How I wrote a podcast and broke into Hollywood
By Ryan Patch
If you clicked on this because you wondered, “Is podcasting a shortcut to getting an agent? What’s the secret? Is this how I skip to the front of the line?” – then I regret to inform you that there is no secret.
My fiction podcast, City of Ghosts, has done quite well – it hit number one on several lists and charts, got a lot of good press (including Variety), and opened a ton of industry doors. But did this help me “skip the line”?
In a word – no. The formula is still highly challenging. It still is “work really hard to make a good thing, network, be a nice person, and then eventually that good thing you made will be passed to an agent”.
That being said, podcasts can be a great way to pilot an idea, do background research, gain experience, make a proof of concept, develop IP, build an audience, generate marketing for an eventual TV show – and get an agent. Here’s what I learned.
If you’re unfamiliar with the fiction podcast genre, check out the subreddit r/audiodrama for a good place to start, or google “best audio dramas”. The audio drama Homecoming was an early classic, as were Limetown and The Bright Sessions, evolving from the “found footage” genre into the lush storytelling of Marvel’s Wolverine. Welcome to Night Vale and Wolf 359 are both super long-running shows which notched up huge audiences. My co-creator Carina Green and I also love Rabbits, The Burn Book, The Edge of Sleep, and Passenger List. Archive 81 started as a podcast and is the number one show on Netflix as I am writing this.
A company called QCode was started to only generate IP in podcast form as sort of a “farm team” testing of shows. There are tons of other great audio dramas out there as well, generally concentrated in sci-fi, horror and fantasy, many with a YA-tinged voice. But there’s no reason they should be limited to those genres.
The advantage of creating a podcast over a spec script or short film
With the time I put into City of Ghosts (two years writing, plus about a year and a half in production, post, and marketing), I probably could have written several feature films or TV pilots. However, as I prefer to be in dark rooms with other people (as opposed to just being in dark rooms by myself) this is the route that I chose. There are so many ways to “break in” – I think it’s just about selecting the one that your resources and personality support the best.
The advantage of an audio drama is that it allows you to tell a story on a much larger canvas than a short film, but costs about the same amount.
The advantage of an audio drama is that it allows you to tell a story on a much larger canvas than a short film, but costs about the same amount. Creating a podcast gave me the opportunity to beef up my storytelling muscles. I’ve been directing short films for many years, but building characters and stories that take 400 pages to develop requires a far more advanced skillset than creating a self-contained story that takes eight pages to tell.
My 2019 short film Regulation cost about $25.000, and in the end went to 20 festivals and has been seen maybe 500.000 times online. My audio series cost about the same amount (both represent a ton of “mates’ rates” labour) and in raw downloads will likely have a smaller audience.
However, even though a successful short film may be viewed 500.000 times, 1m times, or over 5m times, it’s unlikely it will inspire a “cult” following or a true audience. It is proof of concept, proof of your talent – but it doesn’t build a brand.
Podcasts, due to the significant amount of time that people spend consuming them, have a much larger potential to build a relationship with an audience. And this is what producers really want when they buy IP. They don’t want the IP just because it’s cool – they want the IP because there’s an existing, proven audience. This is true of nonfiction “chat shows” as well as audio dramas.
This isn’t to say that podcasts should only be created to build brands and IP or as calling cards. The great thing about podcasts is that you can do whatever the hell you want with them – there’s no adult supervision or rules. You want to experiment with some super-specific genre, set around an event no one has heard of, starring some unique minority? Go for it. There’s not going to be any producers saying, “will this really appeal to Chad in Des Moines?” You can make a show that truly is your voice.
This is one of the reasons we were so confident creating City of Ghosts in audio fiction format. It’s a weird mix of supernatural and spooky storytelling, rich character development, tropey family drama, and political and financial thriller. A TV executive would probably be confused about this – “Wait, is this like Billions or Mr. Robot or The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina?” Yes.
I started this project with my co-writer Carina Green all the way back in 2018. We wrote in small chunks, outside of our day jobs (and our night jobs, when we focused on other personal scripts). Sometimes progress would be consistent, sometimes not…
In a podcast, as in a TV show, it’s important not only to construct the character, plot, and world, but to get the “engine” right. We needed to find a world that kept the stories walking in through the front door, and characters that kept playing off one another.
We entered our initial podcast pilot into the Austin Film Festival podcast script competition, but did not even advance to the second round. Slammed door. Still, I went to Austin that year anyway with one of my other scripts which did advance, and I attended some of the podcasting tracks. Much later on, this had unexpected consequences.
