Today is an exciting day for the Nuva-verse, so I will get right down to it!
In this week's issue, we interview the great Beth Blickers – Agent and Department Head: Theater Literary at Independent Artists Group!! (IAG is formerly APA Agency.) Beth built the Theater Lit department at IAG from the ground up…and I am proud to say that she is now a Nuva!!! WOW!!
Photo Courtesy of Beth Blickers
AND what's more – in this issue, Beth shares an article: “How To Find An Agent!” I cannot think of anything better than learning how to find an agent from one of the top agents in the biz!
For those who would like to connect with Beth, I would strongly recommend reading her article and her interview in full – first. She gives LOTS of tips about how to reach out to agents, what to say, and when is the right time to do it. Definitely absorb all of this info before pitching to her!
More exciting news – in this issue, we share the packet for CBS' After Midnight!! GO GET IT, NUVAS!! I hope a Nuva gets hired!!!!!!
In Nuva community news, longtime/former Nuva Community Manager (and current Advisor) Laura Murphy welcomes a baby!! Nuva Kristen Vaganos stars in a play! As mentioned above, we interview the famed Literary Agent Beth Blickers! Nuva and former Newsletter Co-Editor Kathy Fleig celebrates her birthday!! And, below, we have a fun little guide on how to handle Mercury Retrograde by sign.
And, get psyched – we have gotten a great response to our Nuva Job Search Club!!! This will start the week of August 26th. We will provide Zoom check-ins, we will connect you with an accountability buddy, and provide general job search inspiration and motivation. FOR FREE!! See below for details! Please email before August 23rd if you would like to join.
I hope this week's issue is as inspiring and educational for you as it has been for me. Enjoy, Nuvas!!!!
XOXO,
Nivedita
Image Courtesy of Nivedita Kulkarni/Nuva - Photos Courtesy of Nivedita Kulkarni, Sharon Spell, Jasmine Wynona
Is there an agent in town who is actually taking on new clients?
These are the three most common questions asked of me by unrepresented artists and I’m sure that’s true of every agent in every field in the biz. The below response was written to address the path of a playwright since that’s my focus but feel free to spin it for whatever it is you do, be it directing, choreographing, designing, screenwriting…
Step One:
Using the web, fellow artist friends, theater professionals, etc do some homework on who is out there, what they are like (do they attend client readings, do they give smart notes on scripts, are they good with contracts, do people want to work with them), who do they handle (do they have director/writer clients with whom you'd like to work). Do their clients like them? In what way? Is what they are praised for something you need? Do theaters like working with them? Find them responsive? Think they send smart material? Think they are the source of all the interesting new artists? Also, do they represent the area of business in which you work? If I had a dollar for every novelist, screenwriter and
tv writer (who are not also playwrights) who writes me I could retire. Truly. Also, I’ve discussed this with other agents and we don’t want to be approached on social media or LinkedIn. Our emails are easy to find (many of our clients have websites with us on their contact page). Use LinkedIn as a last resort.
Step Two:
Isolate your one or two or three top choices and then go to town. Have the highest ranking people you know, and who know them, get in touch. That can be one of their clients, but it can also be commercial producers, artistic directors, literary managers or dramaturgs.
So if you set your sites on Jane Austen of the Austen Agency and if someone says to you, "Oh, I love Jane! We talk three times a week." then odds are this is a person who should go on your outreach list. When you have two or three or four of them, launch the attack. We listen when we hear the same name from several directions. And if it coincides with a big award, a major writers group, getting into a serious developmental program or an upcoming production at a great theater then all the better. Please try not to invite me with three performances left in the run. Or six months after it closes. I get that sending invites always slips through the cracks. In that case start them six months before you open!
