The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast · A L Katz

S4E12: Best v Worst

April 1, 2025·43 min

Alan Katz opens with a monkey joke and a nudge to like and share the show. He then brings back his longtime friend and former agent Nick Mechanic, and the talk settles quickly into the old habits of show business, where calls, favors, and bad behavior tell the real story. Mechanic has seen both sides. He runs through the great deals, the not-so-great deals, the great clients, the difficult clients, and the executives who either handled things well or made the whole process harder than it needed to be. Call-backs become a thread. Mechanic says the bigger executives often returned calls faster, and he uses Ron Meyer, Jeffrey, and Donald DeLine as examples of how the top of the ladder can still mean basic courtesy and a working phone. The worst behavior is easier to name. When Katz asks what lands an executive on his list, Mechanic points to disrespect and lying, then makes clear that he bent the truth when he had to sell scripts but still tried to play by the rules. The best deal comes next. He remembers his first assistant sale, the Triads pitch to Simpson Bruckheimer with Ron Kazin and Michael Blodgett for $550,000, a deal that mattered because it paired two writers who did not know each other. It led to plenty more pitches after that. The story widens from there. He also recalls a book idea sold to Disney for about a million two, only for the book never to be written, which says a lot about how far a pitch can travel before the work catches up. There is more history still. The conversation heads toward another story about Tylenol with codeine, a counselor, a return to rehab, and a dirty test, and Katz signals that it will come up again on a future visit. The tone stays loose. Katz lets Mechanic wander through memory, then keeps pulling the thread back to the practical side of the business, where deals live or die on who returns a call, who lies, and who can be trusted to keep a promise. That is the point. The episode treats show business as a place where the bruises become stories, and the stories only make sense once someone has had enough time to tell them without smoothing off the edges.

As heard by us

A clear look at the deals and habits that shape show business.

Alan Katz uses this visit with longtime friend and former agent Nick Mechanic to trace what show business tends to reward and what it tends to punish.

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Why you'd press play

You get the agent war stories when the calls are returned and the deals go sideways.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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