MEMO TO: Talent agency chiefs
FROM: Peter Bart
SUBJECT: Reality check
IN ACCORDANCE WITH this column's custom of giving advice where none is solicited, I would urge you to pause for a moment from your frenetic activity to consider the following question:
Is there a subliminal message in the fact that ICM's answer to Watergate occurred just as the calamitous baseball strike nears its climax?
If baseball is out of control, so indeed is the agency business. The rules of the game have long since been trashed. Competition has given way to chaos.
When I became editor of this newspaper, one of my first moves was to step up coverage of the agency business. Agenting, I felt, represented an important microcosm of showbiz: all energy, flash and big bucks.
As things turned out, this was one of those decisions I lived to regret. The level of competition and paranoia in the agency business is such that every story is greeted by cries of anguish. The whole exercise has proved to be more trouble than it's worth.
Agenting, it is clear, should be relegated instead to the sports pages, because that is basically what the business has become. And, as such, it is clearly time for the people who preside over the agency business to get together and adopt the sort of rules that helped baseball reach its primacy before the crazies took control.
Step 1: A commissioner should be appointed (Fay Vincent is one candidate) to administer new rules of the game. He would have the final say in settling conflicts between agencies.
Step 2: An anti-raiding code should be adopted and enforced by the commissioner. This would simply codify the practices that prevailed before the 1980s: Namely, no agent may pursue a client unless that client had effectively let it be known that he is looking to change his representation. The late Stan Kamen of the William Morris Agency, one of the most successful agents in the annals of ten-percenteries, built up a solid client list without ever raiding anyone. A Stan Kamen Award should therefore be given to the practitioner who most clearly lives up to that tradition.
Step 3: A system of orchestrated trades should be administered by the commissioner's office, governing both agents and clients. Given the fact that young agents are feral by nature, they require frequent changes of habitat; hence, it should be possible for a third party to negotiate a trade whereby International Creative Management and United Talent Agency could simply exchange two or three malcontents.
Similarly, if an edgy client like John Hughes wishes to leave Creative Artists Agency for ICM, only to return to CAA a week later, the commissioner's office should create a Ricochet Rule for clients who need to attract attention to themselves. On that particular week, for example, an ICM client also would be permitted to bounce back and forth to equalize things.
Step 4: Given the growing demands of hot young agents and the shrinking margins of the agencies, a salary cap mechanism should be created, along with what the baseball mavens call their "luxury tax" to facilitate revenue-sharing. This would help to create parity on the agency playing field.
Step 5: To complete the sports analogy, clients should have access to some sort of information about the effectiveness of their agents -- the equivalent of a batting average, if you will. If an agent is batting .300 on his pitches, the client has a right to that information. The same goes for an agent who bats .150. At present, it's the client who's paying the bills -- and who's in the dark as to performance.
NOW, I REALIZE THAT industry seers will poohpooh these proposals on the grounds that the top agents could never work together. I should point out, however, that, as the agent raids have mounted, the august chieftains of every major agency have called this newspaper to lobby for a reduction in the noise level. Specifically, each proposed that news of client shifts be taken off the front page and relegated instead to a space inside the paper -- a column we have labeled "The Ten-Percenters."
This rare show of unanimity bodes well for the future. At least everyone is on the same page.
And certainly the events at ICM this week should reinforce this phenomenon. The specter of four young agents in a latenight attempt to transport their files from ICM with the aim of forming their own agency poses a nightmare image for senior agents. Inevitably, threats of lawsuits and other punishment have quickly ensued.
IN A WAY, the ICM melodrama seemed oddly anachronistic. Why were these guys piling papers into cartons? Whatever happened to computer discs or even Xerox machines?
The incident reminded some of the confrontation a decade ago when one bright young agent resigned from William Morris with the intention of joining CAA.
One of the senior graybeards from William Morris' inner sanctum confronted him in the hall outside his office. "You're fired," he shouted angrily at the startled agent, promptly locking him out of his office.
"You can't fire me -- I've already quit," protested the agent.
"Then I'll take away your car," screamed his elderly boss.
The agent found himself trudging along El Camino in the rain, looking for a taxi.
The old-timers at the Morris agency in that era expected a certain level of decorum that has long since vanished.
Thus the time has come to consider the proposals advanced above. With their adoption, a new era of sanity and stability could return to the agency business. The dealmakers could stop banging into one another and return to the business of making deals.
They could also put their lives back in perspective. In Irving Lazar's memoir , published this week, the revered "Swifty" succinctly sets forth his philosophy of life. "The way I see it," he said, "you get to do what you want to do and you have a great life, and then you have to die -- and that's the deal."
That, Swifty felt, was the best deal he could make. Perhaps it's time for the town's dealmakers to ponder their best deal, as well.
Contact Peter Bart at
peter.bart@variety.com