But before you do this, heed this warning:
Even if most agents wouldn’t admit this, you get one good crack at us. Opinions are made almost instantly and within 20 pages I know if I’m seriously interested. So if your play really takes off on page 77, don’t send it to me. If you know what you want to address in a rewrite, do the rewrite before you send it to me. If you have never had a reading of it, please hear it (even if that’s in your living room) before you send it to me. It’s amazing what you realize when you hear your play out loud. If you have never had a reading at a major theater, or a production at even a minor theater, or won a nationally recognizable award, or gotten into or graduated from a good writing program, ask yourself the
following question: I have one good shot at impressing this agent and making a connection, is this the play and the moment to try to do so? Because while I’ll probably read your new play a year or two later if things seem to be gathering steam for you, there are agents who won’t. And there aren’t many of us, so how quickly are you going to gather no’s from everyone? Then you go out and continue to build your career and come back around in a year or two and are the writer we all passed on. Not the place you want to be coming from. There are people who have come to me six times asking me about
representation and that’s not coming from a place of strength as a writer.
My general rule of thumb? You should be looking for an agent two or three years after you think you need an agent. Every time I say that on a panel, I watch the audience wilt. But every agent I’ve said this to has laughed and then agreed. It’s not true in every case but ask yourself very honestly if it’s true in yours. If it is, take some time, get to know some more people, build your catalogue of plays. You don’t need twelve plays to get an agent (and actually in your query letter please DON’T tell me you have twelve plays). However, if you’ve written twelve plays odds are it’s the last three that are really good and really producible.
The bottom line:
Take your time. If you read this and thought “but I don’t know three people who know agents” then that’s a sign you aren’t ready to pursue an agent. Agent and client relationships can last for years and even decades. Waiting a couple of years to find the right person is going to seem like nothing when you look back and say “wow, we’ve been together for fifteen years.”
And when it all comes down to it, isn’t THAT the kind of agent you want?
Beth Blickers
2023
Nuva Job Search Club!
Like the Baby-Sitters Club, only better!! (Am I dating myself with that reference??)
Are you job hunting right now?? Seems like everybody is! We are going to host a small online group and accountability group for Nuvas who are currently looking for jobs! We will have check-ins, accountability buddies, referrals to recruiters, job search inspo – and more!
Email if you are interested! nivedita@nuva.io The best part? It's free!!
Image Courtesy of Nivedita Kulkarni/Nuva
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Click “View entire message” below…there's so much more in the newsletter!!
Packet Alert!!!
Download the After Midnight packet at this link!After Midnight Submissions due August 21st by 5 PM PDT. Go get it, Nuvas!!!
GIF Credit: GIPHY
Nuva Community News!
Baby Announcement!
Nuva Laura Murphy welcomes a baby boy, Colin!! Email Laura to say congrats!! lmurphy7692@gmail.com
In this Off-the-Clock comedy, Madelyn and Sameer are NPR-listening, latte-sipping blue-staters who are planning a family. Or they were, until they learn that because of a mix-up at the fertility clinic, Madelyn's embryo was accidentally implanted in another client's uterus. That news is hard to take; fostering a relationship with the other couple, NASCAR-loving NRA cardholders, is even harder.
Can these polar opposites make it through nine months of gestation without killing one another?
August 7th-September 1st (multiple dates and times)
Beth Blickers is an agent at IAG, where she represents artists who work in theatre, opera, dance, television and film. She started her career at the William Morris Agency, where she began work after graduating from NYU. Beth has served on the jury panel for the Weissberger Award, the Ed Kleban Award, the Lark’s PONY Fellowship and Playwrights Week and facilitated industry related workshops and panels for organizations around the country.
She is the Past President of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas and is the Board Chair Emeritus of Theatre Breaking Through Barriers, a New York company that works with artists with disabilities.
Q: Tell us about your path to agenting! Growing up, did you ever expect to be an agent?
