalist was approached by a producer, a manager. This guy manages the killers and wanted to produce something. And he had heard this story. this guy was shopping his life rights where he purported to be kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel and forced to perform in essentially an Olympic Games amongst captive people and the losers would be murdered.

12:49Pretty compelling story, right? And the producer wanted to hire the journalist to investigate this life rights claim to see if it was real. And this was an example what i thought was fascinating was they were trying to engineer a movie out of this guy's life rights but they wanted someone to essentially legitimize it through a big article in the atlantic or wherever and it turned into this whole saga i won't ruin the article but the end of the day is it didn't really matter to the producer whether it was true or false just the notion of the investigation was enough like d is have you heard of that before where journalists are now hired to legitimize certain, you know, stories that are out there.

13:36It's interesting. I think that there's definitely conversations from producers that maybe they can reverse engineer it through. Yeah, because there's all these companies. Journalists are, Mark Bowles started a company like that. And there's lots of others where they're trying to engineer the article alongside the rights adaptation. Yeah. You know, a lot of the time, though, the journalists that we're working with, you know, they're journalists at heart. And so they want to be able to tell the story and find the story that they want to tell rather than try to find the movie within, you know, the article or piece that they may be in trying to shoehorn in for a magazine.

14:13Yeah, and it's not a great business. All these journalists who think they're going to go to Hollywood and become millionaires because they can generate IP, like they soon find that it takes five years to get something off the ground. They're like, wait a second, I gave up my New York magazine job to come to LA. And now I'm sitting around doing nothing while they wait to decide whether this producer is interested in developing my project. This episode is brought to you by the Home Depot. Spring is starting, so it's time to wake up your yard. And at the Home Depot, they've got everything you need to do with low prices guaranteed.

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15:34All right. So we talked a little bit about the hot genres. I want to talk a little bit about the hot authors specifically. We do a lot of power rankings on this show. Give me your power rankings of authors right now. Irrespective of UTA clients, I don't plug your book here. Give us like, is Stephen King still number one? Stephen King feels like he's still number one. I would also put Harlan Coben up there. Uh-huh. You look at his track record in terms of the amount of books that he is publishing on like an annual basis these days. Right. And the amount that have, you know, turned into series, whether they're for the U.S.

16:15audience or kind of in local for global audiences through his massive deal over at Netflix. Okay. Who's that? Is Michael Connelly on there? He's got Lincoln Lawyer. He did Bosch. Like, is he still up there? Michael Connelly is up there. Absolutely. For movies, it's got to be Colleen Hoover right now, right? Colleen's having an amazing year. You know, I think reminders of him that she adapted and produced, you know, is a great, great turn for Universal. And, you know, we're really, really excited to see Verity this summer. directed by Michael Showalter that I think is going to be a big hit. So who else?

16:49Who else? You know, selfishly, I love Ellen Hildebrand, you know, who, you know, had the perfect couple, has the five-star weekend coming out this summer that we're really, really excited about for Peacock. Also really excited about Leon Moriarty, the author of Big Little Lies, who has Big Little Truths coming out this fall. Lies to truths, okay. It's an actual, it's an actual. So take us through that. So what, so obviously that's the follow-up to a big franchise. Did HBO have the rights to go after that? Or was it an open market? Yeah, we had to make a deal with them. So, you know, there's - You had to do a deal with HBO?

17:24Yes. Yeah, there were character rights, you know, contractually in the past deal for Big Little Lies, of course. And for the authors that are one tier down or two tiers down, what kind of expectations should they have if they are writing something that they feel is cinematic? I get asked this all the time. I have friends who've written books. I have people in the publishing world who say, I want to know the pitfalls here of signing up with a producer who's asking me to sign an option deal that looks a little sketchy and they're not going to hire a big entertainment lawyer to look at it yet because they're not at that level.

18:03What are the red flags in a deal? I would say no right of reversion, which basically means that if said producer or said buyer ends up exercising their right to purchase the rights outright, that you have no, you know, escape hatch. You want to be able to get it back if nobody's doing anything. I just had to unravel a deal at a, you know, major network with a deal that was made over 20 years ago for a, you know, big legendary author. And there was no reversion. See, that sucks. That's where you get into Hollywood hell. You feel helpless to inherit that. and, you know, it's, but it happens. And people take it.

18:45So what do you do? Do you end up paying them? No, we figured it out. You figured it out, meaning you got it out. Yeah, it's also incumbent on us as representatives. I've leveraged my own personal relationships to have it just not sit on a shelf. And so that, you know, someone's work can hopefully be seen by a new audience. Yeah, and after 20 years, they're not doing anything with it. Yeah. You know, they just probably sat on it because they could. I imagine authors get enamored by a pitch, a charismatic producer or someone who can come along and say, listen, I did this with this property and I turned it into a global hit.

19:24I will do the same for yours. And those deals probably look terrible. Correct. I would also say like just in the instance of, you know, a book that has legs for sequels ahead and selling all of them and not being protected. you know, in case you write eight more books in the series and then it's a big hit. And you only get paid outright for that first deal. Right. That's a red flag as well. And with this volume game, with producers out there, like literally scouring the corners of the internet, trying to find untangled material, it seems like almost everything decent is tied up. Like this notion of coming across a book on the book stand and reading it on a Sunday and thinking this would make a great movie.

