Hollywood Agents

From 1915 through 1960, studios might as well have been kingdoms. Long term exclusive contracts gave them enormous power over their actors. If another studio wanted badly enough to use one of yours, a lucrative loan-out deal was arranged. The actor generally got nothing extra from the deal. Soon, personal representatives, or agents, began getting involved on the actors’ behalf. The studios didn’t like it, but in a time of labor violence, this was the gentlest form of being coaxed out of a few more bucks. The cost of the agent—10% of every deal negotiated and signed—came out of the client’s side anyway, not the studio’s, so they shrugged.

Talent agencies were sellers, but they valued their fragile relationships with the buyers, which inhibited them from really tough bargaining. As a result, Hollywood agents have never had a great public reputation, though that image is about a half-century out of date. Fact is, sure, there have always been a few Caesars and Caligulas mixed in with the eminently decent, the businesslike, and the merely sleazy. Some become leaders of the industry. The business lends itself to that.

The talent agent concept came to Hollywood from the early 20th century worlds of live theater, music, and publishing. Agents in those predecessor fields to movies helped actors, and eventually writers and directors, negotiate their deals. It’s a straightforward sales job that’s a lot harder than it looks, but is incredibly profitable if and when it works out.

The first giant agency was the Music Corporation of America, MCA. Any astute viewer of The Godfather, Parts 1 and II, is probably aware that at one time, the Mob had a role in the music business, from the nightclubs where singers were discovered to the truckers who delivered the records, to the bars where the jukeboxes collected coins and the disc jockeys who accepted payola to boost certain songs up the charts. MCA, the agency, was (relatively) clean; its founder, Dr, Jules Stein, insisted on it. But from the ‘20s through the ‘50s, it was well aware of the kinds of people they were dealing with.

MCA’s super-agent Lew Wasserman was a postwar pioneer in a new legal tax dodge: setting actors up with their own semi-independent production companies. That way, most of the incoming sacks of money were no longer taxable personal income. At the same time, other forces like television hammered the business models of the old-time studio system. Under the strain of competing with the ruthless economics of TV, actors were signed to individual films, not to seven-year fixed price contracts.

Fewer people worked in Hollywood. The ones who did made more and more money. The studios still had most of the power, but a new breed of agents was beginning to re-balance things in favor of their clients.

There were studio holdouts to the new way of doing business. Disney was small back then, a specialist in children’s films and family TV, although unique in the industry, it had a theme park, and it was unusually adept at merchandising deals. Like every other studio, it loved blockbusters when they came their way, like Mary Poppins, but for decades thereafter it was content with inexpensive base hits, not risky home runs. Another cheapskate outfit was Universal, long seen as merely a marginally major studio. It remodeled itself as the town’s busiest low-cost TV show factory, keeping a roster of actors under contract, just like the old days. Ironically, they’d been taken over by MCA’s Wasserman, who was every bit as tight-fisted a studio head as he’d been an aggressive agent.

Warner Bros. chief Ted Ashley had also been an agent, more receptive to partnering with stars. (Their deal with Clint Eastwood survives to this day.) Sixties-Seventies agents like Freddie Fields and Sue Mengers were starting to become famous themselves. As the Seventies began, the massive William Morris Agency was still the dinosaur to beat. Their chief rival, ICM, International Creative Management, was a newer, younger, hungrier outfit that raised the level of competition. But Hollywood had never seen anything like the rise of CAA, Creative Artists Agency, a close-knit partnership helmed by Michael Ovitz, sometimes called “the Steve Jobs of agents”.

Ovitz’s autobiography is titled, with starkly simple, all-caps headline graphics, WHO IS MICHAEL OVITZ? The title, like the man himself, is defiantly egotistical; anyone else would have called it, “Who Was Michael Ovitz?”. But in a weird way, you can almost forgive him for it. He was arguably the King of Hollywood for almost twenty years, very well known on Wall Street, yet he was all but unknown to the general public.

He was never a friendly backslapper, and only rarely a cruel screamer. Instead, he was coldly logical, utterly ruthless, and very intelligent, the Michael Corleone of agents. He didn’t break any laws (well, not until much later) but he broke plenty of unwritten industry rules about poaching clients and monopolizing whole categories of talent. CAA agents were required to read Sun Tsu’s The Art of War, which even Ovitz later admitted was a pretentious gesture, and held them to the strictest rules of professionalism. He sent his staff hundreds of notes a day, icily demanding perfect follow-up on each one.

CAA was the master of “packaging”, assembling slates of clients to write, direct, and star in ‘80s films like Legal Eagles. For studios, that package was a no haggle, take-it-or-leave-it deal, a blueprint for a hit: just add lots of money. One of Michael Ovitz’s simple axioms was, if you have a stranglehold over the town’s top talent, you can set any price you want and the studios will have to pay. For decades, it worked. CAA had something close to a perfectly legal monopoly on the kind of stardom that made opening weekends bigger than ever. The agency—and Ovitz personally—changed the ways Hollywood did business; free-spending ways that would hurt them all later.

