Curry Barker’s Agent Found What Traditional Hollywood Missed, and He Believes He’s Already Discovered the Next Breakout

UTA's Jordan Lonner explains to IndieWire the secret sauce behind the "Obsession" director's success and why he believed in Barker's vision.

Jordan Lonner was heading into the Friday night world premiere of Curry Barker‘s “Obsession” at the Toronto International Film Festival when he was approached by a major studio buyer who asked him, “What’s this going to run me to go buy it?”

“Twenty million dollars,” Lonner responded. Then, “He chuckled at me and laughed and was like, ‘This is going to go way under $10 [million],’ and I was just thinking, ‘Yeah, right, wait and see what happens.'”

Lonner is Barker’s agent, a motion picture group literary agent with UTA, and after the film sold to Focus Features for $15 million, Lonner had the last laugh. Now that “Obsession” has been the indie box office story of the year with $234 million worldwide to date, it’s no wonder Lonner is taking a victory lap.

But Lonner has been representing Barker for the last two years, way back when he was watching an early cut of “Obsession” on Barker’s brother’s laptop. He had come across Barker’s short film “Milk & Serial” and wondered, “How did traditional Hollywood miss him? How did it not get picked up?” 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.

“We were just watching [an early cut of ‘Obsession’], the most basic version, but the movie’s ending, and we’re looking at each other and saying, ‘This guy’s got it. This thing is going to be a monster,'” Lonner said. “It felt like a commercial movie, it had all the right kind of beats, the way that I think he’s 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.”

The attribute Barker has isn’t that he’s a YouTuber or is speaking directly to a younger, Gen-Z crowd but Lonner believes is because Barker is so entrepreneurial. 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.

“The thing that Curry always has been able to do is reach his audience,” Lonner said. “He knows who they are. He knows what stories to tell. He knows what they’re interested in. He knows, quite frankly, their attention span. I don’t mean that in they only want to watch small videos, because when you watch ‘Obsession,’ even though it’s a slow burn and there are very specific beats, those beats happen deliberately. He knows how to keep an audience intrigued.”

Now that everyone is clamoring to work with Barker, he’ll 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.

“If Curry wants to go and write a rock album, we can go figure out how to get him to do that,” Lonner said. “It’s more so, how do you get, especially [from] a creator like him, the ability to touch where he started from in the creator’s 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.”

Lonner’s job as an agent is also, of course, to find the next Curry Barker. The talent discovery process, he believes, hasn’t changed just because they’re 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’s creators aren’t waiting for those mediums to get their work out there. Instead, he’s taking meetings with potential clients who are making movies in their homes in Buffalo or Virginia.

Lonner also represents Dylan Clark, who is the director of the upcoming “Blair Witch” reboot for Lionsgate, as well as Damien McCarthy, the director of Neon’s “Hokum.” Another client, Sam Evenson, is a director with a VFX background who also has a viral horror short film called “Mora” that Neon is now adapting into a feature, as well as an adaptation of another of his shorts called “Ignore It” that Temple Hill is producing. And Nic Curcio is a podcaster who is budding into film after winning a competition at Fantastic Fest.

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’t give Lonner a crystal ball or secret sauce at finding talent, but those are the types of people he truly believes in.

“I’ve worked at UTA for 14 years and always had to be scrappy. That’s how you find clients. I love building filmmakers from the ground up,” Lonner said. “It’s really easy when you can go sign somebody at the highest level and just keep them going. To me, it’s about how do you find people at the source and grow them? I like to think I’m good at this, and I’ve learned how to do it, but it’s more so having to be scrappy and find people before they break, and you can just do that in different ways.”