6.4: The “Lost” Art of Agenting?
-
- Last updated
- Save as PDF
- Violaine Roussel
- University of California Press
For most agents, especially those who entered the profession before 2000, the globalization of the entertainment industry is not synonymous with geographic expansion or international circulation as much as it means the transformation of the “local” reality of Hollywood: the evolution of both studios and big agencies into complex corporate entities, institutionalized and rationalized in their organization, and whose activities go way beyond talent representation and filmmaking, has strongly affected the experience of agenting. Especially since, at the same time, technological changes have made agenting less a matter of face-to-face and physical interactions and have turned a primarily phone-based practice into a distant, fast-paced, e-mail-mediated activity. 16 The skills, profiles, and resources required to excel, and the models of success themselves, have also started to change. As a result of the agencies’ organizational growth and the increased specialization that reorganizes them internally, agents are seeing their craft fall rapidly into obsolescence finding themselves in a weak position when mergers or acquisitions lead to staff reductions. In an environment that feels increasingly unpredictable, the requirement that an agent be a “forward thinker” who is constantly innovating—although not specific to this context but consubstantial to the professional ideology of agenting—intensifies. Adherence to this professional ideology of perpetual anticipation conflicts with the apprehension of being overtaken by change, and makes the fear even more difficult to voice and address. To this should be added the uncertainties generated by relatively short-term employment contracts (typically two or three years) and a compensation system increasingly based on bonuses (with a reduced salary base). 17
Concentration and diversification processes have resulted in new challenges for agents, putting their professional self-definition into question. Although agents recognize sales as being an integral part of their job, most emphasize the artistic dimension as what gives worth to what they do. Thus they put forward their relationship with talent, their role in creative match-making, and their ability to initiate projects through packaging. Because the new conditions bring agenting closer to other sales jobs or corporate careers, many of the agents I interviewed deplored them as leading to “less of a creative experience.” With a little nostalgia, this top agent at one of the biggest companies perfectly describes the loss of balance induced by the corporatization of Hollywood that most of his colleagues with comparable trajectories also express:
I believe that advocacy, in the creative space, no matter what you are—a lawyer, a publicist, a manager, or an agent—has got to be an exclusive and nurturing relationship. And I find that, by definition, it has to therefore be a contained culture. A manageable size and scope. It’s a balance between the right amount of agents in your infrastructure and in your culture, and the right amount of clients—high-end, medium, and up-and-coming—that creates a balance in the way you manage a company that needs to sign, service, and sell creative talent, partly, and in my opinion mostly, through packaging them together and with other like-minded artists that you don’t represent. And that skill requires time and space, and creative collisions. And the more corporate you are, and the more of an order-taker, clinical kind of “here is the list,” “here is the links for the thing” you are, just [going] back and forth in a more clinical, institutional way, the more the creative gets squeezed out. And the agents’ advocacy, the premium on their advocacy, the premium on their brilliance is diminished by the system of having a voluminous client list to service and/or a voluminous agent body to manage. (Talent agent, big agency, 2013, his emphasis)
This definition of the agent as the artist’s advocate reveals the ongoing shift of the profession, in its material organization as well as its symbolic hierarchies, and the coexistence of various paths and profiles currently forming the agenting profession. These different profiles partly correspond to generations that have entered the agency world at different times, and partly stem from the simultaneous presence of heterogeneous profiles intrinsically making up a profession that oscillates between a creative and a commercial pole. The economic prosperity of the industry in the 1990s attracted law and business graduates from prestigious schools to Hollywood. These cohorts of “Harvard kids” then populated the mailrooms of the big agencies, coming in with different expectations and, oftentimes, a less art-oriented self-definition. Even though they represent a minority of today’s agents, some have now accessed leading positions of the top agencies.
Generally speaking and more importantly, the current socio-economic conditions transforming Hollywood are better adapted to the businessmen-agents’ profile than to that of those who mostly wanted to “be in the arts.” If they take on responsibilities, the former are likely to participate in bringing the agency world even further in this direction. Indeed, as the agent quoted below suggests, agency owners and managers who are running large businesses and have to report to their shareholders cannot value what this interviewee calls the “lost art” of agenting:
I feel like I’m an artist. My art is being able to craft an argument and leverage other artists and find collaborations that will work. And then get the money. That’s the job, that’s what I think is my art form. . . . I don’t think that the executives today have a reason, nor are they cultivated, nor are they trained to think of it that way. And because, frankly, art does not necessarily mean commerce. I think that it’s the goal of the owners to create more corporate executives and agents who are more interested in turning a buck than they are relating to talent. (Talent agent, big agency, 2010)
Nevertheless, this relationship to talent, art, and stardom remains remarkably important in defining the agents’ worth and value, even in the most profitable areas of the business. It is not by chance that agents who share this interviewee’s talent-oriented self-definition have often reached top positions in the agency business. In this professional world, the hierarchies ordering the artists, according to which aesthetic and professional recognition especially matters and closely combines with commercial success to make up someone’s “worth,” transfer to the ranking of talent representatives: their link to “their” artists defines the agents. In other words, being of “quality” distinguishes top talent and top representatives alike in these “markets of singularity.” 18 Even in today’s context of “corporate Hollywood,” investors who put money in talent agencies—and not in a less uncertain business—manifest and reproduce the strength of symbolic capital attached to film stars and the magic of cinema. Prestige hierarchies in the industry still place motion pictures above television (nonscripted television shows for sure, and arguably scripted ones too, even though the development of cable channels has made the frontier between film and television much more permeable) as well as gaming and web products—in sum, above the most lucrative sectors of talent representation. This consubstantial interplay between sources of prestige and sources of revenue still organizes the industry.
The “business entrepreneur” agent and the new class of agency executives have not entirely supplanted more “creative types” in the agency world. Some of the latter turn to management, while others remain part of the organizational environment of large agencies. All participate in the self-reinforcing changes that are taking place “behind the scenes” in Hollywood, in the representation and production spaces, in interconnected ways: the structural changes shaping “global Hollywood” before our eyes (and making up the “digital media revolution”) are not just a reaction to external factors. They are produced collectively and subject to sophisticated strategies on the part of big agency leaders, all the while being too much of a systemic process to be controlled by any one powerful industry player.