By the mid-Eighties, CAA’s star had risen so far that it was the preferred partner of merchant banks and billionaires who wanted to own movie studios. Ovitz was packaging on a level where no agent had gone before, arranging the sale of Columbia Pictures to Sony, the sale of Universal Studios to Matsushita, and then five years later helping them sell it to a Canadian company, Seagram’s, not to mention the sale and re-sale of MGM. Each time he recommended to the buyers who should get the top studio job, and his recommendations were usually taken. In effect, this should have made him feel more powerful than a “mere” studio boss.

Yet never having checked that particular box on fame’s list gnawed at him. As a result, Ovitz’s godlike stature never recovered from an embarrassing and unforeseen ego-driven string of sudden career mistakes and bad luck in the mid-Nineties.

Like the bitterly dark “comedy” of A Clockwork Orange’s Alex, on his way down, being at the vengeful mercy of everyone he assaulted on the way up, you can all but hear rival agents and studio heads gleefully chortling like Alex’s droogs, as the once-imperious Michael Ovitz finally gets what’s coming to him. In his memoirs, he ruefully admitted, “After twenty years of dog-eat-dog, it turned out that the other dogs had livid scars and long memories”. His book was published in 2018. In a final insult of fate, by then Hollywood people had to be told or reminded what once made him formidable.

It’s often assumed that the film business is full of nepotism. At one time, it was. But the big filmmaking names of the late 20th century and even of our times rarely got their jobs through connections. George Lucas’s father sold office supplies. Steven Spielberg’s father was a computer salesman; Michael Ovitz’s was a wholesale liquor salesman. (Disney’s) Michael Eisner’s dad was a TV repairman. When James Cameron first came to Hollywood, he lived in his car. Of course, in almost any business, having a powerful relative can help get you a better start, and often that’s all it gets you. Here’s one such story, with a hint of a bitter, cancel culture twist.

Frank Price’s midwestern family was driven west, like so many others, searching for work in the Depression. For a few years of his childhood, Frank’s mother worked in the cafeteria at Warner Brothers. Someday, he’d be one of the bosses on that studio lot.

An unusual background for a future mogul: Frank Price worked in a General Motors plant, joined the Navy, and worked his way through Michigan State. After proving his worth in the television business on the east coast, he was a Universal vice president by the age of 31. He invented the made-for-TV movie and the miniseries, and got dozens of shows on the air: The Virginian. Kojak. Columbo, Battlestar Galactica. In his mid-forties, he became chief of Columbia Pictures, now sharing the Warners lot. Price’s record stood for decades; 9 of Columbia’s 10 best-grossing films were made during his leadership. He jumped to Universal, where he rescued a script that wasn’t going anywhere at Columbia, Back to the Future. Later, Columbia brought him back to run the place again. He was respected and popular—they don’t always go together—and even perfectionist Ovitz admired Price’s disciplined, decisive approach to a tough job. He is one of the few conservatives to have made it all the way to the top in Hollywood.

His son Roy was hired as a CAA assistant agent, working for Richard Lovett, one of Ovitz’s hard-nosed taskmasters. Probably not a hard job to find when your dad is Frank Price, but from that point on he made his own way. Roy Price did a stint as a consultant at the ultra-elite McKinsey & Company, and like many others, sought to find profitable connections between entertainment and digital media. Amazon hired him away, and he created and ran Amazon Studios for them. For nearly ten years he guided its unbelievably rapid expansion, pioneering and making history, as his father did.

Then, over one weekend, he was ousted, over what is widely agreed to be one of the weakest #metoo cases in Hollywood. It seems hard to believe, but it was over telling a couple of jokes, teasing a producer of one of his Amazon shows, at a party at Comic-Con. He did tell the jokes—there are witnesses—and he had been drinking. Prim, buttoned-up Amazon looked into the incident and chose to ignore it. Two years later, he was abruptly fired for it, the man who more than anyone else built the streaming business.

Last year, three years after Roy Price left Amazon, even the Los Angeles Times (never less than woke) was moved to publish a moderately sympathetic account of what happened.

“Many who knew and worked with Price…said that although they found the behavior attributed to him inappropriate, they were troubled by his treatment. They questioned the timing of his exit, two years after he was investigated…Some also wondered whether the punishment fit the crime. “It haunts me. It was so unfair,” said a former Amazon executive, who declined to be identified because the person remains under a nondisclosure agreement.”

(Re Amazon’s NDA: So much for Democracy Dies in Darkness, eh, Jeff?)

This happened between 2015 and 2017. Besides the arrival of #metoo, the ostensible reason, was there anything else that might have affected Amazon’s attitude? Frank Price, then 86, joined (ACF founder) Lionel Chetwynd’s Hollywood GOP committee for the arts in 2016. The trade papers made a splash of the fact that Price donated to the Republicans, as in previous presidential elections, but now it was getting to be different.

I don’t know for certain that resenting Frank Price for his politics played any role, conscious or not, in why his son was canceled. I have no proof. But I do know this: In Hollywood, that’s all it would take.