Hollywood

Playing the Percentages

And with Ovitz's departure, the agency business stopped being a cult of personality hyped by a fawning press. Not that it's any less important in the Hollywood food chain. But these days, an agent's power derives not from personality but from position: You are only who you represent. (Though Ovitz claims to be reinventing himself as a talent manager, he's really just assembling another agency -- Artists Management Group; he even refers to his hybrid employees as "magents." That he is so obviously competing with the agencies for clients is one reason AMG hasn't signed an A-list actor since January. Once the bête noire of anyone who dared cross him, Ovitz now seems indistinguishable from the rest.)

With the virtual demise of packaging, and talented new directors like Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, and Todd Solondz being discovered all the time thanks to the fecundity of foreign and independent films, the CAA juggernaut has slowed, and other agencies have caught up. Agent poaching has replaced client poaching, and now it's every agent for himself. Until as late as January 15, for example, Michael Gruber kept WMA twisting in the wind about re-signing even after CEO Walt Zifkin promised to make him president of the agency in the next three to five years. That promise of power wasn't enough. Gruber left for major bucks and merely the prospect of a partnership at CAA because, as he told his clients like George Clooney, "I wanted to play on the Yankees" (and, apparently, get paid like Bernie Williams).

Well, what did anyone expect? After all, the new breed of agent was born during the Greed Decade, which introduced to the business a litter of hungry pups armed with Harvard MBA or law degrees who'd toyed with the idea of investment banking but opted instead for Hollywood agencies. Yet they were not much different from the protégés of that other Mike, as in Milken: There but for the grace of glam went the latest incarnation of the Drexel traders. And they turned the agency business upside down. The old guys waited their turn, knowing that their patience would be rewarded with professional and financial security. The new kids weren't as patient; they wanted the big money, and they wanted it now. The old guys were products of Brooklyn and the Bronx. The new kids were baby-boom California-bred, or cloned. The old guys looked up to Lew Wasserman. The new kids worshiped Gordon Gekko.

Agency contract negotiations used to be models of simplicity in a complex business. An agent's bare-bones salary and all-important year-end bonus were determined primarily from a series of computer calculations of clients' earning history from the past year and potential for the next one. Eventually, an agent's intangibles -- a winning personality, status in the community, deep studio connections, an eye for young talent -- were also taken into account. Beginning this year, when the bonuses are relayed to the agents anytime from October to Hanukkah, something new will almost certainly be factored in as well: Call it anti-theft insurance, the cost of keeping today's employee from becoming tomorrow's competitor. ICM will worry about losing agents to Wiatt, who in turn will have to overpay WMA agents to stay put, and so on in an endless vicious cycle. Energy that the agencies used to devote to sinking Hollywood fortunes is now going to be spent just keeping themselves afloat. And it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of predators.

"The sharks are trapped in their own pen, and there is no escaping to the free waters of the studios," that former agency honcho told me. "All they can do is turn on each other and see who is the last survivor."

E-mail: nikkifinke@aol.com