Repping Myself

The long and humiliating road of securing representation as a commercial filmmaker

I discovered filmmaking toward the end of high school, and by that point film school wasn’t an option. It might have been too late for formal training, but I fell in love with the process and immersed myself in it.

On set of the music video “Ricochet” by Bas, 2016

I made a few short films on my own and started to gain some technical proficiency. I had a lot to learn, and if I wanted my ideas to reflect on the screen how I imagined them in my head, I knew I needed to practice. I started offering my skills as a service to local businesses, emerging artists, and nonprofit organizations so I could spend as much time as possible making work. This period was effectively my film school, but rather than pay for training, I got paid, albeit not much.

Most of my early commissioned projects weren’t terribly interesting: JCC talent shows, wedding videos, internal communications for the public school system, fundraising media for local non-profits. But even with these projects I’d find ways to infuse my own creativity, even if just for a blip: experimenting with lighting, framing interviews, animation sequences, but more than anything I sought to tell compelling stories.

The more I made, the more my filmmaking community grew, especially once I moved to Los Angeles where I met the recording artist J. Cole, which blossomed into a tremendous creative partnership that jumpstarted my career and continues to this day. This period of my life allowed me to establish myself as a filmmaker, but it also pushed me in a direction that I didn’t expect. I wanted to be a filmmaker, and here I was spending all my efforts in the music business. I’d let the commercial hand steer my creative wheel. I needed to correct course.

Around this time I cold emailed the legendary director, Mark Romanek, who also started in music videos and had gone on to direct some iconic commercials and feature films. I asked if I could shadow him on set sometime, and much to my surprise he responded.

“I watched some of your work,” he wrote. “You're very talented. I'm not sure what you think I'm doing that's so different from you.”

Romanek had been on the roster of the illustrious production company, Anonymous Content, for years. I’d known of several of my friends and peers go that same route of signing to a production company and watched their careers take off: traveling around the world to work on big film projects. I thought this was something I needed to do as well, and I wondered why I hadn’t garnered similar types of interest from agents or production companies. Was my work not good enough? Had I not attended the right parities? Worked with the right collaborators? Made the right connections?

Why did no one want to help me advance my career?

Rather than wait around for someone to come sweep me off my feet, I got proactive and reached out to production companies myself. At this point, I had created enough noteworthy work to warrant meeting many of them, so they responded to my solicitations. Most of these meetings were unremarkable and went nowhere, but there was one - or rather a series of meetings - that changed how I viewed the whole representation thing and myself in the broader landscape.

Through a creative director, I was connected to a partner at a prestigious production company. I’ll call him Squidward. Squidward invited me to his office for a first meeting. In the conference room where I waited for him, I noticed a window sill that ran the entire length of the room full of dozens of industry awards - Cannes Lions, CLIOs, Emmys. The shelf looked like it would buckle from the weight of all the hardware.

Squidward was charming and generous with his time and told me right off the bat that he wanted to be “aggressive” about signing me, which I didn’t expect. I was flattered. Signing to this company, I thought, would be a huge boost to my profile and would provide me with a team of seasoned professionals to procure and produce work on my behalf.

Squidward was also surprisingly frank about how he ran his business with me. “Sometimes we don’t put the best creative forward,” he said. “But because my house is next door to the owner of the ad agency, and our kids play together, we get the job.” On one hand I found this to be a comically cynical take. On the other hand, that’s exactly what I wanted: muscle.

I spent that summer attending industry parties with Squidward, meeting his longtime business partner, and getting to know his sales reps to strategize on how to best “sell” me in the market. He read my screenplays and gave me pointed feedback. He told me to let the other companies I’d flirted with know that I was spoken for, which as I saw it all but sealed our partnership together. His team started to put me up for jobs, so now it was just a matter of waiting to see what landed first.

But after some time, his email responses got shorter, more sporadic. He was hardly in town anymore, and when he was, he was “slammed.” I started to worry that this opportunity I thought was in the bag was now slipping through my fingers. And because I’d told the other companies that I’d been in touch with to stop pitching me, I had painted myself into a corner.

But just as I was starting to give up hope, Squidward emailed me asking to get together for dinner. I thought this was a good sign at first until he scheduled dinner for 5pm and said he had a shoot to get to afterwards but “didn’t want to rush.”

When we sat down to eat, he was his usual affable self. We made small talk for a bit, and then he cut to the chase.

“So we put you up for a few jobs, and there weren’t any bites.”

I can’t say I didn’t see something like this coming.

“What do you think the reason for that is?” I asked.

“I think you’ve been in service to a superstar, but no one knows what you’re about,” he said.

It was a cold, hard truth that I knew deep down but had refused to acknowledge until that moment.

“So,” I said. “It sounds like I’ve got some work to do.”

“Yeah, I think you do.”

We finished “dinner” (neither of us had anything to eat). Squidward went off to his shoot, and I went home. I never saw or heard from him again.

What Squidward didn’t know was the work he thought I needed to do was already underway. I’d just wrapped shooting my film Commute, which went on to win Best of the Year at the Vimeo Awards. I was prepping my film Mango, which premiered at the London Short Film Festival and featured on NOWNESS. My film, Visitors, about the Storm Area 51 festival in the Nevada desert had been in the can. And I was already plotting my films, West by God and Ball People, which were both selected at SXSW - the former of which premiered at the Berlinale.

All these films happened because of my own volition. I financed them all myself, and it was because of the community of collaborators that I fostered over the years that they were made. All this time, I wondered why no one wanted to help me, but as it turned out - similar to Romanek’s response - I probably looked like I didn’t need any.