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Representing Talent
Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies
By Violaine Roussel The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-48713-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Thousands of agents work in Los Angeles, either in one of the few major companies — large organizations, such as the famous WME or CAA, whose acronyms are part of the Hollywood dream, as they are known to represent the biggest movie stars in the world — or in one of the hundreds of boutiques that employ only a handful of agents. Being an agent in these different contexts corresponds to huge variations in terms of work experience, level of salary/bonus and compensation structure, and type and status of clients and of their potential employers. Small agencies can specialize by segment and niche (for instance, representing actors of a certain age group or ethnicity, or film/TV technicians) whereas big ones are internally compartmentalized entities that are simultaneously active in most domains of agenting. This range of possibilities translates into contrasting experiences of agenting.
At the same time, several mechanisms unify the agenting profession. There are common conventions to the practice of agenting, as well as shared professional images. The profession activity is relatively strictly regulated, unlike the much more informally organized role of personal manager. Agencies are licensed by the state in which they are located; Los Angeles–based agencies have to receive the approval of the California State Labor Commissioner. A second level of regulation takes place with the Association of Talent Agents (ATA), which organizes many of the agencies in LA and New York and claims to speak on behalf of the profession, to the industry unions and guilds — such as the powerful Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the Directors Guild of America (DGA), and the Writers Guild of America (WGA). The agencies typically receive as a commission 10 percent of the amount that they negotiate for each of their clients' contract. Nowadays, agents are not allowed to produce — although, as we will see, they are increasingly involved in production-like activities — but they officially have the monopolistic right of seeking work and negotiating deals on behalf of their clients, and to cash the remuneration attached to this activity.
The Invention of Agenting
The professional definition of agents and agencies is the result of a historical process. Kemper's work on the emergence of talent agencies in the 1920s and 1930s (Kemper 2010, 2015) provides us with elements for understanding the birth of "agenting" — as agents themselves call their activity. His work shows that agents sprouted up in the 1920s from the studio system, and as a subsystem to it, in two combined ways: the first generation of agents sprang for the most part from within the film business itself (many were former producers or studio employees); and the conditions for agenting to form as a specialized activity, autonomized from studio tutelage, were created by the stabilization of studio infrastructure and operations themselves. Studios were growing entities that already had to organize the rapid increase in the flow of their production and distribution activities. Delegating talent representation to "independent agents," who remained closely tied to studios since their business depended on such relationships, was not without benefits for the studios. It also protected them against the suspicion — made explicit and debated in the trade papers — that the internalization of talent scouting and management would lead the studios to serve their own interest over that of the artists.
However, the idea that the development of independent agencies would simply respond to a utility function dictated by market laws would be misleading. This process was really anything but obvious or natural at the time. Agents were not immediately or easily accepted as legitimate intermediaries in the film business. This is apparent, for instance, in their conflicts with studios and in the attacks on agents' undue power/profits regularly published in the press throughout the 1930s. Agents had to struggle to establish the validity and merits of their intervention. At the same time as they were developing their ties with studio executives and asserting their systematic presence behind the scenes, they were publicizing their strategic role by placing ads in trade journals or releasing agency pamphlets highlighting their connections to stars and other key talent. By doing so, they were selling the perception of their relationships with artists, production professionals, and studios as organizations, as much as they were making use of these connections themselves. They were gradually constructing their position as "sellers" — that is, unavoidable counterparts to "buyers" on a free market. Their successful negotiations with talent unions (especially the Screen Actors Guild), leading to the signature of franchise agreements between the guilds and the agencies in the late 1930s, were also decisive in signifying their accreditation as professional players, individually and collectively, in Hollywood. Meanwhile, during the same decade, the transactions bringing together agents and studio executives had become increasingly routinized, to the point of defining a norm; studio executives were referring unrepresented talent to the agents they were used to working with, strengthening the new vision that a "fair negotiation" implies the representation of the talent by an independent agent.
