752 - General Meetings

[upbeat jingle] Your agent and your manager are gonna send you out to meet with a bunch of people, and a lot of those are people who they have other clients working with, people who they know socially.

They're, they're gonna basically send you out on a ton of meetings, and they're just th- sort of throw you against a lot of walls and see what sticks.

And the basic reason behind this is people will have read your stuff, but no one is gonna feel comfortable hiring you to do any project unless they've sat with you in a room and seen like, "Oh, she's this kind of person, this kind of writer.

I could see calling her on the phone and talking about a specific project." So you're very unlikely to get hired for any of these early jobs unless you've actually sat in a room and met with these people.

It's true, and sometimes there's a magical little thing that happens.

Uh, inevitably, these, um, these meetings have some context.

I mean, they say general meetings, but there's no such thing because everyone that's having a meeting with you has something they need, and they're gonna mention it.

"We would love to, uh, you know, have somebody write a movie like this." And every now and then, you have one.

You know? You have that thing they're looking for, even if it's just the germ of an idea, and you might just start talking about it, and they might just get excited, and suddenly you're generating a possible job.

Yeah.

So I always look at ge- gen...

I, I always think of general meetings as specific meetings that just don't know what they're specific about yet.

I've talked about this in sessions sort of like the Austin Film Festival, but I don't know if we've talked about it on the podcast, is that every one of these meetings has the same kind of template, which is that you will show up at the office.

You'll be a few minutes early.

The assistant will offer you something to drink.

You should ask for, um, a glass of water or a Diet Coke or something that they will have so they can get you something and bring you something and feel like they've done some part of their job.

The meeting will start a little bit late.

You'll go into that person's office.

You'll sit in whichever chair is appropriate to sit in, and you'll spend the first five minutes talking about nothing important at all, and it's just, just really general chitchat about the most recent movies, about random stuff, where you grew up, where you went to school.

And then at some point, it'll seg to, "This is what we're working on.

Tell us what you're working on.

Is there something together that we should be working on?" I mean, a lot of times, you know, this is the same template for going in for a pitch, where there's, like, sort of general stuff before it gets to the, the meat of it.

In the case of a general meeting, it's, it's just like, "I'll show you some of what we're doing if you'll show me some of what you're doing."

Exactly, and usually there's some pretext for the meeting, um, even if it's just, "You know, I love your agent.

He insisted that I meet you, you know, and then I read your thing, and I really liked it." There's always some, some pretext.