A: I truly didn’t! I thought I would be an actor/lawyer/therapist/ballerina. After a brutal experience at NYU led me to realize A) I was constitutionally ill-suited to an actor’s life (so much credit to actors) and B) I was a truly terrible actor, I knew I had to figure out something else. The funny thing about growing up to be an agent is that you are equal parts (unlicensed) lawyer and therapist. Throw in years of ballet classes on the side and honestly, Little Me was not that wrong about the future of Big Me.
Q: Right now, you lead the Theater Literary department at IAG (formerly APA). You were brought over 9 years ago to start the department. How did you get the opportunity to start your own department? How did you decide to take the leap?
A: Not to sound flippant but in my imagination it kind of happened because I was a decent human being. I’d taken calls from APA agents over the years when they had a theater-centric question and always enjoyed talking with them. When they decided to bring back a theater department, I assume they asked around and some kind people said my name and they were like “well, we already call her for advice so maybe we should have her around.” There was a call, a couple of meetings and a leap of faith that I would be able to continue the live entertainment work I had been doing and meld it with more reach into film and tv. I was excited (terrified) about being able to take everything I’d learned
over the years from the various departments in which I’d worked and build something in my image. And now with two young agents handling their own client lists I’m proud of what we’ve created here and the lives we’ve changed.
Q: What does it take to be a good agent?
A: Every agent has different strengths. Some may be a whiz with contracts, some deeply dramaturgical and yet others may be the source of belief in your skills that keeps you going. Which means it’s important to analyze what you need professionally when thinking about representation. If you have smart dramaturgical people in your life and there is an agent you really like who has great industry relationships and is really good with contracts that could be a great fit for you. It may be less good for someone who is just starting out whose friends are also scrambling to understand what makes a script
ready to go out and to know where to send it. At the end of the day you can always hire a lawyer or a dramaturg to bolster areas where you need extra support. What I want to be able to do as agent, and what every artist deserves, is the ability to look someone in the eyes and speak passionately about their work, to soak in their goals and to be excited to game plan how to make those dreams come true. It doesn’t matter how expensive the person’s suit might be if you aren’t sure they actually consumed any of your material before offering you representation. And I know this happens to artists because I’ve had more than one meeting where I talked about a moment deep into a script and the response was “Wait?! You read my work?!” So clearly people are having meetings where the opposite is true.
Q: What are the challenges that you see in the industry now – both for agents and for writers/actors? How do you see the industry evolving over the next 5 years?
A: Obviously, a whole bunch of sectors of entertainment have gone through a massive contraction over the last five years. I’m hearing things are starting to open up, but it feels to me like a lot of people are still out of jobs, not having the same level of episodic work, going a season without a play being produced etc. Entertainment is a huge ship that doesn’t turn quickly and most of us have no control over where it goes. Which means everyone should tell the stories they feel compelled to tell any way they can tell them. Doing a show in a living room for 10 audience members? Do it. Making a film on
your phone? Do it. Releasing original songs on the internet? Do it. There are so many young industry people who don’t feel beholden to the traditional gatekeeping sources and they are eager to stumble across an artist who excites them whether that’s in a 40 seat black box theater or on TikTok.
Q: Are you happy with the resolution of the strikes? Do you think we made strides?
A: Far smarter labor specialists than I have weighed in on this topic and having gone through the 2008 strike the one thing I know for sure is that you need to wait a few years to see how things shake out. But I’m worried that fighting for every room to have at least six writers has given Hollywood permission to say no room needs more than six writers when they want to cut staffing money. It’s rough when the floor becomes the ceiling.
Q: What is your proudest accomplishment?
A: Being a big part of my nephews’ lives. All of my life I’ve wanted to be an aunt and while clients have good days and bad and critics are unknown factors, I know I can show up in New Jersey with fruit punch gummies and Rice Krispie treats and I will always get an excellent review.
Q: What advice do you have for people who want to get repped?
