Honest Talk About Connections In Hollywood by Markus Redmond
Film Courage: Markus regarding connections, I have a quote here (I don’t know who said it) “Connections are good but nobody is going to put their business in jeopardy because of a connection.”
Markus Redmond, Writer/Director/Actor: That’s absolutely true.
Film Courage: Did you say it?
Markus: No…no…wait…did I? No I didn’t.
Film Courage: I don’t know where we got this quote?
Markus: It’s true though. It’s a business, especially now. And it’s become a very risk-adverse business, especially now because people don’t like going to the movie theater unless SPIDER-MAN is there.
Studios are spending the money where the money is going to get spent. So you can know Lorenzo di Bonaventura (one of the guys who runs Warner Brothers) and you can be like Hey man, I know you are doing a lot of stuff right now. I’ve got this musical about socks.Lorenzo is probably going to say You keep that to yourself. You know what I mean?
It’s a business and it’s shifting daily especially now with all of the streaming wars going on and everyone is upset with Netflix. They are pulling their content off of Netflix and starting their own steamers and they are trying to brand themselves. This is what we do. This is what we don’t do. Counter-branding against that to get their own. A lot of money is at stake. A lot of it’s business. If what you do lines up with their business model, cool. It doesn’t mean you’re not talented. It doesn’t mean that what you do isn’t great. It means it doesn’t fit them.
I just had a pitch meeting that went amazing at major place. And the executives were totally into what we had done and they thought it was really funny and timely. But they are rebranding. Their brand is this. My stuff was this. So they are like It’s great. The writing is great. It’s going to be a fun show. It’s not for us. And that’s fine because everybody is doing what they need to do for their business.
I don’t advocate doing or changing your stuff to fit somebody’s business. But it doesn’t hurt to sort of pay attention to what network, studios, cablers, streamers…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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