WME Adaptation Authorities on the IP Frenzy, a Department Shift and What’s In (and Out) in Hollywood

Lacey Rose
·13 min read

Hilary Zaitz Michael was Sylvie Rabineau’s first hire once her literary agency, Rabineau Wachter Sanford & Gillett, was acquired by WME eight years ago. In the years since, the two, along with partner Jill Holwager Gillett and a department that’s since expanded to 11 agents, have had a front row seat to Hollywood’s intellectual property boom, which only accelerated during the pandemic.

In fact, in the last year alone, their roster has kept them inordinately busy, from Laura Lippman’s Prom Mom and Rebecca Serle’s One Italian Summer being optioned by Universal and Paramount, respectively, to Laura Dave (The Last Thing He Told Me) and Bryan Lee O’Malley (Scott Pilgrim Takes Off) adapting their own material. The breadth of their work also prompted a rebranding of what was formerly the literary packaging department, and now is the literary media one.

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Over Zoom in mid-February, Zaitz Michael, who was recently upped to co-head the department, and Rabineau weighed in on the name change as well as other industry trends.

You are changing the name of the department, from “literary packaging” to “literary media.” Talk to me about that decision, and what it suggests about the business today?

HILARY ZAITZ MICHAEL Packaging doesn’t really speak to all that we do. I also think it doesn’t define all that IP is today. So, we’re moving towards the literary media department because we are such hybrid agents and all wear so many different hats depending on what the client’s needs are, whether they’re adapting or they’re just selling their rights or they want to do podcasts or video games or live events. There are so many other ways to think about how we are exploiting material now, not just through traditional film and TV. So, that was really the impetus for moving away from literary packaging and into literary media.

SYLVIE RABINEAU And it’s been this organic evolution. When I first started as an agent, it was primarily book to film, and then it grew to book to television. Those were the core lanes, so when we came to [WME,] it was really about being partners in those lanes. But what we’ve seen, with our authors, is that they’re interested in podcasts, in video games, in stage rights, in live events, in being speakers. Not all of them, you really have to curate for what the particular client wants and what their publishing agent wants and then work in support of their agenda, but we’re seeing all these different possibilities and it’s a super strength of our agency that we have these different departments that we can access and work with.

It’s easy for an author to come to you and say, “I’d like my book to be a TV show or a stage play, and I want to adapt it.” But not every author is going to thrive in a writers room or be good at turning his or her book into a film or stage play. How do you assess your clients’ strengths and encourage or discourage them accordingly?

ZAITZ MICHAEL Well, first, who better to know the material, honestly, than the author, so we will always come from that perspective and champion our client if they want to adapt. And we’ve had so many wonderful examples where clients have co-created or co-showrun with an experienced television vet, or in features, were supervised by a filmmaker. We also have a lot of clients who are really passionate about writing their novels and they just care about who it gets matched up with in the end — and we take that very seriously, too, in terms of who we’re going to pass the baton to to do the actual adaptation. But every client is different, and sometimes it takes time and practice. We have clients where it took a few tries, and we have others who are just naturals.

RABINEAU To add to that, we’ve seen a shift, certainly over my career, where books had previously been used for their ideas, and now there’s such a respect given to authors. The creative community understands that authors deserve an equal seat at the table just as every other talent involved in the project does. And so that spectrum of, I want to adapt my material to I want to be a non-writing executive producer, there are so many ways to address that and it falls to us to really explain what each version of that path looks like. And ultimately what we found with authors who do want to adapt is that they really do their homework. They’re often natural television or movie lovers, and they read scripts, they read books about screenwriting or television writing and they understand that the craft is related but different.

A few years ago, Sylvie, you had said your least favorite part of the job was having to fight for authors to have a meaningful role in their adaptations – or at least that they be treated with the same respect as the rest of the creative team. Are you suggesting that that’s no longer a fight?

RABINEAU I feel like that’s going to be on my tombstone. (Laughs.) We’ve definitely seen huge improvements. And listen, there are great examples and there are some less than great examples, but overall, the trajectory has been a very, very positive one. Way back when, it was this knee-jerk reaction that authors couldn’t adapt their own work because they were too precious, but we’ve been able to prove that that is not correct at all, and that authors understand that it’s a cinematic interpretation, not a literal adaptation. And the ones that really want to pursue it as a writer, they understand that. I think the authors who have more concerns about that probably just want to see the best writer attached to their material and, as Hilary said, go off and write their next book.

It’s been nearly a decade since you sold your firm to WME. What’s been the biggest change you’ve seen in the literary packaging world in the years since?

RABINEAU Eight years ago, it used to be that you would read a book and you could immediately identify whether you thought something was a feature or a television series. And as time has gone on, what we’ve realized, and there certainly are a lot of challenges, but the beauty of where we are now in the marketplace is that it’s really the material that will dictate how many hours a story needs to be told. And although we like to do the work and come up with the right pitch, oftentimes you take something out and the market might dictate whether something should, in fact, be a feature or an ongoing series or a limited series. And I’d say that’s really the biggest change, that those walls are so porous now, primarily because of the streamers and the way they program and also because most producers do all of it today. So, you might send something to a producer and say, “I think this is a feature,” and the producer might call back and say, “You know what? I actually would love to do this as a limited series.”