We kept working. Once we got the basics of the show right and wrote a few drafts of the pilot, we moved on, and had written four episodes by the beginning of 2020.
I was on the plane home from my last directing gig when President Trump announced the suspension of flights globally. I realized I wouldn’t be boarding a flight to the UK for my next gig. But I also realized that a pandemic might be a great time to finally produce this project.
Carina and I raced to finish the scripts in about eight more weeks (as we thought the pandemic was going to quickly resolve...) and simultaneously reached out to a casting director, who I hired to cast the series. Every cent we spent was valuable, and this was no exception. Casting directors are your pipeline to talent, and act as social proof in the Hollywood system. This director liked the project, which is why they did it for a fraction of their rate. They helped us assemble a killer cast of folks who were all out of work during the early days of the pandemic.
We got Brigette Lundy-Paine from Netflix’s Atypical and Bill and Ted Face the Music, Moises Arias from Monos and Sundance-winner Jockey, Golshifteh Farahani from Apple TV’s Invasion and Netflix’s Extraction, James Scully from Netflix’s You, Rich Sommer from Mad Men, and Kevin Pollak from… well, everything. The key point for most of these names was that it was one to three days of their time (not much commitment). We’d ship them recording gear, and promise them a fun break from the pandemic. They liked the scripts, and I created a compelling lookbook. I also wrote all of them a very nice letter.
We recorded using Zoom, while they simultaneously recorded their HQ vocals on recording kits that we sent them. I also directed remotely, so this was squarely in my comfort zone, which comes back to how selecting your “route” is more about you and your skills than necessarily a “right” way.
The actors then sent the files back to me (many of the older ones needed coaching), and we re-assembled them into the scenes. It was a mess, with audio files everywhere, and no standardization of naming – I highly recommend not doing this. (That being said, honestly, if you asked me, would I do it again to assemble my cast, if they were all over the world? I’d do it. But with a much better workflow. Additionally, given the pandemic, there are now much more established best practices around this.)
Because of the remote nature of the work, we certainly missed a lot of great back-and-forth, playing off one another and live recording energy, and it was challenging to direct people remotely. But we got it done.
What I learned
We had other challenges. Our lead Brigette had a whole day of audio that came in garbled, so we had to re-record it after sending a tech to their house to check the gear. George Floyd was murdered four days before we began recording, and we had to re-arrange schedules so our recording would not conflict with protests (both so our cast could participate in the protests, and so our audio wouldn’t get ruined by the sound of our citizens’ rage).
But everyone was committed to the project, not least because the subject of the series is about how political corruption is an insidious rot that compromises justice. The show is definitely not what one might call a “social justice” show – after all, it’s primarily about ghosts. But on the other hand, it has a purpose and a point of view that makes it meaningful, and that’s extremely important for talent to latch onto.
Don’t fake it – you have to be passionate about the subject. But when you can’t pay $1m for an actor, they’re doing the project because it’s meaningful. It used to be that you wrote roles that actors could “sink their teeth into”. That’s still great, but giving everyone associated with the production a sense of meaning is a crucial element of creating something that people want to be a part of – even if it’s an action thriller with vampires. Most people today want to know that what they spend 8-14 hours a day doing is a net positive for the world.
Anyway, we did it. As always, there were scenes that needed to be re-written on the spot. I found myself striking out a lot of lines in the sessions – possibly a symptom of a rushed writing process (John August says “anything that can be cut will be cut”) but when you hear scripts spoken out loud it quickly becomes clear where the fat is. It was an incredible process for me, to hear over 400 pages of my writing read and acted out loud in a week.
After receiving back the audio files, an assistant and I slowly pieced the hundreds of files together and synchronized them. My assistant made a rough edit, then I did the final editing. I am particular about pacing and take selection, and also, I didn’t have money to pay anyone else to edit.
I have some audio experience from New York University, where they literally start film school with an audio storytelling classes. I had enough Pro Tools kicking around in my brain from 15 years ago to use it to edit this project, but actually I don’t believe that knowing Pro Tools helped me at all. If anything, it made things more complicated. If you are considering doing anything of the sort, I would encourage you to use what you know, and to use what is cheap. Audio storytelling is very simple, technically, so you don’t need all of the bells and whistles of Pro Tools or even Logic – frankly, they slowed me down. The best program to use is always the one you have, and the one you know.
