When we talk about market concentration in entertainment, we often default to the most visibly concentrated elements: one movie theater chain, four movie studios, one cable operator and one telco per region, five tech giants.
But there’s another - incredibly salient - form of concentration that’s invisible unless you’re actually in the industry: consolidation in the talent agencies.
Private equity-backed rollups have turned a wild jungle of hundreds of agents and agencies into a manicured, ornamental hedge of four mega-agencies: WME, CAA, UTA and ICM.
Private equity is the most predatory form of capitalism extant, the end-product of generations of looters who distanced the financial economy from the real economy, until the best way to make money is to destroy real value.
And when these eminently guillotinable wreckers took over the talent agencies, the got control over a critical bottleneck in entertainment production, the funnel that all creative laborers move through en route to production. Having control over a bottleneck, they SQUEEZED.
The agencies started creating “packaging deals”: when you hire a writer, they also find you a director, lead actors, and so on. And they skim a “packaging fee” off the top of the production, in addition to the commissions they earn from their clients.
This is a massive conflict of interest. Agencies could (tacitly) offer studios lower compensation for their clients in exchange for higher fees. The talent got less, the studios paid less, and the agencies made more.
The arts are a bizarre labor market, because people make art even in the absence of a rational expectation of return - arts production is motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors.
When Samuel Johnson said “None but a blockhead ever wrote but for money,” it was pure aspiration. Not even Johnson himself ever lived up to that standard!
This gives rise to highly exploitative relationships, where unscrupulous middle-men can charge money to artists for access to audiences (or even the promise of access, never delivered upon).
Predatory “vanity publishers,” fake agents, and other grifters have bankrupted many a would-be artist.
To counter this tendency, writers are advised to stick to a rule of thumb that “money flows towards the artist.”
That is, your publisher makes money from your creation, not fees you pay for publication. Your agent makes money from commissions on the publisher’s royalties, not from a service charge to you.
Publishers and agents should NEVER have side-deals that incentivize agents to accept less for you. This is incredibly obvious: agents argue your side in a negotiation with an entertainment company. They can’t ALSO be working FOR the entertainment company.
Duh.
I mean… DUH.
So when the big agencies started doing this packaging thing, writers got pissed. What’s more, screenwriters are unionized, represented by (among others), the WGA. And they told the agents, fuck no, no way, cut this shit out.
And the private equity bosses running the agencies said fuck off, what are you all gonna do, fire your agents?
So every WGA member fired their agents.
That was in April 2018!
Most of the mid-sized agencies caved. But the action dragged on for YEARS, seemingly with no end in sight.
That just leaves CAA (who used to rep me) and WME (who currently do) as holdouts, still involved in both the labor action and an endless, slow-motion lawsuit.
This is a huge victory for the writers, but it’s not really clear what’ll happen next.
For one thing, there are all the writers who fired their agents and hired managers, went to mid-sized agencies, or used lawyers to rep them – will they go back?
Then there are writers like me: not in the Guild, but with enough option deals to need a screen agent.
As I understand it, if I ever get signed on to adapt any of my work on a union production, I’ll have to join the Guild to work on it, and that means firing the agent who got the deal. It’s a pretty weird situation!
And for the record, my agent is a hardworking, lovely person who gets my work and is great to work with. She’s not a private equity baron.
For me, the ICM deal is a hopeful sign that CAA and WME will cave soon. Their biggest (former) clients can now sign with UTA or ICM, which should scare the shit out of the holdout agencies.
Woman Reading (1885). Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935). Watercolor and gouache on paper. White House Collection.
Hassam represented the core of American Impressionism, dedicated to painting what was real for him, what was familiar and close at hand, out-of-doors when possible, and with the immediacy of light and shadow—which though exaggerated and falsely colored at times—makes a purposeful impact or impression.
