{"id":332736,"date":"2026-06-11T21:36:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T21:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/332736\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T21:36:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T21:36:16","slug":"how-curry-barkers-agent-at-uta-found-what-hollywood-missed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/332736\/","title":{"rendered":"How Curry Barker’s Agent at UTA Found What Hollywood Missed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jordan Lonner was heading into the Friday night world premiere of Curry Barker<\/a>\u2018s \u201cObsession<\/a>\u201d at the Toronto International Film Festival<\/a> when he was approached by a major studio buyer who asked him, \u201cWhat\u2019s this going to run me to go buy it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTwenty million dollars,\u201d Lonner responded. Then, \u201cHe chuckled at me and laughed and was like, \u2018This is going to go way under $10 [million],\u2019 and I was just thinking, \u2018Yeah, right, wait and see what happens.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Lonner is Barker\u2019s agent, a motion picture group literary agent with UTA<\/a>, and after the film<\/a> sold to Focus Features for $15 million, Lonner had the last laugh. Now that \u201cObsession\u201d has been the indie box office story of the year<\/a> with $234 million worldwide to date, it\u2019s no wonder Lonner is taking a victory lap.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a> \"Alejandro<\/a> <\/p>\n

But Lonner has been representing Barker for the last two years, way back when he was watching an early cut of \u201cObsession\u201d on Barker\u2019s brother\u2019s laptop. He had come across Barker\u2019s short film \u201cMilk & Serial<\/a>\u201d and wondered, \u201cHow did traditional Hollywood miss him? How did it not get picked up?\u201d As he looked more into Barker, he saw someone who was actually shot listing the TikTok videos he would shoot, someone with the markings of a real filmmaker.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were just watching [an early cut of \u2018Obsession\u2019], the most basic version, but the movie\u2019s ending, and we\u2019re looking at each other and saying, \u2018This guy\u2019s got it. This thing is going to be a monster,’\u201d Lonner said. \u201cIt felt like a commercial movie, it had all the right kind of beats, the way that I think he\u2019s deliberate in his timing, deliberate in his storytelling. I think it was very, very apparent that this was not only a good movie, but a movie that was going to work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The attribute Barker has isn\u2019t that he\u2019s a YouTuber or is speaking directly to a younger, Gen-Z crowd but Lonner believes is because Barker is so entrepreneurial<\/a>. Being able to figure out how to distribute a film on your own and to assemble the audience around it is not unique to this era but comes with its own challenges in the digital age.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing that Curry always has been able to do is reach his audience,\u201d Lonner said. \u201cHe knows who they are. He knows what stories to tell. He knows what they\u2019re interested in. He knows, quite frankly, their attention span. I don\u2019t mean that in they only want to watch small videos, because when you watch \u2018Obsession,\u2019 even though it\u2019s a slow burn and there are very specific beats, those beats happen deliberately. He knows how to keep an audience intrigued.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JordanJordan Lonner, UTAChris Patey<\/p>\n

Now that everyone is clamoring to work with Barker, he\u2019ll be able to get green lights or theatrical deals on whatever he wants, but Lonner believes Barker has always been in charge of his process, and little has changed even if his success has.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Curry wants to go and write a rock album, we can go figure out how to get him to do that,\u201d Lonner said. \u201cIt\u2019s more so, how do you get, especially [from] a creator like him, the ability to touch where he started from in the creator\u2019s business and branded content and also reach all of the different access points of traditional Hollywood, and then he gets to go create it on his own and figure out exactly what he wants to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lonner\u2019s job as an agent is also, of course, to find the next Curry Barker. The talent discovery process, he believes, hasn\u2019t changed just because they\u2019re now looking for YouTubers. But there is a different access point. Agents like himself need to be looking not for whom is directing the latest music video, commercial, or film festival discovery, because tomorrow\u2019s creators aren\u2019t waiting for those mediums to get their work out there. Instead, he\u2019s taking meetings with potential clients who are making movies in their homes in Buffalo or Virginia.<\/p>\n

Lonner also represents Dylan Clark, who is the director of the upcoming \u201cBlair Witch\u201d reboot<\/a> for Lionsgate, as well as Damien McCarthy, the director of Neon\u2019s \u201cHokum.\u201d<\/a> Another client, Sam Evenson, is a director with a VFX background who also has a viral horror short film called \u201cMora\u201d that Neon is now adapting into a feature, as well as an adaptation of another of his shorts called \u201cIgnore It\u201d that Temple Hill is producing. And Nic Curcio is a podcaster who is budding into film after winning a competition at Fantastic Fest.<\/p>\n

Most of these folks are under 30 and have either been grinding with small budgets or are posting work to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and Lonner believes they all have the same independent, entrepreneurial spirit that Barker has. That doesn\u2019t give Lonner a crystal ball or secret sauce at finding talent, but those are the types of people he truly believes in.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve worked at UTA for 14 years and always had to be scrappy. That\u2019s how you find clients. I love building filmmakers from the ground up,\u201d Lonner said. \u201cIt\u2019s really easy when you can go sign somebody at the highest level and just keep them going. To me, it\u2019s about how do you find people at the source and grow them? I like to think I\u2019m good at this, and I\u2019ve learned how to do it, but it\u2019s more so having to be scrappy and find people before they break, and you can just do that in different ways.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jordan Lonner was heading into the Friday night world premiere of Curry Barker\u2018s \u201cObsession\u201d at the Toronto International…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133,97521,1636,107992,4431],"class_list":["post-332736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-curry-barker","tag-film","tag-obsession","tag-uta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}