Part 35: Utopia Distribution, a Budget Top Sheet Dilemma, and the Amazing Assistant at a Top Hollywood Management Company
- Amy Giaquinto
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
April 2025
I'm so excited to announce that, after months of crickets, I'm finally seeing some forward momentum for THE ONLY WAY OUT. As you know, the script is at Utopia Distribution. It's been there for some time, so I reached out to my contact and told her about my TrackingB win and used this as a round-about way to ask about the script's status.
My contact quickly got back with me and asked if we had a Budget Top Sheet we could send over. I cringed only because this wasn't the first time she'd asked for our Budget Top Sheet. No, the first time she'd asked was when she invited us to submit the script, pitch deck, etc. While preparing the submission, I called my film's producer, Marty Katz, and asked him to send over the Top Sheet, but he said he didn't have one.
I was more than a bit surprised, since, after speaking with other filmmakers, having a Budget Top Sheet seems to be the standard nowadays when submitting to studios, financiers, and distribution companies. But then again, what do I know?
When I asked Marty why we didn't have a Budget Top Sheet, he explained that he didn't feel it made sense to spend a lot of money to create a Budget Top Sheet before we had a star attached and locations secured. He explained that once we had a star and locations secured or even a financier or two attached, he'd be happy to create a full budget and production schedule that was way more accurate than an arbitrary Budget Top Sheet would be.
A Budget Top Sheet is a 1-2 page quick breakdown of the major financial costs of each department necessary to execute a particular film. The Budget Top Sheet is compiled from the main budget and includes an itemized summary of costs on everything from development to deliverables.
What Marty was saying made perfect sense. I get not wanting to spend money doing something only to know you're going to have to redo it for real at a later time. However, as an amateur investor myself, I also understand the perspective of the studios, distributors, and financiers.
Making movies isn't cheap and the vast majority of movies lose money, so these companies need to see some kind of estimated, departmental break down showing approximately how much it's going to cost to make the film. This is the only way they'll be able to determine whether the potential financial rewards outweigh the risk. I don't invest in anything unless I see numbers, so... Let's just say I was at a loss for how to respond.
Marty told me to simply let my contact at Utopia know the budget range for my film and politely explain why Marty didn't want to do a Budget Top Sheet, and so that's what I did.
$35 (free shipping)
Subscribe to my site today for a 10% off coupon for any of the merch on my site! Thank you!
But, when I followed-up about the script, my contact asked me if I had a Budget Top Sheet yet and, if I did, to send it over. She also inquired about whether we'd made any progress in finding a star. I was losing my mind. No, we didn't have a budget of any kind, and no progress had been made finding a star because Marty was waiting to get in touch with Netflix who, he explained, might strongly prefer and even help attach, a specific star.
Marty and the team were worried that if we attached the wrong star, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot with any studio that wanted to sign on. At this point, I wanted to scream while jumping up and down and pulling my hair out. Dammit! It was one more Catch-22 that kept the script from moving forward on any front. I just kept wondering how the hell do movies ever get made.
Desperate for a yes, desperate to give something to my contact at Utopia, a contact I'd worked so hard to reach, I called Stephanie and asked her to talk to Marty about procuring a Budget Top Sheet. She said she had just spoken with him about it, and she reiterated what he'd said to me months earlier. There wasn't going to be a Top Sheet Budget, but she said Marty found someone new at Netflix he was trying to reach.
The perfectionist child inside of me was throwing an epic temper tantrum by this point. I did not want to throw away my opportunity at Utopia Distribution for something as stupid as not having a Budget Top Sheet. And so, I did what I do, and I obsessed and tried to figure out how to create one myself, but life did what it does and after the 10,000th interruption in less than 5 minutes, I realized there was no way I could do a Budget Top Sheet in a day.
I mean, I couldn't exactly strand my kids at school and pull an all-nighter to dive into a task that probably takes most professionals at least several hours, even with the right software or app that contains auto-fill fields. In desperation, I reached-out to a producer friend of mine for advice, but she was travelling so I didn't hear back from her. I then reached out to a friend who's working on an AI app to create film budgets. I know squat about AI at this point, but I was willing to learn tout-de-suite! But as luck would have it, his app wasn't yet finished.
INSERT SCREAM HERE!
And so, with great reluctance, I emailed my contact at Utopia and let her know that no, we didn't have a Top Sheet Budget, and we also hadn't made any inroads with a lead actress, but I couldn't hit the send button just yet. I couldn't handle sending an email that was the equivalent of, "Sorry, I forgot to do my homework." I felt like that would be like walking into a meeting with my pants down and toilet paper trailing from my shoe, so I talked to the team and decided it was time to use the little leverage we might have to help us stand out at Utopia.
I told my contact that Netflix had expressed interest in the film, but needed help financing it, and we had a UK financing company who had also expressed interest but wasn't ready to put down first money.
I then offered to connect her with the appropriate people at each company, hoping and praying that Marty would get us back in the door with Netflix and soon. (To be honest, I'm not sure what happened to the people at Netflix who first expressed interest in the script and even tried to shop it around to Skydance and Thunder Road.)
I felt sick to my stomach and spent the next several weeks dwelling on it. My brain was spiraling, and I realized it was time for a new strategy. And so...
In 2023, I had the privilege of somehow being included on an email chain from a studio assistant who had written some incredible coverage on THE ONLY WAY OUT. As a script reader myself, I felt compelled to thank the assistant for the time, thought, and effort he'd put into writing such amazing and comprehensive coverage of the script, so I plucked his email address from the email chain and surprised him with a Starbucks Gift Card.
He was blown away by the gesture and sent me a very grateful email. The whole thing made me smile. Reading scripts and writing coverage is often a thankless job and you don't get a lot of feedback on your coverage, which is why this was so special. I love making people happy. I love making their day and, selfishly, it made me feel good to make his day! Anyway, after that, we connected on Linked-In and then that was that.
Fast forward to 2025...
This month, from out of nowhere, I started thinking about this particular script reader. I knew, based on his Linked-In feed, that a while back he'd switched jobs and was now with a decent-sized Hollywood management company, but I didn't know any more than that. On a whim, I reached out to him to see if he'd be willing to let me pick his brain over the Catch-22 I was in with the script. After all, he did say in our previous emails that he was rooting for THE ONLY WAY OUT to be made.
Normally, anxiety would have gotten the best of me, but not this time. No, there's something about having just come through major emergency spinal surgery that makes every moment feel that much more precious. Every day the life each of us lives is a gift, but that gift is not guaranteed and the way we live, how we live or even life itself can end in a split second. There's great power in operating from this point of view and choosing to seize every moment. And so, I messaged my contact through Linked-In and what happened next was...
To be continued...