By the end of the 1930s, collective perceptions had shifted. Agents were now commonly seen as legitimate intermediaries performing a "valid economic service" and fulfilling a necessary function in the industry. This perception is in line with the definition of Hollywood as a disjointed and opaque market in which supply and demand of talent require intermediation. This mental framework of the "Hollywood market" was gradually defined in the same process by which professional groups formed and fought for their recognition: the professional constitution of the main industry forces in play (the major studios and their smaller competitors, the agencies, the talent unions, etc.) is inseparable from the formation of the mental repertoire with which they name and construe what they are doing. The definition of agents as market intermediaries is thus the outcome of a historical process, and not the necessary effect of immanent market laws: it is the result of interdependences, alliances, and competition between groups that progressively clustered, during the 1920s through the 1940s, into a specific professional system. Today's Hollywood still rests on the interdependence structure that formed in this period, in spite of the changes that have occurred within it.
Changes that have occurred since then — the growth of agencies as organizations and the strengthening of the agents' role in Hollywood that this book elaborates on — make the study of contemporary agenting all the more necessary. Agents are central participants in what happens and what gets manufactured in Hollywood. They are said to "sign, sell, and service" talent. However, beyond just placing clients into jobs and negotiating associated deals, they shape artists' careers and profiles in a very profound way and participate in the early orchestration of projects — all the more when they work at the biggest companies and are able to assemble the various elements of a project in a film, television, or digital "package." "Packaging" is the key activity of putting together the critical elements of a project then sold altogether to a studio or a network. What agents do therefore goes way beyond fulfilling a gatekeeping function and filtering the massive amount of aspiring artists who converge on Los Angeles. In fact, for most of the agents who operate in the major agencies, agenting is not about gatekeeping at all. It's a much more complex and decisive role that the following pages unveil.
Filling a Lacuna in the Sociology of Hollywood
Despite what I just said, the creation of a movie is usually attributed to a small number of visible participants: a star actor, a director, or sometimes a big producer is supposed to be the driving force of the process, coming up with an idea that is soon turned into a cinematic product. In such a simple story, agents are either purely and simply forgotten, or they are treated as minor players, strictly standing on the commercial side, brokering the deals. Sociological studies of Hollywood reflect for the most part this perception.
Besides the question of celebrity and stardom, artists' careers have captured most of the scholarly attention, with a perspective that approaches Hollywood in terms of project-based organization (Faulkner and Anderson 1987; Jones 1996; Rossman, Esparza, and Bonacich 2010). Cultural products that are manufactured in Hollywood — films and television shows especially — have also attracted sociological interest, be it from the angle of their recognition as legitimate "high art" (Baumann 2007) or their transformation and shaping by globalization dynamics (D. Bielby and Harrington 2008). By contrast, studies looking at what happens "behind the scenes" remain rare, and when they exist, they primarily focus on the production side, be it by shedding light on the history of the studio system (Schatz 2010) or the independent film world (Mann 2008; Ortner 2013; De Verdalle and Rot 2013). Recent works have started to explore less legitimate areas of entertainment production, such as reality programming in television (Grindstaff 2002) and "below-the-line" workers in film and television (Caldwell 2008; Mayer 2011). Talent representatives and agents, however, have consistently been missing from attempts to decipher the dynamics of the film/television world and to identify its participants. The profession has largely been ignored by art historians and scholars, more inclined to analyze the content of films than the professional configurations leading to their fabrication. In spite of a few pioneer incursions into the agency world in the form of specifically focused articles (W. Bielby and D. Bielby 1999; Zafirau 2008),the social sciences have not yet offered a systematic analysis of the activity of contemporary Hollywood agents. This book has this ambition.
Understanding agents' contribution to the making of artists and artworks implies considering their relationships with other professional groups that populate "Hollywood." This book approaches Hollywood as an occupational space holding together various types of participants whose activities collectively make entertainment products. Its epicenter is located in Los Angeles, and even in specific areas: all the most powerful agencies have their headquarters in Beverly Hills, or nearby, in Century City. Agents and production professionals who work in New York often mention the necessity to live "around Los Angeles time" (in the words of an interviewed agent) and to adjust to what happens there. So do other "media capitals" (Curtin 2010) such as London, Paris, Dubai, Beijing, or Vancouver in which participants adapt and respond to what they perceive as Hollywood, while Hollywood professionals may also work at conquering foreign territories and audiences. Hollywood is thus the dominant pole of the interdependence system that these diverse media centers form, even though local cultural production has more autonomy than the model of cultural hegemony suggests.