ZAITZ MICHAEL It happens more often than not these days. I also think just in terms of changes in our business, I mean, we’ve lived through the pandemic and then the writer’s strike, and now that that’s behind us, what we’re seeing and working towards is an intentionality that’s there with buyers because we can bring things with the writer perspective now. It just felt like for a long time, we were doing tons of deals, but they were essentially open writing assignments, and we really weren’t able to [fill them], unless our authors were adapting.

I’m curious, what are your media diets, and how have those changed in recent years?

ZAITZ MICHAEL It’s all over the place. I mean, I’m doing a podcast deal right now and I’m out with five different books. We also represent a number of super high-end journalists and publications. And then I have clients where we’re focused on fashion opportunities, or building out their events business because they have a rabid fan base. So, we’re doing some of everything, and it’s fiction and nonfiction, adult and kids.

RABINEAU And what’s great in our department is that people really are allowed and ultimately tasked with following their passions. So, we have one agent who has an expertise in sports, and one who has an expertise in kids and family, and another who has an expertise in Spanish language – and they all do everything but they have that expertise that they can lean into. And I know for me, as somebody who’s been doing it for a long time, it’s been great to learn the podcast business or what it entails to build a video game. I love that you get to continue learning as the business evolves. And we embrace the changes.

ZAITZ MICHAEL By the way, we also have a whole task force just dedicated to “BookTok.” So, that is a huge area.

RABINEAU That’s right, that’s a major change in the last eight years, just how important book talk and social media has become to the success of books.

You’ve referenced video games a few times. What, exactly, does that entail for your author clients?

ZAITZ MICHAEL Creating a video game. We represent most of the high-end contemporary fantasy writers, and many of them really like gaming, and so that is something where it’s not just adapting your book or writing something, but it’s thinking about other mediums of storytelling.

RABINEAU It is about being world creators — for film or television or a video game. And none of it has yet crossed the finish line, but I’d say we have half a dozen authors who are in those video game conversations now, and many of them have worked in it before.

We’ve written a lot about the IP boom in recent years, particularly during the pandemic and WGA strike. How would you characterize the market today? And what kind of impact has the industry-wide contraction had?

ZAITZ MICHAEL From where we sit, IP is evergreen, right? There’s never not a need for great material and great writing, period. And it’s so clear to us, even post-strike, that books have the power to be filmmaker bait and actor bait, and they are often a blueprint for a major screenwriter or showrunner or director to take something and have creative license with it and spawn the next big idea beyond just the book itself. Now, what we have seen recently is that it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality, and we’re hearing that across the board from the buyers and studios that we work with. And coming out of the strike, people are very specific about what they’re looking for. And it just feels like there is this need right now for white space content that is just wholly original and windows into cultures and businesses and worlds that we can travel to as viewers.

RABINEAU But the one common denominator is that everybody is cost conscious, so the goal is being able to deliver premium content for a price. And we are very aware of that when we’re reading books and material and it’s about understanding what the investment and the risk is with each particular project. But I’m sure you’ve heard the adage, which applies to all agents, “Your job starts when somebody says no.” So, we live for those exceptions, and even in a difficult market, in terms of cost and consolidation, we sort of march forward undeterred.

In terms of what you see selling or desired in this moment, what’s in and what’s out?

ZAITZ MICHAEL I think the two major buckets that we hear a lot right now is the epic contemporary love story and premium procedurals. And I’m not talking just about, like, a basic law enforcement or cop procedural — we’re talking about something that is character-elevated and sustainable over multiple seasons, which dovetails into this other ask, which is for ongoing shows, things that have the capacity to return and an engine to sustain itself. So, that can be a number of different things, but we’re getting that across the board. And what’s out, like Sylvie said, are things that cost a lot. If a network is going to justify an outrageous budget now, it has to be backed up with book sales or a major audience that they’d be tapping into.

RABINEAU I would just add to that that everybody’s always interested in the great family show that we haven’t seen before. You can look at everything from Succession to Yellowstone to The Bear as different types of family shows. People want an emotional journey in terms of what they’re watching because it has been such a roller coaster of a time in the world –- they’re looking for content that can help them process their emotions.

Before you go, I should also note that Hilary has been elevated to co-run the department with you, Sylvie. What prompted that change, and how will the division change or evolve with Hilary at the helm?

RABINEAU When I was part of my old agency, RWSG, we’d identified Hillary when she was at Anonymous as an incredible reader and communicator, and she was so able to help move projects forward. So, when we came here and we were building and re-imagining the department almost like an in-house producorial team, we knew that Hillary, coming from working for producers, would have that extra skillset that we wanted to grow in the department. And that’s exactly what has happened, and it’s been incredible to watch her come in, having never been an agent, and really develop these superpowers. Also, for the company, it’s just so important to know who the next generation leaders are, and to give them this incredible runway to grow even more.

How big is the department at this point?

ZAITZ MICHAEL We have 11 agents now, including us.

RABINEAU And then we actually have a librarian because one of the things that we started in this department is a [digital] library. It’s an archive of all WME represented material, and it’s been this incredible project that we built from the ground up with an official librarian. We also have our own business affairs executive.

ZAITZ MICHAEL The point of the library is so that anybody here could search something very specific and it could find an old spec from 1999, or a book that newly fell out of option. I mean, as an agent representing your clients and needing to have real time info of what’s there, it’s amazing. There are almost 6,000 titles in there, and we’re only a year into launching it.

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