Talent Agenting in the Age of Conglomerates

6 Talent Agenting in the Age of Conglomerates Violaine Roussel “Now, everything in the talent agency business is different forever,” commented a talent agent I interviewed after the announcement, in late 2013, of the acquisi- tion of the sports marketing giant IMG (International Management Group) by the major agency WME (William Morris Endeavor). Indeed, in the past decade, Hollywood talent agencies have had to undergo drastic changes, for which they are also largely responsible. These changes are intrinsically connected to transformations that have simultaneously affected and been generated by the studios, who are the agencies’ counterparts on the production side. This organizational mutation creates consequences in creative terms: it directly affects what “doing one’s job” as an agent means and, inseparably and subsequently, how agents contribute to making cultural products and artistic careers. In a tumultuous time of rapid professional reconfiguration, work situations feel more precarious to creative work- ers and, inseparably, more uncertain to their agents. This chapter addresses such transformations. Talent representatives in the United States are divided into four main types of professionals: talent agents, managers, publicists, and entertainment lawyers. Unlike managers, who have only recently developed as an organized occupa- tion, agents are closely regulated by the state in which they work. They also hold a legal monopoly over the right to seek and procure employment for their clients, a service for which the agency receives 10 percent of the amount negotiated in the artist’s contracts. Agents scout and “sign” talent (although not always in formal written form, especially in the large agencies), work at placing them in jobs, and negotiate deals with producers and studios. They are thus involved from an early stage of the film and television production process. 74 Talent Agenting in the Age of Conglomerates 75 The agency business has evolved into two relatively autonomous systems: in “Little Hollywood,”1 hundreds of small companies and one-man shops form the nebula of organizations representing beginner-artists and clients with modest careers. These agents mostly deal with casting directors, especially in television. By contrast, midsize and big agencies, such as WME, CAA (Creative Artists Agency), UTA (United Talent Agency), ICM (International Creative Management), and their smaller competitors (Paradigm, Gersh, Verve, and so on), belong to a different system of interrelations which links them to studios and established talent.2 I will mostly focus on this “Big Hollywood.” The existence of such large and powerful companies—WME and CAA now total thousands of employees—who represent high-end international talent and make transactions with major studios is unique to Hollywood. Only recently has the American agency business come to be led by giant cor- porate entities that are simultaneously active in many sectors of the entertainment industry as well as beyond the domestic market. Parallel to this, production professionals have witnessed decisive transformations. This chapter provides a brief description of these organizational changes in order to explore what they imply for the practice of “agenting.” I first outline the structural changes that have reorga- nized the agency business and redefined talent representation. Next I look closely at “independent film agents;” the emergence of this new expert profile within the big agencies is especially revealing of the mutations affecting both agency and production sides of the industry. It is also rearranging the balance of power between sellers and buyers. Finally, I examine the effects that these radical transformations, which agents have often experienced in the course of their own careers, have on what agents feel to be their professional identity.3 The instability attached to the fast and substantial changes in agents’ environment, working conditions, and respon- sibilities blurs their self-definition and creates fragile professional identities. While most talent representatives experience the uncertainty of their status and pros- pects going forward, some are in a position to embrace such a self-reinvention process, whereas others underline what they see as the degradation of the value of agenting entailed by this transformation. In addition, the new context with which these professionals have to deal influences, through their experience and their work, the process by which projects are selected, put together, and brought to life, as well as how artistic careers are handled. HOW AGENCY GROWTH TRANSFORMS AGENTING The prevalent narrative of change in the agency world attributes to Michael Ovitz, through his success in building CAA into the most powerful agency of the 1980s and 1990s, the role of shaping and leading the reconfiguration of the system link- ing the main agencies to the major studios. Turning an agenting style into an 76 Violaine Roussel organizational “culture,” the group of five young dissidents who left the reputable William Morris Agency to create CAA in 19754 ushered in new practices in the talent representation business. These new professional repertoires were attached to an organizational model: building teams of agents to attract high-end talent by exhib- iting ostensible signs of power and importance (that is, notably, by staging relation- ships with other key players). At an organizational level, this strategy was intended to create a collaborative structure encouraging internal sharing of resources and assets, by contrast with the more individualistic and internally competitive model under which other agencies were organized. The success of their endeavor put Ovitz and his collaborators in a position to systematize “packaging” practices—that is, the assembling of key pieces that make up a project: in film, typically, assembling a star actor or a prominent director with a writer, other agencies’ clients, and pos- sibly financiers who are willing to bring complementary funding, and selling them as a package to a studio—and often, because the stars desired by the studios were massively represented by CAA, to impose their conditions on the buyers. But the story of how CAA changed the industry is only one piece of the puz- zle. In fact, a more collective and systemic mechanism was in play. The modes of action and organization that made CAA successful circulated widely in the agency world and hybridized as they were appropriated in different contexts. All of the leading agencies transformed on a relational level. The new ways of agenting born from this pervasion and hybridization process (focused on packaging, “poach- ing” competitors’ clients, and so on) progressively became a professional norm in Big Hollywood. Veteran agents had to convert to new ways of doing the job that newcomers perceived as the norm. Those who launched new agencies in the early 1990s, UTA (1991) and Endeavor (1995) in particular, had the precedent of CAA in mind, but they had already distanced themselves from this model. The collective reorganizing of the agency business, in a favorable economic context in which studios had money to spend on hiring stars and developing projects, led to the constitution of a group of big agencies that had the critical mass of clients and agents to develop the practice of packaging. By the start of the 2000s, agents had negotiated unprecedented salaries for their star clients, and star power inseparably meant agency power. The balance of forces between studios and agencies, then in favor of the latter, was about to swing back. At the same time, for agencies internally, growth translated into an increased division of labor—that is, both compartmentalization and specialization. Consti- tuting new roles and areas of expertise inevitably generated institutional boundar- ies within the structure of the agencies: the departments by which agencies were traditionally organized—(talent or literary) motion pictures and television, music, theater, commercials, books—were subdivided or complemented by new divisions in charge of the uncharted territories. These emerged from media transformation (and the rise of new distribution platforms) and from the extension of the realm of Talent Agenting in the Age of Conglomerates 77 entertainment to nonscripted/alternative television, gaming, branding, sports, and digital media. Talent has been redefined in the process, as agents nowadays represent reality television performers, chefs, web celebrities, as well as corporations and brands, as much as (and often more lucratively than) actors, directors, writers, or below-the-line personnel.5 Developing such additional branches of activity not only equals increased specialization; it also implies the constitution of new areas of expertise, as new subprofessions and career paths emerge within the scope of talent representation.6 It used to be a high level of specialization back in the days, in the 60s and 70s. At William Morris when I worked for them, I was in the music department, I wanted to get out of it, I wanted to move in the actor’s business . they said no. And I left. They were specialized. Then, they were like “that’s dumb because TV actors are movie actors, TV writers are movie writers! We want hyphening agents!” Now, you are in reality business or in digital business, and these things really don’t cross over as much. That’s interesting. That creates more specialization, but not the old. (Talent agent, big agency, 2012) Transformations in the economy of media—especially with the development of cable television and the subsequent opportunities in number and quality of projects, and then with the supplanting of DVDs by digital outlets for distribution— take the form of organizational dilemmas in the private bureaucracies that are the agencies. Agency leaders know that they must institutionalize the necessary circu- lation of their artists between complementary sectors, toward what they believe to be the most promising new areas.7 For instance, the boundary between film and television has become permeable, and the symbolic hierarchy between the two has been rearranged in favor of the latter.

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