20:20I'm going to like that. It does happen. Like I picked up a, a graphic novel by a guy named Nick Dornasso who ended up becoming the first graphic novelist ever to be long listed for the Booker prize. I literally picked up his first graphic novel from a bookstore and cold emailed him. He had no representation and the rest is history. And you sold it. Yep. It can still happen. Very much so. You know, we all also are getting asked all the time for what are those gems that have fallen out of option that may have, you know, with, you know, there was, there was, you know, a few years ago, it was like everything was getting sold into limited series.

20:58and then a bit of the TV market and the limited space fell out and they were like, this is not financially incentivizing. I don't know if we're going to be able to make this many. So a lot have fallen out and then getting resold sometimes even for a much greater sum on the feature side. So maybe there is an opportunity there to take something that had been in development for TV and reposition. 100%. One of my giant white whales is hoping to help shepherd Eric Larson's The Devil in the White City to the screen. And, you know, that had... Oh, that's been... They've been trying forever. Didn't MRC have the rights for a while?

21:36And, I mean, that seems like... I was almost supposed to go at Hulu with, you know, a creative team that fell apart, unfortunately. And it's been reset up at 20th on the feature side. Yeah. And getting the author to have input is a dicey question. Because this... What is her name? Jeanette McPurdy. She had that show that was going to go with Jennifer Aniston. I forget what the title was. But that fell apart, I understand, because of her involvement. And she was so protective of the material that finally they all just threw up their hands. Jeanette McCurdy. I'm glad my mom died. Yes, I wrote about that last year because it was so difficult to do that adaptation with the author involved that they just essentially abandoned it.

22:24Well, hey, it's the rub for any time you want to option a book. We tell our authors that you lose a semblance of control. You just do. And even with all the creative approvals to try to ask for, you're giving something up by optioning it to a studio or streamer. How do those conversations go, though? Do authors usually demand or really want to be included as a writer or producer on the film? Well, J.K. Rowling got her husband to write the Fantastic Beasts movie. Well, somebody at her level, sure. But a more standard deal with a writer who's not incredibly famous and powerful yet, how do those conversations go about how involved they are in the movie?

23:06It depends. It depends on their interest level in doing it. I have authors that really would love to be the one to adapt it. And then we hear from our studio partners that they have this big A-list writer that they know can be able to, who's able to deliver a show or a feature to their liking and would rather go there. But, you know, we then build in protections in terms of them being a producer on the project, maybe joining the writer's room, having meaningful consultation rights and being involved. and also it really just starts at Inception where we want to partner them with people that understand how to work with authors and speak to them and keep them involved.

23:47Do you feel like there is an appetite on the studio side for action franchises and bigger properties now that the kind of superhero era is less than what it was? Very much so. I mean, the book White Smoke that I brought up is a great heist action thriller set against the Vatican and he's planning on writing more books in the series using the same team, kind of in an Ocean's Eleven or Slow Horses sort of manner, but in different international global outposts. When you're selling the book before it has become a huge hit, it's tougher for a studio to make a gamble on that. They've got to love the material and not love the audience that the book already has.

24:31They're betting on what's on the page, which is what we have to do as well. Yeah. But I feel like a lot of studios won't hit that green light button until they see that it's become a phenomenon. I think it also does both ways, though. I think that a studio can really help market a book and put some extra chutzpah behind it so that both are aligned for the same thing. They want the book to be a big hit just as they want the movie to be a big hit. Yeah. What else is not in favor anymore? Is the erotic thriller out? No, I think that, I think they're seeing a lot of studios go after projects, I think, post the success of Housemaid.

25:09Yeah, that was huge. I think that could be a domestic erotic thriller. I think there's going to be many, they're making a sequel to that one. There's going to be many more. Well, she wrote additional books. It was interesting to see that author. She announced that the movie was better than her book. You don't see that very often. You don't. You don't. that's sort of a dream for producers like oh you like the book this is the author says this is better um this is a good way into this conversation do you feel like that there has to be talent attached to these book properties we don't you don't feel that way now it feels like typically when this stuff sells it's first an actor's production company or a filmmaker's production company gets their hands on it they then take it to the market and the studio buys the package Hey, I think that, you know, we definitely are looking at projects, you know, where it could actually absolutely be additive.

26:05And some of the time it's getting, you know, a piece of talent to to read and make a definitive decision at such an early stage, you know, as you had pointed out. But if things start to get hot, you know, there are a lot of great actor led production companies that, you know, the the principal, whether it's, you know, Margot Robbie or Benedict Cumberbatch or Emma Stone or, you know, or Reese, you know, they show up in your inboxes or show up on your, you know, at your office to say how how much they love a project. Does Reese require that her company get the rights to do the movie before she makes a book, one of her book club?

26:45They do not. They don't do that. Very separate. Interesting. But, you know. I wonder why not. Seems like that'd be good leverage because they can guarantee some book sales. 100%. She's a fierce advocate. I mean, I had a great experience in Little Fires Everywhere with her, which was a book that I had given to Lauren Neustadter, her producing partner, when it was in galley form. And that was Celeste's dream partner for it. And Reese is not a client here, but we gave it to Lauren. She read it over a weekend, and Reese was in Celeste's inbox by Monday. And it worked. And it did. It worked. It worked creatively.