ICM Reaches for the Ring : Entertainment: Overshadowed by a pushy archrival, it aims to be the Tiffany of talent agencies. After much travail, it may be poised to succeed.

Marvin Josephson, principal owner of International Creative Management, likes to tell how his company’s Chase Manhattan bankers were at a business meeting when someone, yet again, brought up the phenomenal success of rival Creative Artists Agency.

The speaker carried on about the drawing power of CAA superstars Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

All three, the Chase contingent had to point out, are actually represented by ICM.

One of the world’s most powerful talent agencies, ICM is bigger than CAA, with roughly twice the clients and agents, if not revenue. Big-name authors such as John Le Carre and star-quality newscasters such as Jane Pauley make ICM a giant in businesses where CAA has no formal presence. And a network of offices and affiliates in Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Rome and Munich have given the company global reach, while Beverly Hills-based CAA has largely stayed home.

Yet ICM--like its pushy archrival, 15 years old--still has to insist upon its full measure of respect. New respect may soon be in order, however.

In the wake of a 1988 management buyout, ICM has exploited boom-level movie and television profits to prepay acquisition debt, while tackling problems that handcuffed the agency in the 1980s. It has used the lure of ownership stakes to attract top agents--as it couldn’t do while shares of its former parent, Josephson International, languished on the stock market--and has been striving to outgrow a self-destructive internal culture that often put the company at odds with itself.

Moreover, ICM is trying not simply to outsell CAA and the William Morris Agency, its other chief competitor. Instead, it has fought to establish its identity as the “quality” shop, promising wider opportunity to artists who long to work outside the conventional limits of their disciplines, or beyond the borders of the United States.

“I’d rather be the best than the biggest,” said Jeffrey Berg, ICM’s 43-year-old chairman and a principal strategist for the agency since he assumed its presidency in 1980.

“We all know what we’d like to be 10 years from now . . . the Tiffany of the industry,” seconds Co-Chairman Guy McElwaine, who returned to ICM last year after leaving to head film operations at Rastar Productions, Columbia Pictures and Weintraub Entertainment Group.

The march to Tiffany status has seen some reverses, of course. Just as ICM was celebrating a record $3-million script sale for Joe Eszterhas, who had been lured away from CAA Chairman Michael Ovitz, CAA struck back by luring away prize screenwriters Robert Towne (“Days of Thunder”) and Bo Goldman (script consultant on “Dick Tracy”).

Similarly, ICM has seen the lucrative European TV market cool just as the agency was beginning to tap that market for clients whose films or programs proved too sophisticated or expensive to be funded solely by U.S. studios and networks. “Foreign business is much more selective. In 1992, sales aren’t going to be what they were in 1990,” acknowledged ICM television chief Alan Berger.

Still, some close observers say ICM is poised to reach for the brass ring in the 1990s. Said independent film producer Steve Roth: “I believe the industry feels their time has come.”

Freewheeling Egos

ICM was born in 1975 from an uneasy marriage between Creative Management Associates--an industry powerhouse which then included agents Freddie Fields, David Begelman, Sue Mengers and Sam Cohn--and the International Famous Agency, another strong company, much of which Josephson had purchased from what eventually became known as Warner Communications.

The new partnership almost immediately dissolved into an array of freewheeling egos and warring camps. “These people thought nothing of stealing a script from another agent’s office to get ahead,” says a top Hollywood producer who dealt closely with the agency.

The divisiveness left growing room for CAA, founded the same year by five defectors from then-dominant William Morris, thus forming a triangle of big agencies that would prevail in Hollywood for more than a decade.

(Triad Artists, born of a three-way merger in 1984, eventually carved out a chunk of business, while smaller companies such as InterTalent and the newly combined Leading Artists and Bauer/Benedeck Agency have shown new vigor lately.)

Josephson, meanwhile, devoted himself to an ill-starred acquisition campaign that diverted funds and attention to successive ventures in office products, radio and financial services without ever hitting a jackpot that might have turned his conglomerate into a miniature Gulf & Western. (See accompanying story.)

Several individuals close to ICM say income has been boosted lately by the agency’s presumed 10% of some phenomenal star salaries, including, for instance, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $20-million-plus take from “Twins.”

