WME’s Indie Chief on the New Business Models: ‘Get Every Dollar Out There’
Deborah McIntosh is scoring profit participation (for some) and talks a fresh market where every window is shattered and ‘plug-and-play’ deals are over
I cover agents, lawyers and top dealmakers for paid subscribers. I wrote about top Q2 deals plus M&A predictions for Q3 and reported a 3-part series about the state of TV pacts including the scoop on Apple’s new backend for writers.
Deborah McIntosh has had a front row ticket to the evolution of the independent film business from the very first days of her career — 18 years and counting that has included strikes, financial crises and the rise and fall of the DVD market — and she’s now on the forefront of creating deals that reflect the current disrupted reality and the evolving future of independent filmmaking and the theatrical market.
As co-head (with Alex Walton) of WME Independent, McIntosh manages a team of 10 agents and specializes in securing financing and distribution for indie films as well as consulting with high-net-worth individuals and production companies looking to make investments in the space.
Her resume features awards darlings from Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash to Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, and many titles which were also actors’ directorial debuts, including Paul Dano’s Wildlife, Dev Patel’s Monkey Man and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter. Most recently McIntosh sold Kristen Stewart’s first feature as a director, The Chronology of Water, to a new distributor called The Forge.
The UT Austin grad with a double major in film and advertising — who says she turned to Dazed and Confused almost nightly for comfort after moving to L.A. — started her career at the William Morris Agency in 2007.
Her trajectory since then: The agency merged with Endeavor in 2009, and McIntosh was promoted to agent in 2011; in 2017, she started Endeavor Content with Graham Taylor and Chris Rice and became the division’s SVP, film advisory, returning to WME in her current role at the end of 2021 (WME Independent was created as Endeavor Content was being readied for a sale amid the dispute between the WGA and agencies over packaging and agency ownership of production companies).
“My career began at the tail end of what most people in Hollywood would consider a very normal, predictable time,” McIntosh, 40, tells me. “The DVD market was keeping things humming. It allowed for specialty distribution arms to be created at almost every studio. There was some normalcy to how consumers got movies, and there were only a few of those options.”
That normalcy was about to end. (More on that below.)
Now that we’re in another big transition period, I turned to McIntosh to put things in perspective. We caught up on Zoom last week, just ahead of her trip to the Telluride Film Festival, to talk all things indie.
In this conversation, for paid subscribers, McIntosh shares her insights on…
How her role has evolved — from agent to “billionaire whisperer”
Her thoughts on Mubi, The Forge and the distributors and dealmakers shaking up the indie landscape
What indie films must do to thrive in a direct-to-consumer world
How spec sales are signaling the health of the broader industry
What indies can learn from KPop Demon Hunters’ surprise success
The real story behind A24’s early hits like The Witch — and why filmmakers love the studio
Details of a streaming deal that could rewrite the playbook for filmmakers
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