Hello beautiful people!
Let’s get repped!
Okay.
So today’s gonna be a biggie if you’ve never done rep targeting with me. Please budget some extra time today not just for watching this long-ass vid from our SMFA Online course but also for the work itself, even if you’re happily repped (see more on your variation on today’s work below).
(For those of you not in showbiz, your work is to update your show bible with specific focus on targets you know are meant to be in your world, become your superfans, do business with you for decades. Please still go through the curriculum on this page, as it will inspire you in ways that may surprise you!)
First thing’s first: Decide now that you’ll from this day forward never settle for a ho-hum when you can identify and land your HELL-YES rep.
No matter what market you’re in, you needn’t settle. There’s plenty you can do on your own ’til your hell-yes agent or manager is ready for your greatness. This is someone who gets out of bed thrilled that they rep you! They cannot WAIT to get to work and start pitching you as if their rent depended on it (because it does). They see you and know there’s money there. And you’re so elated to be repped by this person — not because they’re an agent but because they’re an agent who’s on board with your goals and your strategy for getting to the next tier while also being a direct line into the casting offices you’re targeting.
Let’s charge on in! Be ready to take notes. Watch multiple times if you need to.
A current list of “The Bigs” is available as an SMFA Hot Sheet. In general, you avoid pursuing these folks at this point because they’re fancy and they’ll come pluck you from obscurity* when you’re fancy too. (*Obscurity, here, means “from the very ninjaly-strategized place you’ve gotten yourself… fully aware that you’re placing yourself right in the cross-hairs of ‘The Bigs’ so they can discover you and make it seem like you’re an overnight success.” Play along. Let it all be their brilliant idea. Just thank me when you hold up something gold and shiny.)
Now, a quick note about anything you see on an actor’s IMDb profile with an orange asterisk next to it, AKA listed with the designation: “Starred info submitted by page owner via IMDb Resume (has not been verified by IMDb).” That goes for credits, training, and representation. It’s all been submitted by the person whose profile you’re checking out. Therefore, for the purpose of this work, I want you to ignore all of it, just like you disregard every “uncredited” credit you see.
Because unless your next-tier goal is to be an uncredited actor or to have representation that doesn’t claim you on their roster page (but you allege they have signed you as designated by that orange asterisk), those bits of data don’t help you get any closer to the next tier. They show you stuff that’s evidence of low enoughness. You’ve already been working on that. You don’t need any of it on your online profiles.
You want rep that is so hell-yes about you that THEY send out a press release about it! THEY update their newsletter to blast out how excited they are to have signed you. They — at the very least — have you listed on their IMDb page and you don’t have to go add them to your profile to try and prove you’ve got rep.
Less-than-happily repped by a ho-hum partner but not yet ready to do a full-court-press on researching your next set of target agents to whom you’ll gleefully submit? Cool. You get to use this method in reverse! Starting with your agency’s roster page on IMDb-Pro, open up the folks “in your tier neighborhood” and check their recent bookings. Find the pattern of which casting offices love your agent the most! This information you’re gathering is not so you will micromanage your team but so you may develop a deeper understanding of why you’re not getting to the tier of your dreams on the shows most aligned with your storytelling. If your agent or manager doesn’t have strong relationships in your target casting offices, there’s only so much they can do!
Today’s work: Use the SMFA targeting method to determine who reps the actors who are booking your target shows at your tier or just above. Don’t get overly ambitious here and do multiple shows, gather data for higher-tier bookings than you’re capable of in the near future, or blow through several markets all at once. You’re building a muscle for this work and you’re looking for immediately helpful data first! Once you’ve gotten this research method down, it’ll go a lot faster and you’ll be able to do it for multiple shows (and films and commercials and theatre companies too), you’ll be able to do it for a tier or two beyond where you now sit to calculate the trajectory of your rise through the ranks of reps (and start laying the groundwork for relationship-building that’ll pay off five years from now), and you’ll be able to do it for multiple markets since you’re so fancy… jet-setting all over the globe.
But for now, start with one show and keep it conservative, tier-wise. This alone will get you around 100 actors’ rep data laid into your show bible! Patterns will emerge. Layering in a second show? That’s another 100 or so actors’ rep data added on. Patterns getting clearer? Yep. And so on. Ooh… this is sooo delicious and empowering!
Extra credit: If you’re hungry to see who some fancy actors were repped by at earlier tiers in their career, there are a couple of ways to figure this out. But before I tell you, promise me you understand that this data isn’t of high value when compared to the value of current data on folks booking your target shows just one tier above where you now sit! While someone you idolize who is now repped at Gersh may have once been with Stone Manners Salners and perhaps was with Avalon before that and maybe with Angel City when he first got to LA, that doesn’t mean your path will be the same. Especially if a key agent at one of these companies moved to another agency in the decade that ascent took, you’re not getting the whole picture. Current data is far more valuable.
That said, sometimes this is fun data to mine! So if you’ve done all of the above work and are craving more of a deep dive (Really?!? Wow! Okay, tiger!!), you can check the archives of the trades to search when actors were first announced as signing at certain agencies (the notice will almost always mention what company they left to go to one of “The Bigs;” it’s like a badge of honor somehow), you can search old blog posts and social media mentions for old “brags” that smaller agencies did about their clients booking first co-stars, and you can even use the Internet Archive (AKA the Wayback Machine) to look up an actor’s old website in all its incarnations to see when she would’ve posted news about signing with an agent early on in her career (before her publicist stopped her from doing such things).
Ooh… gonna need a couple o’ days for this? Yeah. Maybe a few months. Give yourself a lot of breathing room here. Team up with one another to multiply your coverage! A community show bible is something I’ve suggested since my very earliest days as a casting columnist! (In fact, we have a URL we bought for creating and maintaining The Hollywood Wiki many, many years ago… just waiting for anyone to be ready to take this project to the next level. Maybe even an app? Ooh… we’ll see! But for now, there’s plenty to do here.)
So let’s get to it!
’til tomorrow… stay ninja!