On TV, the agency has had hits in Fox’s “The Simpsons” and “The Tracy Ullman Show,” which it “packaged” with producer James Brooks--that is, helped assemble major participants in return for a percentage of the revenue. It also has an impressive 30 hours of TV movies and miniseries in production for the three major networks and Turner Broadcasting, and is involved with a string of current and forthcoming series that include “Gabriel’s Fire” on ABC, “Midnight Caller” and “Life Stories” on NBC and “The Hogan Family” and “Good Sports” on CBS.

Public records show that ICM was consistently profitable during the 1980s, with pretax profit margins that averaged about 15%. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 1988, the company expected to post pretax income of $8.5 million on about $56 million in revenue, according to one of its last public filings.

The figures seem minuscule when compared to the billions of dollars in sales posted by entertainment conglomerates such as MCA Inc. or Walt Disney Co. According to Josephson, however, talent agency revenues, which consist of client commissions and packaging fees, must be multiplied by a factor of roughly 13 to come up with the agency’s “billings”--that is, the total dollars it processes annually.

If ICM continued to grow at the 11% rate it posted in 1988, current revenue would approach $70 million, with billings in excess of $900 million.

Comparison is difficult, since none of the major agencies disclose finances. But those figures appear to run a bit behind 91-year-old William Morris, which got a big boost from “The Cosby Show,” which it packaged, and which still collects fees on programs like “Make Room for Daddy” from the early days of television. Some industry insiders estimate that CAA’s revenue is about the same as ICM’s, despite its smaller client list, thanks to its strong showing on TV with programs like “Golden Girls” in the 1980s and its unusually rich mix of stars, Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise among them.

For the moment, at least, smaller CAA also projects a stronger public image than ICM. Its sleek new headquarters in Beverly Hills, a rounded structure of marble, tinted glass and crisp white steel designed by renowned architect I. M. Pei, stands in bold contrast to the anonymous Los Angeles and New York office buildings that house the bulk of ICM. Several ICM insiders have said their agency is considering plans for new quarters in Los Angeles, but Berg declined to discuss the matter.

Cross Pollination

ICM’s pride is its ability to fertilize the careers of its artists by tapping resources that cut across disciplines and national borders.

New client Garry Marshall, fresh from directing “Pretty Woman” for Disney, turned next to a stage play in Chicago with a boost from his agency’s theatrical connections. Sam Cohn, ICM’s chief New York film agent, insists that everyone in his nine-member group handle both screen and stage work. That contrasts sharply with CAA, which has stuck closer to Hollywood. “As a company, they have no great love or understanding of theater,” said Cohn.

(CAA represents several clients who occasionally cross over into theater, including Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Hulce, Gregory Hines and Christine Lahti. CAA also was instrumental in packaging the Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman” starring Hoffman several years ago.)

Similarly, ICM’s book department--which claims to be the world’s largest literary agency, with E. L. Doctorow, Jay McInerney, Kitty Kelly, Dr. Seuss and Peter Benchley among its stars--feeds a steady stream of material to ICM’s film and TV departments in Beverly Hills. “They’re going to get something to give Mel Gibson for his next movie. . . . We’re a built-in source of product,” said Amanda Urban, who has co-headed the book division with Esther Newberg since Nesbit left.

In television, ICM’s international department helped Michael Mann find a Spanish co-producer for “Camarena: The Drug Wars,” a miniseries that aired on NBC but could not have been made, he believes, without the agency’s global reach. “They became aggressive before anybody else, and are way in advance of anybody else in innovative packaging formulas involving foreign finance,” Mann said of ICM’s 5-year-old effort to build a worldwide network of allies under its international chief, Peter Rawley.

ICM’s presence overseas has also been boosted by its music unit, which has a large complement of British stars, including Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Tears for Fears and Robert Plant.

The agency hasn’t brought that link home to Hollywood by aggressively pushing its rock stars into movies, as CAA has done with Madonna. But music department head Bill Elson said he has been a “built-in advocate” for any client who wants to cross disciplines, as with Motley Crue, an ICM rock group that appears in Fox’s “The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.”

Divisiveness Persists

The hard part has been getting all those cylinders to fire in order.

Both inside and outside ICM, critics say the agency has yet to overcome the fractiousness that has distinguished it from machine-like CAA, with its emphasis on group effort.

“ICM is not the product of any one vision, so there is no core to it,” complained one ICM agent, who declined to be identified. “ICM is like the Soviet Union. (Agency President James) Wiatt and Berg are trying to control a bunch of Baltic states.” (The agency is big enough that Ralph Mann, head of ICM’s news and business affairs division in New York and a 30-year veteran of the agency, had to be identified to the office staff during a recent walk through the neighboring music division.)