A: Stop. Just stop. Breathe. Accept an agent is unlikely to massively change your life or reduce your workload. Now go do some homework. Who are the artists in your wheelhouse who are five years ahead of you and who reps them? Do those agents have clients with whom you’d like to work? Did you read an article they wrote/listen to a podcast they recorded/attend a lecture they’ve given and did they say something that inspired you? Talk to your friends/teachers/colleagues about who reps them, what agents they interact with and ask what they think of them and who they think could be good for you someday. And then and only then, when a couple of really nice things have happened in your career, write a short, thoughtful, personal email to the agents you feel are most right while deploying some of the people in your life who know them to reach out on your behalf. It should be an email of introduction, a lifting up of your primary projects (you get no brownie points for having a lot of things that need doing), with some way to sample your work while providing a sense of some of the people with whom you have worked. That can be via a link to your website or New Play Exchange Page (or
whatever those resources are for actors) or your online stand up footage. Please write me an email that makes it easy to assess where you are with your career (even if it’s super early, in the last year I signed a playwright who had one play written) and what kind of art you make that allows me to decide how I want to engage (ask for a script/offer a meeting). It’s amazing to me how many people I’ve never interacted with write to me about their 12 screenplays, ten pilots and 189 poems and tell me they’ll be
calling me on Thursday at 3pm to discuss representation. Don’t do that! When in doubt go back to the top of this answer and stop and breathe. It’s time well spent to do outreach smartly and to match with an agent for the long run.
Photo Courtesy of Beth Blickers
Q: Please tell us about your roles as the Past President of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas and as the Board Chair Emeritus of Theatre Breaking Through Barriers!
A: When I was arm twisted into attending an LMDA conference in Toronto I was convinced I’d be shouted out of the room because I was an agent and not a dramaturg in a rehearsal room or a literary manager in a theater. Then I walked through the door and realized nearly everyone was a friend and I was wonderfully welcome. Thus began my journey of accepting I might have some dramaturgical skills. And because an all volunteer organization loves nothing so much as a human who will say yes when asked to do something, when the call came to lead the organization for two years I said yes. Because my second greatest love in life (after my nephews) is anyone who seeks to make the creative workplace a more just and equitable space and anyone who seeks to support artists in achieving their vision. Dramaturgs do that. Chef’s kiss to all of you!
TBTB is a more personal story. When I was a little kid, I had reconstructive surgery on my legs and spent most of kindergarten in a wheelchair. It lit parallel interests in disability and the arts. When I was a student at NYU, I met Ike Schambelan the founding Artistic Director of a company then called Theater by the Blind who came to speak to us. I offered to intern and a little like my experience with LMDA years later, you become a little involved and find yourself very involved. The company is now led by the extraordinary Nick Viselli who is very much keeping Ike’s passion alive while expanding the now named Theater Breaking Through Barriers. If you are an artist living with a disability of any kind, I highly recommend you seeking them out. And if you live in NYC please go see their wonderful productions! As a country with an aging population with a high percentage of people who identify as having a disability and where apparently a huge swath of us watch tv with the subtitles on, understanding the finer points of what accessible really means is going to be relevant for all of us whether your knees creak when you kneel down or don’t.
Q: What projects or career aspirations are you excited about for the upcoming year? Do you have an “ultimate” career goal?
A: I’m not sure I’ve ever had an ultimate goal and I sort of wish I could say “When X happens I can pack up my tap shoes and go home.” There’s always the next show you are passionate about getting open and can’t imagine leaving until it’s in the world. I won’t rest until the musicals Gun & Powder, Bhangra Nation and Real Women Have Curves are on Broadway. I need someone to do Lisa Loomer’s powerful play about Akathisia because the world deserves to understand an all too unknown side effect of anti-depressants. I have plays by Lloyd Suh and Mike Lew and Paloma Nozicka and Chaz Martin and MJ Kaufman and Christina Pumariega (and so, so many others) that should be seen in NYC and around the world.
Q: Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to yourself at the beginning of your career?
