Part 34: THE ONLY WAY OUT Screenwriting, Meeting with Hollywood Management Company #2, Red Flags, and One More Shot
- Amy Giaquinto
- Apr 1
- 6 min read
March 2025
While I was processing my meeting with Manager #1, I received an email, via the contact form on my website, from another Hollywood manager who was interested in my work. In the email, the manager told me he and his business partner had heard great things about my screenwriting and wanted to set up a meeting.
He went on to explain that he and his partner actually owned three companies, a management company, a film production company, and a book publishing company so they had plenty of access to amazing intellectual property for adaptation and the ability to turn that IP into feature films. That really piqued my interest.
I have a novel I'm looking to finish and have always wanted to try my hand at adapting novels into films, so I felt like this could be a great fit! He asked me to send him my script, so I did, and we set up a meeting for 2 days later. Additionally, he sent me links to the book publishing company and the film production company that he and his partner run.
Bursting at the seams with excitement, I immediately dove into both websites, but then... You know the hissing sound a truck tire makes when it runs over a nail? Yeah, well, that's the sound I made upon reviewing the websites. On the book publishing side of things, these "managers" were searching for writers to take outlines for books that they had come up with and, for pennies on the dollar, turn those outlines into novels they could publish and sell.
Not only that, but when I looked their repped writers and the authors of all the books they had published, I discovered something crazy. The authors' names were all pseudonyms for Owner #2. I thought, you've got to be kidding me!...
But then...
On the film side of things, the Owners, these "managers" would take the same outlines and have screenwriters turn those outlines into feature-length scripts for, you guessed it, pennies on the dollar. And guess who got credits for those scripts? If you guessed Owner #2's pseudonym you'd be right! BING! BING! BING!
It was a freaking brilliant con! Do some work, use others to do the heavy lifting, take all the credit, and reap major financial rewards as a result. Damn! Why didn't I think of that? Oh right, it's because I have a soul. In any event, I wondered why in the hell these guys thought I'd want to be represented by anyone whose business it was to rip off writers and then give them minimal to no credit for any of the writing work they'd done?
BUT...
I kept the meeting anyway because I'm a writer and I'm insanely curious and love studying human behavior, especially when it's outright criminal. Plus, I was lonely and had been stuck at home for weeks in a neck brace. What the hell else did I have to do? Besides, meeting with these two would give me a much needed 45-minute break from writing, which is something I sincerely needed.
When it came time for our meeting, I met both men were on a Zoom call. They seemed nice and positive, but Owner #1 apologized for not having had the time to read my script before our meeting. Wait, my brain screamed, this guy was so excited to meet with me and read my work, but he hadn't bothered to read it before our meeting? What the hell???
And so, for fun, I flipped into journalist mode and the conversation instantly took on a very palpable awkwardness. The next sign of trouble was when I asked Owner #1 how he'd heard of me, and he replied that he'd heard about me and my writing via some agent or manager or something. I said, oh, really, who? And he stumbled for a second, then said he didn't remember and then abruptly changed the subject.
My first thought was that Owner #1 was full of shit and that he definitely hadn't heard about me or been referred to me via my TrackingB Screenplay Competition win or he'd have said as much. My second thought was that he'd simply stumbled upon my website and thought I'd make a great mark (as they say in the world of con artists).
As the conversation continued and I asked more and more specific questions, Owner #1 kept deflecting and changing the subject. I'm sure this tactic works for a lot of eager writers, and it probably would have worked on me years ago, but I'm much too experienced for something like this to work on me now. Besides, I had nothing to lose, and you can't con someone whose got nothing to lose.
Meanwhile, Owner #2's demeanor changed, and I thought, HA! Gotcha! Here's a man, probably the more honest of the two, who knows I'm about to call their bluff and it's making him uncomfortable. Very, very uncomfortable.
In fact, if this were a crime thriller and I, as a detective, had Owner #2 in the interrogation room, this would have been that sweaty palmed, anxious moment right before taking a deal and confessing that he and his partner did, in fact, commit murder.
I digress. The conversation came back to their film production and book publishing businesses and when I asked about those, Owner #1 told me that the writers who work for them writing books and films from outlines, don't make much money, but that he wanted to focus on representing me through their management company, which, of course, was completely separate and different from their book publishing companies. This is where the money was.
Of course, Owner #2's face said differently. In fact, for a moment I though he went pale and looked sick to his stomach, but that might just have been my imagination. I felt like the longer our conversation went on, the more inwardly irritated Owner #2 got with my questions and the harder it was for him to keep it together. Owner #2 literally went silent.
They had had some success with a feature, some good success, but it was based on a novel Owner #2 had written, or at least outlined and a script written by some writer who probably didn't even make enough money to buy a tube of toothpaste... On clearance... At the Dollar Store.
Our conversation was reaching the end and Owner #1 asked me to send over any ideas from any other material I was working on, send loglines, etc. He promised to read my script and look at what I'd sent and get back with me.
Once again, curiosity got the best of me, so I sent him two pages of loglines detailing the various stage each script was at in terms of being market ready. As soon as I hit send, I immediately questioned my lack of judgement. You idiot, I thought, you just sent some amazing ideas to a couple of con artists who'll probably steal some of those ideas and use them as a shortcut to develop their own material. Curiosity definitely kills the cat, every time!
And, as expected, I haven't heard a word from either Owner #1 or Owner #2. They failed to even acknowledge that they've received the requested film and TV loglines. Oh well, what can you do? I'll tell you what you can do. You can do what any good businesswoman would do in this situation and that's beat them to the market.
In the meantime, I have a meeting scheduled for May with a production company the specializes in adapting video games for the screen. I know this is something I've said I'm not super-hot on, but I'm going to consider it in this case only because of the exciting films this company has produced, films I had no idea were based on video games. We'll see how it goes...
To be continued...
Until then, be sure to check out Episode 16: Mama Fix It's 7 Favorite Exercises to Reduce Low Back Pain. If you like my videos, please SUBSCRIBE, Comment and Like! Thanks for your support!
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