“Marjorie Prime” producer Uri Singer of Passage Pictures and former Netflix executive George Berry have launched TaleFlick, a platform with a searchable library of stories for film, television, and digital media.
“As a producer, I’ve learned the importance of finding strong content and having a reliable source that can provide it,” Singer said. “TaleFlick allows studios and producers, like myself, to find stories that otherwise would not have had a chance to be seen.”
Tuesday’s announcement appears to allow writers to bypass agents and managers in selling material. “TaleFlick bridges the gap between the written word on paper and the spoken word on screen by paving the way for storytellers around the world to shop their content to the entertainment industry,” the statement said.
The platform is for all content — published books, short stories, and any original narrative — and the submission process includes an introductory one-time single-level fee of $88 to cover curation, which makes the content available for one year on the company’s website. Authors will retain all rights to their books, but will give TaleFlick the chance to bid on their dramatic rights and present their stories to studios and production companies.
inger has set up “The King of Oil,” written by Daniel Ammann, with John Krasinski’s Sunday Night Productions and attached Matt Damon to star for Universal. Singer has also optioned Nobel Prize nominee Don DeLillo’s “White Noise,” the New York Times best-seller “The Zero” by Jess Walter, and “Tracks” by Niv Kaplan.
Singer and Berry have also invested in a new technology utilizing the NLP machine learning algorithm which categorizes and classifies content, curating each piece with an algorithm paired with human expertise.
Berry said, “By applying the right balance of technology and human experience, TaleFlick can find those stories that are the ‘needles in the haystack, both efficiently and at scale.”
The announcement, citing research commissioned by the Publishers Association and produced by Frontier Economics, also said film adaptations of books gross 44% more at the U.K. box office and a full 53% more worldwide than films from original screenplays.