Innovative Artists Entertainment agent Andy Patman is not sitting around waiting for the entertainment business to change. Instead, he and his team want to make the changes themselves.
“Every time we would go out into a meeting, everybody complains how hard everything is in the business right now,” Patman said in an interview with Variety “So rather than wait around for the business to improve, what our focus is as a team is how to do things differently. We treat this as an opportunity to rethink how to engage and super-serve not just our clients, but also the business.”
Patman is a 20-year veteran of Paradigm and began his career at William Morris. He moved to A3 Artists Agency in 2020, but following the shutdown of A3 in early 2024, Patman and multiple colleagues moved to the literary department at Innovative Artists. His team now includes Martin To, Martin Spencer, Margaret Mendelson, and Ian Greenstein, who serve alongside Innovative lit vets Jim Stein and Michael Pio.
Innovative is looking to continue their growth, which has been spurred in part by outside investment from private equity firm Coral Tree Partners. Patman sees continued growth in live entertainment and sports as a big opportunity for Innovative in the coming years.
“We have a great theater business led by Gary Gersh in New York” Patman said. “We have Tamra Goins and Steve Muller, who run our comedy business. So we have comedy touring. And we’re really taking a good strong look into music and sports. We made a good sports investment with the addition of Brad Small, who’s just this master in the professional wrestling world. So much of the skill set is the same. You’re representing artists and personalities, and you have to find the best.”
Many of those in the world of professional wrestling, sports, and comedy still want to find their way into more traditional Hollywood roles, though.
“They need access to the acting and content creation world, which is really what literary is,” Patman continued. “So we’ve also done and are going to increase our investment in the digital space, which is really being spearheaded by Jack Harris. You have to have access to anywhere content is being consumed, period…It’s like every streamer has sports in a big, big way. Everybody needs to be all things to all viewers. And that’s kind of like representation. You have to be nimble and be able to provide opportunity anywhere a marketplace is emerging.”
Patman and Innovative also have a robust roster of veteran showrunners, something Patman believes is a crucial component of the agency given the content bubble bursting Hollywood has experienced in the past couple of years. A recent conversation with a top production company illustrated that point for him.
“[The company’s] sweet spot right now is providing shows at $5 million an episode, one hours,” he said. “That’s a that’s an interesting data point. The only way you can do that is by teaming with real showrunners who know how to execute and know how to make those adjustments and say things like, ‘Well, we’re not going to get this shot today. How do I continue the story there in an artful manner?’”
Patman has also seen a shift in the way lit agents are supporting clients in the streaming age. According to the veteran agent, many buyers now are not looking to develop projects, but rather are looking for projects that can come to them all but fully formed.
“They don’t have the time to invest,” he said. “The head of a streamer said, ‘We don’t develop. We don’t have time to develop.’ They make the binary choice, yea or nay, and that’s the bad news…The fact of the matter is that the opportunity has fallen into the representatives laps…to give notes. Writers traditionally don’t like getting notes from their agent or their manager, but they’re not getting notes from anybody else.”
