A one-year private partnership for the actor, writer, director, musician, or creative who knows something essential is misaligned and is ready to do what it actually takes to close that gap.

private Development partnership

The Sentence.

You have a story.

There is a thing that happens when someone reads material that is genuinely good.

They stop taking notes. They read longer than they need to. And then they say some version of the same sentence.

Don't show this to anyone else.

That sentence is not a compliment on your craft. Craft impresses people, and impressed people keep reading calmly. This is something else. They felt something land in the chest, and their gut told them ahead of any thinking that the same thing would happen to a seventy-year-old in a small town and a nineteen-year-old on the other side of the world, for reasons neither of them could explain. They know how rare that is. They want to hold it before anyone else feels it too.

Talent does not earn that reaction. I've watched enormously talented people go whole careers without hearing it. And you cannot aim at it, which is the part that traps most people. Writing toward everybody produces work that reaches nobody, because broad is not the same as universal. Universal is what happens when something is so particular, so specific to one person's real experience, that it stops belonging to that person at all. The most personal thing you have is the only thing that travels.

Most material stops one layer short of that, and rarely because the maker isn't good. The hook doesn't quite hold under retelling. The engine turns over without ever running. The voice is in there somewhere but hedged, and the person who made it stayed just outside the work where it was safe. It stops short because no one ever went in there with them.

That is what this is.

“John sees me, my character, and the story I’m trying to tell all at once. This allows a complete confidence in rooms and on camera that I don’t think I’ve been able to find before. He wishes to help me shape characters, tell stories and I believe he is truly devoted to helping me shape my career the way I want it, and beyond that, help me live my life the way I want to.”

— Jeremy Allen White · Emmy Award Winner, The Bear

Actor. Writer. Director.

Actors. You have a project, or the idea of one, or the slow understanding that waiting to be chosen is not a career. A script you've drafted. A role you built for yourself because no one was writing it. A story from your family you can't put down. You don't know if it's good. You don't know how to find out, and asking friends has told you nothing.

Writers. You have pages. They're competent. Someone called them "well-written," which you correctly heard as a verdict. Craft isn't your problem. Nothing in it costs you anything, and readers feel that immediately. They just can't name it, so they tell you they didn't connect.

Directors. You have prep. A lookbook, references, a shot list, a statement written the night before. What you don't have is a governing idea strong enough that every department reads it once and knows what to do without asking you.

What you’re Arriving With.

“Part of Markland’s approach has a beautifully tactical practicality to it, like building a fence: post by post by post. The other part of his work is courageously nebulous, leaving room for the divine — like a poetic conjurer of an alternate spirit. It’s an intoxicating process that pushes me into corners of myself I hadn’t considered pointing the flashlight at.”

— Lewis Pullman Top Gun: Maverick, Sinners

The Questions.

What I see when I look at your work

I've believed one thing since I started, which is that there's no separation between life and art. That isn't a philosophy. It's how I work.

When I read your script, or watch your scene, or listen to you pitch it, I'm reading two things at once. The story, and the part of you it came out of. Those are never unrelated. The scene you keep rewriting and can't fix is usually sitting on something you haven't looked at. The character who stays flat is flat because you're protecting her the way you were protected, or weren't. The third act that ties up too neatly ties up too neatly because you tie things up too neatly.

Most of the notes people give you are guesses from outside. Raise the stakes. We need to like her more. They hand you the symptom and leave you to go find the cause, which is why you can do every note you're given and still have something that doesn't move.

What I can do is show you where the story is actually coming from and hand it back to you clearly enough that you know exactly what part of yourself you're operating on. Once you can see it, revision stops being guesswork. You're not out hunting for a better idea, you're going to the place the thing was already trying to get to.

That's why the personal work sits inside this. Not as therapy, and not as the point of it. It's the instrument. It's what makes the development go deep, and what makes it go fast.

The woRk Itself

Development. Concept into structure into pages into a draft that holds. Story arcing, engine design, character architecture, behavior patterning, protection devices, gesture signatures, sympathy invites, escalation, the mechanics of dread and delay and payoff. I bring my own work as a writer and producer to your table, not theory about it.

The hooks. What makes a reader unable to put it down, and what makes a listener lean forward. These are different instruments and most people only build one. We build both, because the pitch is not a summary of the material, it's a performance of the same instinct that produced it.

The pitch itself. How you enter, what you carry, what you say first, what you never say. And the part almost nobody works on: how you sit there while someone reads it in front of you. Actors already have the training for this and almost never apply it to their own work.

Career architecture. The shape of a whole working creative life rather than just the next step. The multi-hyphenate reality of making, developing, producing and performing, designed so that it can survive its own success.

Image design. Your public identity was built in protection of something. We redesign it as art direction: unguarded, specific, and consistent with the work you actually make.