Company managers say they’ve brought a more collegial style to ICM, as some of the older generation of agents moved on or mellowed. The motion picture group, for instance, now meets three times weekly with a bicoastal telephone hook-up--a far cry from the situation only three years ago, when Cohn, a notorious lone wolf, routinely declined to return calls from West Coast colleagues.

“The interaction between Los Angeles and New York is operating at a better level than it has in the past. . . . Getting jobs for clients is a shared experience. The old competitiveness about doing that has disappeared,” maintained Wiatt, a 43-year-old Beverly Hills High and USC graduate who joined the agency after serving as an aide to then-Sen. John Tunney, the California Democrat. Wiatt was named president with Cohn’s strong backing in 1985.

But sore spots remain. One Hollywood executive, who declined to be identified, told of a recent film on which an ICM agent, who represented the star, went down the studio’s list of preferred directors and struck every entry from his own agency, leaving the list studded with CAA clients. The logic? “If it goes wrong, and he put in an ICM director, he might get blamed. It could reflect badly on him,” said the executive.

Such contretemps have deeply pained some of ICM’s young comers and have contributed to several defections. ICM insiders say the most notable of those occurred when Bill Block--then head of the West Coast-based script division--several years ago mounted a short-lived push to organize a tighter, CAA-like approach, then left to co-found competing InterTalent as the effort fizzled. Block declined to be interviewed for this story.

Yet Berg has fiercely resisted any pressure to mimic his strongest competitor.

The son of a Connecticut art dealer, with a degree in English literature from UC Berkeley, Berg has played the cool intellectual before Ovitz’s sometimes heated rush for power. According to one colleague, he has been known “to quote Jefferson and T. S. Eliot, in proper context, at staff meetings.”

As an agent, he is highly regarded. Writer-director James Brooks remembers that during a long dry spell when he couldn’t sell “Terms of Endearment” to the studios, Berg not only returned his many calls but actually “parked outside the door” of one executive who had reneged on a promise to fund the picture. Occasionally, though, he is also known as “The Iceberg,” a reference to chilly moments in which he may, for instance, dismiss an associate’s idea as “stupid.”

In an interview, Berg spoke of his competitors only obliquely and with deference. But one ICM agent recalled being told by a colleague of a heart-to-heart during which the colleague, bothered by what he felt was CAA’s overpowering presence in the film business, asked: “Jeff, doesn’t this bother you?”

“You don’t understand,” Berg replied. “This is not some sport. This is not a race. I run a business. If the figures add up to a profit, I’m a success. . . . And guess what? At the end of the day, I get to say I helped put together ‘The Last Emperor.’ ”

Berg’s Approach

So far, Berg’s intellectual passions have proved attractive to personal clients as skilled and challenging as Brooks, Bernardo Bertolucci, Roman Polanski and others.

More broadly, his approach has also given ICM an edge with agents and clients--including some with huge box-office potential--who don’t feel comfortable with the group mentality that they believe they would encounter at CAA.

“It has to do with individuality,” said Ed Limato, a powerful agent who rejoined ICM, his alma mater, after leaving William Morris in 1988 with clients Richard Gere, Mel Gibson and Michelle Pfeiffer, among others.

Limato believes that he might have become wealthier working for CAA but would never have fit in. “I’m a bit of an eccentric,” he explains. “I like to wear Versace clothes. I’m a guy who hates to shave. If I don’t want to shave for a couple of days, I don’t want to be looked at askance.”

Guy McElwaine, who similarly returned to the agency after years away--and quickly brought in screenwriter Eszterhas, as well as some business with another former client, Steven Spielberg--believes that his colleagues are learning to balance such individuality with a respect for each other that was missing when he left for Rastar in 1981. “We just kind of grew up together,” he maintains.

If individuality becomes the mood of the moment in Hollywood--and ICM can lick some of its lingering demons--the agency may well come into its own in the 1990s. By some accounts, the shift has already begun.

In the words of Michael Mann: “These are good times for ICM. Period.”

ICM CLIENTS:

ICM has had hits in Fox’s “The Simpsons” and “The Tracy Ullman Show,” which it “packaged” with producer James Brooks--that is, helped assemble major participants in return for a percentage of the revenue. Major clients include Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michelle Pfeiffer, John LeCarre and Jane Pauley.