1 Robert R. Faulkner, Music on Demand: Composers and Careers in the Hollywood Film Industry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1983).
2 On the effects of the division between core and non-core agencies in terms of market segmentation and artistic careers, see William T. Bielby and Denise D. Bielby, “Organizational Mediation of Project-Based Labor Markets: Talent Agencies and the Careers of Screenwriters,” American Sociological Review 64.1 (1999): 64–85.
3 My work is based on 112 interviews conducted in Los Angeles, mostly with agents and to a lesser extent with managers, production professionals, artists, lawyers, and publicists, as well as in situ observations at talent agencies or alongside an agent. This research received support from the European Commission (7th Framework Program, Marie Curie Fellowship).
4 Ron Meyer, William Haber, Michael Rosenfeld, and Rowland Perkins are the other four.
5 Below-the-line encompasses the technical professions working on film and television projects. See Laura Grindstaff and Vicki Mayer, “The Importance of Being Ordinary: Brokering Talent in the New-TV Era,” in Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries: Invisible Hands in Cultural Markets, ed. Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 131–152.
6 In addition to formalized divisions, various other principles of fragmentation combine. Agents are categorized much like their clients are, according to homologous (prestige) hierarchies.
7 Positions of “crossover agent” are created in some agencies for that purpose. The question of how to institutionalize the activity of social and digital media agents, in a context where no one initially knows how to monetize digital content, also illustrates the strength of the institutional framework of the big agencies. On the way film and television professionals approach this “digital revolution,” see Michael Curtin, Jennifer Holt, and Kevin Sanson, eds., Distribution Revolution: Conversations about the Digital Future of Film and Television (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
8 In 2010, CAA formed a strategic partnership with the global private equity firm TPG Capital, which owns 35 percent of the agency. WME partnered with Silver Lake in May 2012, the private equity firm acquiring a 31 percent share in the agency.
9 The Wrap, April 13, 2014, www.thewrap.com/leaked-inside-details-of-two-billion-dollar-wme-img-financing.
10 “Independent” in this context makes sense in contrast with “studio movie,” that is, the concentration of the activities of production, distribution, and retail under the unified umbrella of a studio. The practice of “packaging,” traditionally attached to studio production, gets partly redefined and expanded to include the activity of putting together such “big indie films,” with a focus on finding their financing and organizing their distribution. Small independent films made with no money outside of “Big Hollywood” do not belong to this category and do not result from the activity of the same participants.
11 Lynda Obst, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013); Roussel and Bielby, eds., Brokerage and Production.
12 In 2013. Motion Picture Association of America, Theatrical Market Statistics, 2013, p. 4, www. mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/MPAA-Theatrical-Market-Statistics-2013_032514-v2.pdf.
13 Midsize agencies practice “copackaging” with larger companies that have more star clients.
14 Indie film agent, big agency, Los Angeles, 2013.
15 “There is a bunch of things we do, not just financing movies. . . . We’ll make investments in different movies that only come after the fact in North America. So it has nothing to do with me packaging a movie, it has to do with me saying, “Okay, I like that as an investment, let me see if one of my guys wants to put money in.” We do all of the financial analysis and put them as producers on those movies” (indie film agent, midsize agency, 2013, his emphasis).
16 Such dematerialization mechanisms also generate more “spec work” for agents, to use the category forged by John Caldwell (see chapter 2).
17 This is also true of the agents who work in the countless small companies of Little Hollywood, although it takes somewhat different forms in their case: directly impacted by the precarization of labor affecting their clients and the subsequent diminution in revenue for their agency, they sometimes have to jump from one small boutique to another at the mercy of economic ups and downs that can quickly lead a small organization to close doors. Their fear of becoming “dispensable” (in one person’s words) or irrelevant also stems from the experience of extensive technological changes: the new electronic tools that equip the practice of agenting increasingly turn it into the rationalized management of massive lists of clients (whose profiles are submitted mechanically to casting professionals via online platforms that disclose the information about available jobs to all agencies at once) and devaluate the “craft of agenting” as the agents knew it (getting the information first based on personal connections within the casting community, having more time to advocate for individual clients, and so on). However, even the agents in the most vulnerable positions claim the ideal of the fearless entrepreneur-agent who thrives in tumultuous times, dissociating themselves from a critique of flexibility or from making common cause with precarized clients. For convergent observations, see Berg and Penley, as well as Mayer, chapters 4 and 11.
18 Lucien Karpik, Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