Access. Between sessions you have me. Growth doesn't wait for a scheduled call. And when something is ready, it goes out through the network I've built over a career spent between craft and industry.

Look at what you have. And what you dont.

Before we ever talk, sit down with your material and let me ask you a few things. Answer them honestly, not generously.

Can you tell it in a bar, in thirty seconds, and watch the other person lean in? Or do you have to explain it. Explaining is the sound of a hook that isn't there yet.

Do you have an engine, or a premise? A premise happens once. An engine keeps generating. Most of the scripts I've watched die in development died because nobody could tell me what the second act, the second season, the second scene of real pressure was going to be.

Is your audience holding a question, or just watching things happen? Things happening isn't story. Story is consequence, and for something to be a consequence, something had to be at stake before it.

Do your characters want, or do they need? Wanting is plot. Needing is character. Needing is also where the protections and the deceits and the contradictions live, and that's the only place an actor can build from.

What are you risking? Show me the line, or the scene, you'd be embarrassed for somebody who knows you well to read. If there isn't one, that's your note.

If your name came off the cover, could anybody tell it was yours? Style is decoration. Signature is the thing you can't help doing.

Actors, is this a story or is it a vehicle? Producers smell the difference by page ten and they'll never tell you which one they smelled.

Does it travel? Hand it to somebody who shares nothing with you. Not your age, not your background, not your taste in the kind of thing you make. If they can admire it and not feel it, you're still describing your experience instead of doing to them what it did to you.

And what's the second thing? Because don't show this to anyone else gets followed about ten minutes later by what else have you got. I've watched people give back everything they just earned in that gap.

If most of those landed badly, good. That's the raw material. It's worth more to you than another year of notes from people being kind.

Scope and Rhythm

A year is the outside edge of this, and inside that it does not run on a calendar. Some projects come to maturity in four months. Others take eight, and some use the full year before they are what they were trying to be. I don't know which one yours is and neither do you, and pretending otherwise would put a clock on something that doesn't respond well to one.

So it runs as a back and forth that flexes. Dense at the beginning while we find the spine of the thing and the part of you it's built on, then moving at whatever pace the work is asking for. Sometimes weekly. Sometimes daily when you're close to something. Sometimes a quiet stretch while you go away and write, with me there when you surface.

You are not a student here. You're a collaborator, and collaborators don't meet on a schedule. They meet when there's something to meet about.

The Stages

These run in this order every time. How long each one takes is the part that varies.

Concept lock. We excavate. The stories only you can tell, the range nobody has let you show, the thing you keep circling and putting down. We choose the one with legs and commit to it, which is harder than it sounds and is where most people stall for years.

Treatment. Structure, world, character, tone. The story finds its spine and finds out what it is actually saying.

The draft. Pages. A pilot or a feature in your voice, developed in session and between them.

Look book, and out. Art direction for the piece. Visual language, tone references, the project dressed for where it is going. Then we start taking it out.

At the end, something exists that didn't before: a completed script, a treatment and a look book. That is the package development deals are actually made from.

What I bring

Most of my producing and writing has happened out of view. Off market, behind the scenes, on things that never carried my name anywhere you'd notice. That's fine. It means what I've got isn't a credit list, it's a set of instincts about why material works and why it stalls. There’s plenty who will confirm this, and those are the first I offer it to.

You'll know in one session whether I can see your project more clearly than you can. That's the only credential that matters here, and you can test it immediately.

I'm in it with you. My hands are on the pages, and my name goes out with the piece, which is why it doesn't end up in a drawer. I only develop what I believe in enough to walk in with, so my part in it doesn't stop when the year does. And because you built it, you're holding the thing artists almost never get handed, which is a producer's seat on your own material, with the credit and the backend that come with it.

“He has helped me explore every aspect of myself — the interesting, and the ordinary. Guiding me to confront parts of my past I didn’t even realize I had buried. He creates a safe space, free of judgment, and pushes me beyond what I think is my limit — because he sees me. And there’s nothing more powerful than that.”

— Anna Sawai · Emmy Award Winner, Shōgun

Is this right for you?

You don't have to be ready to be good. You have to be ready to be honest.

Ready to stop managing the gap and start closing it. Ready to treat the creativity as a practice and your life as the material it runs on.

I work with actors, writers, directors, musicians, and people at every stage of this, including some who are leaving one career to build a creative one. Where you are matters less to me than how willing you are to go somewhere you haven't been.

I take a select number of these a year, on purpose. The work needs presence, mine and yours. When one starts, it has my full attention.

This is for the creative who Doesn’t What to Wait anymore.

Investment

One year, often less.
The partnership runs up to twelve months. Some come to maturity in four, some in eight, and when that happens we are finished.

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