For Hollywood Attorney Elsa Ramo, ‘Creative’ Dealmaking and ‘Courage’ Are Key
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Right after Elsa Ramo, managing partner of Ramo Law PC, graduated law school, she made an “unconventional” decision. Instead of working for an established firm, she set up a trailer on the Universal Studios backlot in the summer of 2005.
Her business cards may have come from Kinko’s and she may have had to use the bathroom on the “Desperate Housewives” set, but her bold move paid off. During a time when filmmaking was switching from 35mm to digital, Ramo was right on site helping young directors and producers as they sold their $200,000 movies to the open market for seven figures.
“I was literally the girl on the Universal backlot who could do your production legal for basically no cost because I was excited to sign a client,” Ramo told TheWrap for this week’s Office With a View. “It was sort of a perfect storm of geographically being in the right place.”
Ramo filled a gap in the market again in 2008. During that earlier WGA strike, she and her team shifted to unscripted. That expertise led to Ramo Law PC later selling Netflix its very first docuseries, “Chef’s Table” from Boardwalk Pictures.
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Since that summer in 2005, Ramo’s firm has grown to employ 22 attorneys across New York and Los Angeles. Ramo Law has advised top-name production companies such as Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, Kevin Hart’s Laugh Out Loud and Hartbeat Productions, Reese Witherspoon and Seth Rodsky’s Hello Sunshine, David Ellison’s Skydance, Viola Davis and Julius Tennon’s JuVee, the Jim Henson Company, Boardwalk Pictures and Scout Productions.
TheWrap spoke with Ramo about the importance of courage in leadership, the current “glacial” pace of dealmaking and how spotting and capitalizing on gaps in the entertainment industry has helped her career.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What advice do you have for anyone who wants to take a less traditional approach and capitalize on the gaps in their industry?
When a problem is identified, everyone else is also trying to actively solve it. Particularly in the legal field and in the representation field, I would say a large majority approach is to just look backwards and rely on precedent and how it’s been done. It takes people a while to evolve.
Part of it is to be unafraid and open to being creative in how filmmaking is thought about and understanding that nothing is necessarily meant to conform to how it used to be done. In that respect, I think there’s a tremendous opportunity in the entertainment industry right now. If you’re just looking at how net profits are paid, how streamers do business, that is not a stagnant reality. It’s one that is shifting underneath us.
When these new business models run downstream, one has to be willing to look at it completely fresh and completely with a new perspective, utilizing the experience and the know-how that they have. It’s about approaching something with a fresh set of eyes and not relying on a formula or boilerplate or precedent.
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What shifts are you currently seeing in the marketplace when it comes to dealmaking?
Everything is so strike-focused. It’s the combination of the strike focus and every single studio and streamer having an existential crisis of who they are. First quarter we had a ton of layoffs. Second quarter was all about the strike.
I would say in dealmaking now there’s a lot of wait-and-see. The pace is glacial. Buyers are not quick to buy. Sellers are contemplating and really thinking about what’s being proposed and offered and not necessarily pushing to close. It feels slow because everybody wants to see is there a vision from the streamers and studios as to what they’re trying to do next? Are there going to be resolutions on these labor issues? And so it just feels like unproductive dealmaking, for lack of a better way of putting it.
I think there is non-WGA development that might be happening off record or internally by people or films that are being made with the idea of going to market and being, ideally, sold in a robust market where the streamers and studios are going to be starving for content. It’s like everyone’s in the workshop actually creating a little bit off record. It’ll be interesting to see once the wait-and-see period is over, the strikes have resolved and the streamers and studios have decided what they’re planning to do. Will there be this renaissance of content that pours out that everyone’s kind of holding to themselves? That’s at least my hope of why it feels so slow right now.
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You’ve spent a good amount of time and energy investing in others. For example, you founded the Professional Entertainment Female Attorneys network. Why is giving back such a priority for you?
I think a lot of why I started the way I started was I didn’t really have an opportunity or a lot of choice as a woman in my early twenties in like the early 2000s starting out. It was very hard to walk in the door because it was very much an established old-boys club, and I really struggled.
I am so appreciative of the handful of mentors and the women and men who’ve really given me a chance when nobody else would. In our industry, it’s so relationship-oriented that if you don’t put yourself out there to establish relationships with somebody who may not be anybody right now but will eventually be someone, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
I feel like it’s as much a give-and-get as it is a responsibility. A woman who’s graduating law school in her twenties, she could be running a BA department at a major studio. Why not? My friends now do it.
But creating Professional Entertainment Female Attorneys as a nonprofit and aggregating this community that feels a lot of responsibility to be a mentor and to connect with one another has been very important to me. I do think you have to create an organized community around that and to not just be in the post-#MeToo movement and checking off a box. You have to do the actions. I really feel like we all, in whatever position we’re in, have that responsibility to do that for the betterment of our entertainment industry as a whole.
What is the best piece professional advice you can give someone?
First of all, in the words of Kendrick Lamar, “Sit down, be humble.” That’s a big part of it. But I think more than anything you have to know where your passion lies. It’s why you’re doing this in the industry. And be unafraid, unafraid to walk into a room and pitch if you’ve never done it before. Be unafraid to take on a deal for someone when you’ve never represented that person. There’s a bit of courage to be in those uncomfortable inflection points, especially in our industry, because it’s not about doing really well in a similar job. It’s about how do you make yourself uncomfortable to get into the next opportunity? And you have to do that with with a little bit of courage and confidence to get there.
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