“Now, everything in the talent agency business is different forever,” commented a talent agent I interviewed after the announcement, in late 2013, of the acquisition 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 workers 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 occupation, 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.
Figure 1: The Creative Artists Agency (CAA) building in Century City, California. Photo credit: Minnaert, via Wikimedia Commons).
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 corporate 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 reorganized 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 responsibilities blurs their self-definition and creates fragile professional identities. While most talent representatives experience the uncertainty of their status and prospects 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.