When I got into the edit, I realized that even though I knew audio storytelling would require more exposition in the dialogue, I underestimated how much it would actually need, and also what sort of scenes worked well. Yes, you do need to orient listeners in every scene. Where are we? What is she holding? Who’s speaking? The latter question was harder than anticipated – in a film, not knowing who a character is can be mysterious, a great unanswered question to drive tension, or else easily glossed over. In an audio podcast, it’s just annoying and confusing, and people really need to know names.
Film loves short scenes (and things like time cuts, match cuts, etc.) because visually you can get re-oriented very quickly. A good director will set you up for the cut well, and you can tell a story just in the juxtaposition between cuts. Audio doesn’t give you that – it’s a much more manual process of having to set up every scene, so those short expositional scenes we all write in films worked far less well in audio.
Of course, we all know that every scene should have beats and actions and objectives – but we all cheat a little. We set the scene in an interesting place, doing a “pope in a pool”, to use Blake Snyder’s coinage. But in audio, a pope in a pool sounds strikingly similar to a pope not in a pool, so it’s far harder to make these scenes compelling. Our best episodes were the ones with a low scene count (10-12 scenes over 35 minutes), but those scenes had clear dramatic propositions.
We eschewed the “found footage” or “reporter” style that many audio dramas have used, but that also meant that we needed to give our characters reasons to be speaking to one another. Our lead was a loner, but just listening to someone grunt while walking around the city doesn’t work. So, we invented two characters that she can always talk to – an accomplice on the phone (who she often narrates her surroundings to) and a ghost, who can also be called upon to verbally process with.
All these learnings were hugely helpful for me.
After our assistant editor took a first pass at the edit, I fine-tuned everything, as well as scored it myself with an AI music tool called Amper (that no longer exists after being sold to Shutterstock – I hope they bring it back). A friend wrote simple melodies to go over the score. It took me hundreds of hours to do this, as each episode takes well over 20 hours to edit, and there are 10 of them.
As I finished every episode, I handed it off to a sound designer who has worked on my films to create the lush soundscape. The folks at Ott House Audio did great work in creating a full, cinematic soundscape. This set us apart from almost every other drama out there – we approached it in a much more fully sound-designed way. This is something else that came from my specific experience – I direct branded documentaries for my day job, so I had a relationship with this audio house that gave me mates’ rates on the design. I had a flexible schedule, they love working with me, and it worked well.
You might be saying to yourself “well, I don’t have experience directing, and I don’t have connections to Emmy award-winning sound designers”. But that’s my point – figure out what life experiences you do have and leverage those – both for content, connections, and collaborations.
How I got signed at CAA
Now, for the third act twist. As we were finishing the first couple of episodes, we were approached by a production company through a connection of one of our casting directors. They had just started a podcast IP development farm, essentially to develop the IP then leverage into properties. I won’t name names, but I’ll just say the principal had a Vanity Fair profile about them – they are a big freaking deal, and I'd still be honoured to sell anything to them.
They were very excited about buying the rights and then reselling to another podcast network (Spotify, Stitcher, etc). They courted us for a while with a deal that felt rough, but not too bad for first-timers. But I just couldn’t shake the recurring feeling that they were not right to distribute this particular project. However, they were really the only name I had access to in town, and I didn’t know what else to do. I cold emailed the other networks and got nothing back.
Then I remembered that way back when I went to the Austin Film Festival podcast track, I had spoken with people and gotten their cards. I dug one card out, and sent an email. I attached the first episode and a lookbook (revised for distribution). To my delight, this guy whom I had met once, over three years ago, responded within a couple hours and we spoke on the phone the next day.
The quality of the production, as well as the cast, clearly compelled him. He said what we needed next was a trailer, and then he said he'd like to introduce us to the podcast people at CAA, who would be able to offer much better terms to broker a deal than the terms we had been offered. I worked with him for a few months to refine the trailer, which you can hear on any of the places the podcast lives.
As will happen with industry relationships, this contact was protective of his relationships at CAA, so he worked with me for long enough to make sure that I was not going to embarrass him if he made the introduction. I believe I comported myself well, and that gave him the confidence not only in my content, but also in me as a person, to make the introduction to CAA.
Remember, with these sorts of relationships, people are primarily curious if you're a good person who they can do business with. There are plenty of talented people out there. But making movies and podcasts and being an agent is these people’s jobs and they’re likely not going to choose to work with people who are stupid or mean.
I spoke with Anna, who’s now our agent at CAA, who was excited to sign me and represent the podcast for sale. I can’t describe how much more “in sync” our agent was with us than that big prodco.