"Hollywood" is also the name of a unique configuration: nowhere else in the world are the activities of film- and entertainment-making institutionalized and professionalized to the same extent. Hollywood is indeed an "industry" in which agencies that employ several thousands of people and are active in many different sectors of entertainment (including motion picture, television, theater, music, book publishing, digital media), as far as the biggest companies are concerned, face a few large studios able to produce and distribute worldwide, and which are part of powerful media conglomerates. In addition to such giants, midsize and "boutique" agencies, management companies, law and publicity firms, smaller mini-major studios, and independent production and distribution companies populate this occupational space. They compete and cooperate for the transaction of projects and artists who number in the hundreds of thousands, aspiring to professionalization in Hollywood. This second group of smaller players forms what the second chapter of this book analyzes to be "Little Hollywood," in contrast to "Big Hollywood."
I will expose later in more detail the composition and structure of this Hollywood game. What matters here is to consider that it forms a differentiated sphere of activity. In other words, it is one of the specialized spheres of action, characterized by the relative autonomy of their specific dynamics and "rules of the game," that together compose contemporary societies like ours (Bourdieu 1976; Luhmann 1982; Alexander and Colomy 1990). "Hollywood" is, as a professionalized world, characterized by a set of common norms and institutions, specific vocabularies, and shared experiences and references known by the players. At the same time, this world appears as internally segmented and hierarchized, and so is the agency system within it. Firstly, activities are partly organized around specific types of media (motion picture, television, digital, etc.) even though the boundaries between them are regularly — and increasingly often — crossed by some of the participants. Secondly, functional division of labor delineates different occupational groups that form Hollywood's professional system: artists, talent representatives, casters, producers, distributors, and financiers (or studios that concentrate the last three types of activity). These groups cooperate and compete, defining the frontiers of their activity and sometimes engaging in jurisdictional contests (Abbott 1988). Thirdly, within the group of talent representatives, agents, managers, and lawyers deal with one another in cooperative or competitive ways, or are just held together by interdependence mechanisms. Fourthly, the agency world has its own internal structure and divisions: small agencies contrast with large corporate entities, while, in the latter, the formal hierarchy of positions combines with a high level of compartmentalization of activities. The departmental structure of the large agencies separates motion picture (talent or literary) from television (scripted versus reality programming), as well as from digital, music, theater, branding, gaming, sport, independent film financing/packaging, books, commercials, and so on. Careers tend to confine "expert agents" into specialized domains of operation, whereas their artist clients often need to cross over various media and creative genres. The question of the place of agents and agenting work in professional configurations will therefore be omnipresent.
I consider art to be collective work and occupational dynamics to be what directly frames the contribution of various categories of participants making cultural products. Approaching Hollywood as a professional sphere has often led to separating creative from noncreative personnel within it. Becker's famous approach to the art worlds (1982) includes this partition of "creative" versus "support personnel," the agents being a priori assigned to the second category. Similarly, the few existing studies of middlemen and brokers in culture industries often analytically separate creative from economic power and spheres of activity, even when they strive to explore their intertwining. The perspective of the production of culture also relies on such a division by approaching cultural forms as determined by modes of production and infused with the ideologies they convey (Crane 1992; Ohmann 1996; Du Gay 1997; Peterson 2004): the focus is placed on the hold that economic mechanisms have on cultural production, which ultimately defines cultural production as an economic process.
The approach in terms of cultural intermediaries that has recently developed in Europe and the United States also comes with an implicit model of the market in which brokers and middlemen — including production, distribution, and representation professionals — operate. But these studies insist on the social and cultural processes that shape economic practices in cultural industries (Faulkner 1983; Nixon and Du Gay 2002; Negus 2002). However, agents are not their focus, and when agents are incidentally mentioned, it is still mostly as incarnations of economic constraints and of the power of entertainment corporations over creative activities. The idea of tension between a "commercial pole" and an "artistic pole" structuring the fields of cultural production is also central to Bourdieusian approaches (Bourdieu 1996). In this perspective, the cultural intermediaries that agents are — especially when they operate in the most lucrative segments of Hollywood — is readily associated with the commercial pole. Even though my approach to Hollywood as a structured and specialized sphere of activity is coherent with Bourdieu's theory of fields, I diverge from his conclusions as regards such a dual structure of this field, organized around the tension between "mass production" and "art for art's sake" and between the possession of economic capital and that of symbolic capital.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Representing Talent by Violaine Roussel. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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