Matt Atchity Joins Story Merchant As Associate Manager

 

In addition to representing current Story Merchant intellectual properties, Matt will in his new role introduce stories he discovers to the Story Merchant family of companies, which include Atchity Entertainment International (The Meg), Atchity Productions (Mr. Irrelevant), Story Merchant Management, and Story Merchant Books. He will be working closely with Senior Associate Manager Tobe Roberts, who is based out of New York.

“Sam Skelton and the whole gang and I are delighted to welcome Matt to our family of companies,” said Ken Atchity in a statement to Deadline. “His vast knowledge of the commercial story market and cheerful gregariousness and sense of humor will contribute greatly to our expanding presence in the Hollywood marketplace.”

Shared Sam Skelton, Creative Executive and Producer at Atchity Productions and the Story Merchant companies, “Ken and I have eagerly anticipated expanding our team, and Matt’s arrival marks a thrilling new chapter. With Matt’s passion for compelling narratives and his dedication to curating exceptional content for our film and television projects, I am confident that his presence will propel us to unprecedented heights of creativity and success.”

Added Matt Atchity, “I’m excited to be on the other side of the entertainment business. I’m looking forward to both discovering and shepherding great stories, and ones that will make exciting movies and TV series.”

Formerly, the younger Atchity spent ten years as the Editor in Chief of Rotten Tomatoes, leading the team that made the site a household name, as well as introducing TV reviews and expanding the site’s influence on the entertainment industry. A frequent reviewer and commentator for CNN, he also co-founded and co-hosted What the Flick!? alongside Ben Mankiewicz and Cenk Uygur, the first spin-off show on the TYT network.

Across its assortment of companies, Story Merchant comprises a publisher, a production company, and a rep of both writers and rights to stories for film and TV. As we were recently first to report, subsidiary Atchity Productions recently tapped veteran martial arts filmmaker Andy Cheng to direct Shadow Ghost, a feature adaptation of the comic book written and illustrated by Sifu Kurtis Fujita.

via Matt Grobar Deadline Hollywood

The Hollywood Conveyor Belt

 

The Conveyor Belt

Imagine a magical conveyor belt in the sky that carries every story that’s heading for the screen. Your goal is to somehow get your story from the back of the belt, where “naked stories” lie, to the very front of the belt where fully-clothed stories are about to leap into “principal photography.”

What do the fully-clothed stories at the “stardust point” of the conveyor belt look like? At the very least, they have

1. A perfected script that has been vetted numerous times by dozens of highly-critical technical and creative industry readers, and rewritten accordingly. It’s not unusual for a script to have gone through twenty or more revisions.
2. A finalized (and “bonded”!) budget that has undergone even more revisions than the script.
3. A “start date” agreed upon by all parties to the filming.
4. A location that works for the best interests of the film.
5. A solid legal foundation that provides contracts for everything from the “underlying rights” to the services to be provided by every member of the cast and every member of the crew.
6. A director who understands the story enough to “enhance the flame” created by the screenwriter (who enhanced the flame the original storyteller created), and who the financers and “completion bond” executives trust to deliver a completed film.
7. A committed cast suitable not only to the script, but also to the distributors, sales agents, and finance representatives.
8. An international sales agent who has agreed with the producers on selling the completed film to every possible market.
9. A “domestic distributor” who has shown interest in distributing the film in the United States and Canada.

By contrast, stories at the far end of the conveyor belt lack any or all of these elements, the farthest from stardust being, in this approximate order,

• a “great idea for a film,”
• a written “pitch,”
• a book (fiction or nonfiction),
• other source material (like a magazine article, or life rights),
• a “treatment,”
• a stage play, or first draft screenplay.

They aren’t ready to be filmed until they gather all the other necessary elements.

One of the nearly infinite “Catch 22s” of show business is that every story on the conveyor belt risks being leapfrogged over by a story that has more of the necessary elements. No wonder it takes forever to make a film. I recently saw a film into production that I’d been working on for twenty years. It sold to networks twice, but always got stopped along the way by “regime change” or “policy change.”

Ken on Sell Your Story to Hollywood!

Through the expanding influence of the Internet and the corporatization of both publishing and entertainment, the process of getting your book to the big screen has gotten more complicated, more eccentric, and more exciting.⁠ ⁠ 

This little book aims to help you figure out how to get your story told on big screens or small. ⁠ 

⁠ Available on Amazon