A: Sign only for passion. When I was a young agent, I was sometimes dazzled by an artist with very fancy friends and didn’t understand if those names weren’t on their resume then they weren’t opening doors for the artist and there was a reason for that. Also don’t sign someone whose work you don’t love just because they have a major production coming up. That production will fall apart and you’ll be left with a client looking to you to find a new path forward. You’d better be damn excited to do so. And to do it again. And again. And to talk about updating the script 20 years later. Especially successful projects never leave your life so you’d better light up when those emails show up in your inbox. I’ve been talking about Bill Cain’s play Equivocation since 2007. I love that play so much I still get a thrill when a theater reaches out to ask how we’ve done the beheading.
Q: Can you talk about some of the challenges on your career path? How did you overcome them?
A: It could be just me and my age and growing up in a small town in Illinois…nope scrap that, I’ve been around long enough to know this is pretty universally true… I was raised to believe if I was quiet and well behaved and worked hard that the world would reward me. Then I moved to NYC and everyone was running around tooting their own horn and it made no sense to me whatsoever. Especially when it was agents…shouldn’t you be crowing about your clients? It took me some years to understand that there is a balance. Yes, you need to tell people you are great. You also don’t have to make that 100% of your conversational output. When I was a baby agent, I asked a more senior agent why she thought a couple of recent breakout artists had become so beloved and her response was that every time she saw one of them and asked how they were they responded by telling her how excited they were about someone else’s work. She would have to guide them to talk about themselves. But her point was that someone with that spirit of generosity and good will who is getting out of their home to see things and being a good compatriot to the wider artistic family is exactly the person you want around when the mic for the comedy night is on the fritz or there is a blizzard on your day of outside filming or the lead is sobbing in her dressing room. When it’s all going to hell, we look for the person who can ground us for a minute so we keep moving forward. I showed up in NYC knowing no one in the business. It was genuine curiosity that sent me out to see show after show after show which unbeknownst to me at the time was creating a lot of good will. It was some innate instinct about how humans tick along with some very generous inclusive behavior on the part of the dramaturg extraordinaire Morgan Jenness that taught me how to talk with artists about their work. All of which led this little Lutheran girl from Illinois to be the person people turn to when the house is on fire (even if that fire is simply that you can’t crack the rewrite) and it’s been the greatest blessing of my professional life to be that support system for others.
Q: What is your life motto or philosophy?
A: First do no harm. Or DBAA (don’t be an a##hole).
Q: Welcome to Nuva! What do you love about Nuva or our mission? 😊
A: Ask a hundred people if they like to network and about three hands will go up (who are those people???). It’s a struggle to do what needs to be done in a day and still make time to advocate for oneself. It takes mere seconds on most platforms to hit a wall of negativity. Nuva is a refreshing way to (what is the opposite of doom scoll? success scroll? fortitude scroll?) interact with others when you need engagement, to read about how other people got where they are when you need inspiration or just to find your next inspiring read/watch/stream while you curl up on your couch and avoid your To Do list. Because sometimes you need a movie and a bowl of ice cream before you vacuum. Sometimes the most valuable thing a person/place/thing can do is make you feel not alone. And that is Nuva!
Free! Printable August Calendar
Click the image below to download and print!
Image Courtesy of Nivedita Kulkarni/Nuva
Happy Leo Season!
Click the image below to download and print!
Image Courtesy of Nivedita Kulkarni/Nuva
Manifesting Corner!
Let's manifest something!! Dedicate 5 minutes to the thing you want to manifest. It can be anything – love, money, career success. Pick one goal. Spend a full 5 minutes on looking at the scene below and elevating your vibe. Don't stop until you are in a vibration of JOY – the happiest that you have ever felt. Feel the joy throughout your whole body. (Keep going, keep elevating your vibe – you can do it!) At that point of joy, visualize the thing that you want to manifest. Hold that image – from a vibrational state of joy – as long as possible.
Congrats!!!! Your manifestation is now on its way!!!!
