6.2: How Agency Growth Transforms Agenting
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- Violaine Roussel
- University of California Press
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 linking the main agencies to the major studios. Turning an agenting style into an 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 exhibiting ostensible signs of power and importance (that is, notably, by staging relationships 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 possibly 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 puzzle. 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, “poaching” 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. Constituting new roles and areas of expertise inevitably generated institutional boundaries 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 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 circulation 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. At the same time, however, for the individual agent, crossing an artist over to a different media or area of practice without deferring to colleagues in the concerned department remains a risky subversion of organizational order, as the agent quoted below describes: “I started as a literary agent [representing writers and directors], and then I branched into talent [representing actors]. I’ve always been in the motion picture business. When I started representing actors in addition to my writer-directors, people were like “you’re doing both ?!” It’s like shocking, blasphemy. And now it’s not so unusual. I’m called a hybrid agent, and it’s what I love, I would not be happy to just be doing lit[erary] or just talent. I like both. They’re both very different, but they cross-pollinate each other” (agent, big agency, 2013). Moving (and transferring one’s skills) from one specialty to another is a challenge within the institutional structure of big agencies, whose functioning tends to reinforce the differentiation between departments (especially given the way agents are usually evaluated and compensated).
In sum, “being an agent” in Big Hollywood from the 2000s and thereafter takes on a different meaning. It involves practicing a highly specialized job, maintaining relationships with a small circle of predefined buyers regarding a given type of product or profile of client, in a quickly changing environment and in large corporate companies that have instituted a strict division of activity. It also means handling more clients, often over 150. Only top agents can preserve a managerial style of agenting by representing a few of the (rarefied) stars who still get very lucrative contracts from the studios. This transformation of agenting and agencies in Big Hollywood is directly related to the notable development of management companies in the past twenty years. Such changes are, in turn, consequential for artists and art-making: if agenting is a numbers game, the clients who are not generating enough revenue for the agency get forgotten; the projects into which agencies put effort and energy are also of a different type, as our next section will explain.
The development of large talent agencies into complex organizations has generated a new class of agency managers, who are at more of a distance from the practice of agenting and closer to other types of powerful business leaders, and whose professional value is no longer exclusively or primarily derived from their client list (and consequent ability to leave with star clients):
The major companies, each does something similar and each is engaged in things that are different. I think our core businesses are similar, but our emphasis may be different. Our sizes are different. Our method of capitalization is different. We have private equity partners in this company. . . . But the businesses are run, managed, and operated by professionals, each of whom has been in the business for an excess of twenty years. So there’s an experienced professional class of executives who run these firms but who are also agents. (Big agency manager, 2011)
The big agency world is a shrinking oligopoly. From the “Big 5” agencies (CAA, WMA, ICM, UTA, Endeavor), made “Big 4” by the WMA-Endeavor merger in 2009, two giants have emerged as a result of a concentration and diversification process: CAA and WME. The latter now surpasses its competitor in size, thanks to the 2.4-billion-dollar deal by which WME bought IMG, announced in December 2013. Combined, WME and IMG immediately totaled over 3,000 employees in cities around the world, compared with CAA’s 1,500. But the growth of these companies is better measured when one considers that, in the mid-1990s, CAA only had approximately 500 employees. Both CAA and WME have relatively recently partnered up with a private equity investor; 8 they could soon have an IPO and become a public company. These new investments—which bring fresh money into the agency system—establish a new power configuration. It comes with consequences that agents can anticipate, and which they describe as threatening the creative dimension of their professional identity:
If you are partially owned by an outside, nonentertainment company, they’re kicking the tires to see their return on investment, and they’re not always as knowledgeable as they need to be about really what’s going on, aside from just what the bottom line is. And so WME and CAA both have P&L statements that they have to really manage , and that means cutting clients, cutting agents, making choices not based necessarily on the artistry, but based on the bottom line. (Talent agent, big agency, 2013, her emphasis)
By contrast, the still privately owned agencies UTA and ICM work at repositioning their image as “artist-friendly” companies, while the industry press reveals that client representation was only 14 percent of WME’s revenue in 2013. 9 The gap separating Little from Big Hollywood grows wider as bigger entities focus less exclusively on representing artists. At the same time, the studios have also radically changed and become part of large media corporations. This evolution directly affects the types of projects made (or dismissed) and the relevant strategies for spotting and manufacturing “talent.” On the agency side, this process happens through the transformation of agenting work sometimes associated with the emergence of new types of positions.