Jeffrey Berg’s new agency is still young, but it’s looking to the future and, to that end, had a presence at this year’s London Book Fair. Berg, an ICM veteran, got Hollywood types talking when he announced in January that he was forming a new agency, called Resolution. Rich Green, who was at CAA, is heading up the agency’s media rights department, was at the fair and spoke to us about the new outfit, and where Resolution fits in the current rights ecosystem.
Green oversees his department with Shari Smiley (another former CAA agent), and said he and Smiley were the first two hires Berg made. The overall company, which Green said is less than “40 work days” old, has roughly 20 to 25 agents on board. The number of clients at Resolution is harder to nail down, as a number of agents, still transitioning from former jobs, remain in the process of learning which clients they will be able to bring to the new agency.
The media rights department—which is a team of three including, after Green and Smiley, department coordinator Adrian Garcia (who will also be focusing on graphic novels and comics projects)—is one of a handful of departments established at Resolution. A music department, a television department and a motion picture department have also been set up, but Green said many departments are still in the works and, of the existing ones, many still need to be “built out.”
As for the kind of books Green represents—his focus is on selling dramatic rights to books—he says it runs the gamut from “commercial YA to the toniest of literary fiction.” To that end, he represents (and has sold options on) books by Jonathan Franzen, Tom Rachmann and Andrea Cremer. At London, one project Green was shopping is the film rights to Rachmann’s new novel, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (which Sceptre acquired in the U.K., and is the sophomore work from the author of the breakout literary hit, The Imperfectionsists). Green recently sold film rights to Nathaniel Philbrick’s Bunker Hill to Warner Brothers, with Ben Affleck attached to direct, and is still fielding offers on The Rosie Project, an Australian novel that was one of the big books of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair.
Speaking to Resolution and how it will distinguish itself from its competitors—a list which includes six or seven other major agencies from CAA to UTA—Green said it will aim to “provide comprehensive, full service representation for its clients…with a much leaner group of agents then our larger competitors."
