Off-Centerpiece : Agents, Take Notes: There’ll Be a Quiz After the Movie

It’s become a Hollywood ritual: Each summer the town’s agents rifle through the graduating class of USC’s prestigious film school looking for hot new talent. When students show their stuff at the spring “First Look” film festival, agents swarm in like pro recruiters at a college basketball championship.

“All the agencies send people to these screenings in the hopes of finding the next Spielberg,” says Pat Tobin, the school’s program coordinator. “But in reality, it’s still student work.” Tobin estimates that out of any given year, only a dozen of USC’s 150 graduating students are able to secure Hollywood agents.

The June “First Look” screening sent agents scrambling after such talented young writer-directors as Jeff Boortz, Wolf Weinberger and Toni Osborne. But it was 27-year-old Boston University graduate Gary Fleder who probably caught the most attention. His experience showed how in Hollywood, perception--as much as talent--is half the game.

Fleder made a 48-minute film called “Air Time,” a dark story (written by UCLA student Scott Rosenberg) about a late-night radio psychologist who is jarred when an ex-con calls up and reveals the doctor’s own prison past. After it screened, the town’s agents set prey on Fleder, lobbying the new graduate for his business.

It didn’t hurt that Fleder had the help of a couple of savvy Hollywood insiders who knew how to fan the flames under him: personal manager Melinda Jason and attorney David Colden. Even before the USC screening, the pair had been working the phones to sell their client.

Then they set up early screenings of “Air Time” designed in part to get the agents’ competitive juices flowing by seating contenders in the same theater together. “Sometimes you have to ‘agent’ the agent,” Colden explains. “You have to do things to make them pay attention. One has to have the goods to do that. But you can play agents at their own game.”

Agents go gaga over film students because of “the competition--it’s about winning,” acknowledges one agent involved in the battle for Fleder. “It’s rare that there’s an open-market competition for talent. (With a student) the film is shown and agents get out of the starting gate at the same point, and that feeds on itself.” This agent even counsels clients to let competitors court them before signing up: “You create a frenzy, which helps them in the industry.”

Fleder estimates that in the last couple of weeks he has talked to 65 agents at 11 companies. “At one agency I talked to as many as 12 agents,” he says. In most of his meetings, the issue was “why competing agents weren’t any good, rather than what they could do for me. It was a very negative sell, and that was draining.”

When a rough cut of “Air Time” was shown last winter, a number of boutique agencies showed interest in Fleder. But by the time this summer rolled around, Fleder was hot enough that the boutiques were being gently told that the director wanted to go with a bigger name.

A couple of weeks ago, the field narrowed to two: Intertalent and William Morris Agency. Trusting his gut instinct, Fleder says, he finally went with Intertalent.

Meanwhile, the selling of Gary Fleder goes on. Getting an agent is one thing; getting a studio deal is quite another. “I’m very aware that the heat on a filmmaker straight out of film school is ephemeral. The point now is to get my film seen, to get it to the right people. “