As I said up front, this formula is not a new formula. You still have to work really hard, make something good, network yourself, be a decent human, and have a product (that “something good”) that the agent can sell.
I believe we all think of “an agent” as the golden promised land, someone who will be our mentor, assistant, motivator and idea-bouncer who will line up all of our jobs. We’re wrong. They’re sales people whose job it is to find and sell things. They need something good to sell. This is something that I overlooked upfront – not only was a podcast a different kind of portfolio piece for me, but it was also a sellable commodity – which a short film is not.
A Final Twist
Eventually, after pitching to a number of networks, our agent told us (and this is verbatim): “Although we have received several pieces of positive feedback about your podcast, several of the big networks have passed. I’ve noticed that more and more of these places are taking shots on development as opposed to finished shows”.
That was disappointing, but we’re far from the first people to not have our great idea picked up. We then moved fully to a self-release strategy for the project, which is how we have released it to the public. This involved a lot of hustling, emailing to press outlets, work hiring an artist to do the show art (which I think turned out great! Check it out on our Instagram) and eventually releasing the show to great success.
As regards the observation from our agents about development happening in-house, this means that it might be more beneficial to march in with a script and a lookbook rather than having to do everything on spec and make it all yourself like I did. This will save you the cash and hundreds of hours of labour. On the other hand, there’s nothing like having that cold, hard piece of finished content to catch people’s eye, and also, there’s nothing like being answerable to no one except yourself for creative decisions.
Like a lot of the film industry, it’s certainly a catch-22. You shouldn’t spend your own money on something when someone else is going to want to develop it, but it’s also true that no one will pay attention until you’ve actually had something made. It’s a difficult predicament to be in, and you need to find the best way to break this cycle. For me, I just made a ten-episode podcast.
The final twist, however, came several months after the podcast was released. The show did truly well (especially given we really didn’t know what we were doing) but didn’t necessarily become a household “must listen” name (we’re no Serial). Not enough listenership to create the revenue to make another series or demand a TV adaptation, I thought. I thought this would be the end of it – but a great portfolio project and an agent is not a bad thing to end with.
However, just in the last month, our agent emailed us. She let us know that there’s interest from several TV production companies and a showrunner in adapting the show for TV. This heralds, of course, the beginning of another very long journey, but even if nothing comes of it, we’re meeting folks and building those ever-elusive Hollywood relationships.
Final Thoughts
For anyone considering creating a podcast, I’d like to point out that some of the examples of the audio dramas that I gave – like Welcome to Night Vale, Rabbits, and The Bright Sessions – did something very smart that I didn't do. They started very, very simple. Many of the early episodes were just two characters talking in a room together (or even one character talking to you) in extended dialogues.
They started very small and stripped-down, and slowly built the world. We got ourselves into a world of hurt going full-bore, large-cast, sound-design-heavy right off the bat. This limited how many episodes we could produce.
Another thing to think about is creating a nonfiction podcast that goes through the facts your fictional script is based on. This way you can prove the topic’s appeal – and then use that podcast as a way to sell your fiction TV script. Examples like The Shrink Next Door or Dr Death abound.
These reporting or chat shows (also known as “two ways”, because it’s just two people speaking) are enormously easier to produce technically. They’re also easier to produce a great deal of content for. Which is important, because podcasts actually are a medium that rewards lots of content.
What builds an audience for a podcast is almost endless content – 20 or more episodes in a season, and multiple seasons. To do that, you need to think very intentionally about writing stuff that works with a small number of actors, a small number of characters, not a ton of action to sound design, and long, long scenes. As I said, I did not do this.
It’s unsustainable for me to work hundreds of hours on editing and scoring a show. With City of Ghosts, we have ten episodes lasting between 25-45 minutes, and 14 cast members that we pay. The episodes are extremely high-quality, but I don’t have the time or money to do more – unless someone pays for them…
Ideally, you want something that can be more slow and steady in building an audience, something that doesn’t need to land hard. I heard several times that “the first season is when you find your voice. Your second is when you build your audience. The third is when you make money or make deals”.
As I said, this is a long-haul game, not a shortcut. But for someone who likes writing genre (or has a bit of a YA-flavour to their work), who has some audio production experience, access to a couple of friends as actors, and likes the idea of building something – if you are that person, creating a podcast is a great method to make a “proof of concept” product and jump-start your career.
Ryan Patch
I’m Ryan Patch, and I make films, audio stories, and experiences. You can learn more about me on my website, and connect with me on LinkedIn.
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