Claire Lundberg, Founder, CTL Scouting
By Erin L. Cox, Publisher | @erinlcox
‘Managing Your Own Heartbreak’
The life of a film scout can be quite exciting, discovering a fantastic book, bringing a publisher and production company together, and giving a writer’s story a new audience. To outsiders, it can also seem quite stressful, although Claire Lundberg, founder of CTL Scouting, might not categorize it as such—she describes it as “the most fun job.”At the time of our original interview, she had to reschedule because a deadline for offers on a project had been moved up unexpectedly, requiring her to drop everything and act quickly. For scouts, that’s all part of the job.
Lundberg didn’t get her start in a publishing house or literary agency the way many scouts did. She came to it from the production side, first as a theater director and producer, then in working with the famous producer Scott Rudin, then running MGM’s literary office. It’s that different pathway that provides a unique perspective compared to those of her peers.
“I’m always thinking about adaptation and what it could be,” she says, “and I’m coming at it from the production perspective. I’m very agnostic about where it fits in the film and TV market, and I think that, for people coming out of publishing, that can sometimes feel uncomfortable.”
For many scouts, the role can be challenging because they’re merely connecting parties, not creating anything themselves, so there’s no ownership over the project.
“You have to be able to manage your own heartbreak in all creative industries, but in scouting, you have to both really love it and be able to advocate for it and also be able to move on and let it go.”
As the film and television marketplace changes, so does the way scouts do their work, the projects they focus on, and the clients for which they are scouting.
Lundberg notes that streaming has changed the industry quite a bit.
“When I started,” she says, “I was a very classic feature scout for both big producers like Scott Rudin, and then for studios like MGM and Warner Bros. It was both very American-focused and quite narrow in terms of what a feature could be—Harry Potter, The Bourne Identity, The Martian, a Sophie Kinsella novel.
“With streaming, not only did it become more international,” Lundberg says, “but it also became so much more diverse in terms of the kinds of stories that people could tell. And that makes your job as a scout more complicated, because obviously you must cover more of the market. But it’s also more fun, because you don’t feel like the stories are as limited.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on the book-to-film market and more on the film industry.
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