This sounds like a rather unscrupulous company, and probably enough red flags have been raised to scare off any future IndieTalk clients.
About producer's reps in general, I'll offer my own experience, for anyone interested:
I'm repped by a manager in Los Angeles. He deals primarily at the major studio level, and by his own admission has limited knowledge of the independent film industry. A former colleague of his founded a producer's rep firm in L.A. along with a couple of partners. My manager sent my film to them, and they expressed an interest in handling it...for a rather hefty up-front fee.
Of course, both my manager and I balked immediately at that - the fee amounted to a third of my production budget! In their defense, I will say that the fee included all legal services - negotiations, contracts, accounting and audits, if necessary - the partners in the firm are all seasoned entertainment attorneys. If the film were a success, one might easily spend that much on attorney fees anyway. But it was still a ridiculous sum for my budget level.
I did some online research and ran across several articles like the one cited by slapshot, which seemed to confirm my decision to pass on the offer. My manager agreed that the fee was unreasonable, but did some calling around to his contacts in the industry. To our surprise, he was told by several producers that upfront fees for producer's reps are actually commonplace now. Because of the huge volume of indie material out there, many distributors will no longer bother to even screen the films sent to them unless they contain a recognizable name or are submitted by a reputable firm.
The firm that offered to handle my film was recommended across-the-board as one of the most reputable in the biz. My manager was assured by many that, yes, they're expensive, but worth every penny.
But the price was still way too high. We made them a counter-offer of about a quarter of the amount, and they countered with a slightly higher figure, plus a guarantee of the remainder on the back end. It was still pretty steep - well into four digits - but with all of the assurances from my manager's contacts I decided to take the chance.
They spent about 9 months sending the movie out to about 50 distributors and following up to make certain it was being reviewed. They divided the distributors into 3 tiers - tier 1 was comprised of the big names that everyone's heard of: Fox Searchlight, Lion's Gate, Miramax, Sony Classics, etc. No takers there, not surprisingly, so they moved on to tier 2, which are names that many IT'ers may recognize, but few in the mainstream would know. They fully expected interest at that level, but it didn't happen. So they moved onto tier 3, which was the smaller/newer names.
In the end, my film did not get picked up. The producer's rep firm seemed very surprised, but did acknowledge that there is a glut of indie horror product right now, and films need to have some major marketing element to attract the top distributors.
They also acknowledged that there were many other distributors to whom they could have submitted the film, but chose not to because those distributors had a reputation of screwing producers out of their percentage. I was free to submit to those distributors if I so desired, and the firm would still act as my legal representative, but they would not take responsibility for any unscrupulous behavior on the part of the distributor.
So, bottom line (for those of you still reading
): I'm out the upfront fee, but do not owe the balance. I still don't have a distributor, but I do have the firm's assurance of legal representation if something does pan out. Would I do it again? Probably not at that same budget level, though everyone thought my film's relatively high production value would have more impact in the market.
Take what you will from this expensive lesson. There is no clean-cut, hard and fast rule about producer's reps. It's a tough market, whether or not you have representation.
