Go Into The Story Interview (Part 4): Jeff Portnoy

An extensive conversation with the Bellevue Productions literary manager.

“The goal is always to sell and to get produced but, short of that happening, a spec can have a lot of value in other ways.”

Jeff Portnoy is a literary manager at Bellevue Productions. Prior to joining Bellevue, Jeff worked at Creative Artists Agency, The Gotham Group, Resolution talent agency and Heretic Literary Management.

I met Jeff a year or so ago at a Black List Live! event in Los Angeles and we had a good discussion about the business. I made a mental note to get back to him for an interview. Then Amber Alexander, one of the 2018 Black List Feature Writers Lab participants, recently landed a writing gig adapting the horror novel “Snowblind” for Zoic Studios. When she emailed me to share the good news, she connected me with Jeff who is her manager.

Jeff and I ended up having about a 45-minute conversation covering a lot of territory which promises to be both interesting and helpful reading for Go Into The Story readers.

Today in Part 4 of a 5 part series, Jeff provides his take on the state of the current spec script market.

Scott: What’s your take on the current state of the spec script market?

Jeff: It peaked in the late ’90s, early 2000’s. Then after the writer strike, it hit its bottom for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Starting little by little coming back. It’s coming back. It will eventually plateau. I don’t think it will ever come back to the place it was in the late ’90s, early 2000's.

It does feel like it’s coming back a little bit. I do think the one thing is, how do you quantify the spec market, whether it’s good or it’s bad or where it’s at? It’s very hard to do that. There’s the amount of spec sales. Then there’s the numbers behind the sale.

Let’s say there was a hundred specs sold in 1997 and a hundred specs sold in 2007. That’s the same number. One would think, “The markets were the same. They reached the same place.” If the amount of money that was spent on those specs in 1997 was, I don’t know, 20 million dollars and the amount of money spent on the specs in 2017 was, I don’t know, a million dollars or two million dollars…You see what I’m saying?

Scott: Yes, sure.

Jeff: We track specs by the sales and the trades. Other sources of information tell us where they are. Only the agents, managers, and writers know what’s happening behind the scenes in the deals. I do think that amount of spec selling aside, there’s just less money spent on development nowadays than it was then.

Even if the amount spec selling was the same, they’re spending much less now than they were then. Back then, it was just a wild hay day. The Halcyon days, the money was insane. It’s coming back. The spec market is coming back, but I don’t think the amount of money being spent on the scripts is even close to what it used to be.

It’s not easy but we persevere. The people that love it have no alternative. It’s not like we go, “There’s not a lot of money. We’re out of here.” This is all we know.

Scott: Could you speak to the value of a spec script beyond the fact if it doesn’t get sold or optioned, the fact that it can land somebody representation, the fact that it can get people into open writing assignment meetings.

Jeff: Yes, the goal is always to sell and to get produced but, short of that happening, a spec can have a lot of value in other ways. For example, a spec can help a writer get signed by an agency and it can get them a lot of general meetings with producers and build a fan base. Maybe they get on the Black List, which gives them some exposure and gives us a bullet points in their bio…when we’re selling them, we can say, “They were on the Black List. The script on the Black List.”

I actually tell them to expect that, not to expect a sale. Get your hopes set on that. If we get you on the Black List, if we get you a producer attaches to your project and if we get 25 general meetings and maybe 1 assignment comes out of that meeting, we succeeded. That’s what we’re setting out to do.

The sale is on a whole another level. Of course, we want the sale. It is the main thing. We’re cynical. We’re cautiously optimistic about a sale but we know that that’s harder. If that happens, we’re ecstatic. If at the end of the day, there’s no sale, the writer’s prepared for that. We built a foundation for their career.

Their next spec they write, they’ve got 25 fans waiting for it. When we send it to people in the body of the email submission, we’ll say, “Such and such writer had this appear on this Black List. They are developing this or another script with such and such producer.” Maybe they didn’t have any money on either of those things. It looks good. Maybe that one sells. Maybe the second one sells. Maybe they don’t get paid a lot of money.

The third one, maybe that’s the one that sells for a lot of money. Maybe the fourth one gets made. That could be a four or five‑year game plan. It’s just a lot of work, but you’ve got to keep building. You just have to look at the silver lining every script. As long as you get something out of it, fans, new fans, some notorieties and exposure.

We look at that as a success. The sale is a whole another thing. We love for there to be a sale. It is tough, it’s a tough market.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Jeff talks about the importance of the Black List, why it’s important for writers to generate both movie and original TV spec scripts, and the three qualities he looks for in potential writing clients.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

For Variety’s “Hollywood’s New Leaders: Agents and Managers” feature which included Jeff, go here.

Twitter: @Jeff_Portnoy.

For nearly 200 Go Into The Story interviews with screenwriters, filmmakers, and Hollywood insiders, go here.