New Guys Running the Show

Did agents ruin the old Hollywood?

Conventional wisdom holds they did. The movie industry was a big, self-perpetuating oligarchy. It manufactured stars, ground out product, filled the theaters, sold popcorn, produced a fantasy world on and off screen. It filled magazines, fueled dreams and was a mecca for the stage struck all over the world.

When the studios controlled the stars, it was the greatest show on earth. Blockbuster movies could be made for a million dollars. Long-term contracts were the vogue. It was a company town, but the company paid well.

Then, the agents moved in, like illegal aliens and, overnight, the picture changed--or, at least, the picture industry did.

It began modestly enough. With Jimmy Stewart, of all people. Instead of a weekly salary, his agent worked out a deal where he took a percentage--and a million, up front--to do the film “Harvey” from the stage play. Stewart also took a percentage for a movie called “Winchester 73.”

Soon, talent deals became endemic. Independent producers emerged to buck the studio system. Agents controlled the talent; so, they controlled the product. Not to say, the industry. The studios toppled.

Was this a bad thing? Well, not for the help. Clark Gable spent his whole life on salary. His pictures were box office smashes but he got wages only. For his biggest hit, “Gone With The Wind,” the studio (MGM) got millions. It lent him out to Selznick for more money than his total salary. MGM secured the distribution rights to the film while Gable simply got his weekly paycheck.

There were other inequities. Studios bound players to 7-year exclusive contracts, which were renewable at the studio’s option and on the studio’s terms. Olivia de Havilland’s agents cracked that.

I bring this up because the similarities between the ‘30s and ‘40s Hollywood and the ‘70s and ‘80s baseball are startling.

I lunched with one of the most powerful men in organized baseball the other day. No, not Commissioner Fay Vincent, owner George Steinbrenner or even Peter O’Malley.

Dennis Gilbert never started a World Series game, managed a pennant winner or bought the Yankees or ran a league. But he may have been walking around with the National or American League pennant in his hands this winter.

Put it this way: Gilbert was the agent representing Bobby Bonilla, Bret Saberhagen and Danny Tartabull last winter. If that’s not a pennant line, it comes as close as you can come. Bonilla and Tartabull were free agents. Saberhagen was on the trading market.

Dennis Gilbert is one of a handful of player representatives who probably have more to say about the conduct of big league baseball than Judge Landis ever did.

For instance, in dealing--or helping to deal--Bonilla and Saberhagen to the New York Mets, he may very well have landed a National League pennant there. Bonilla was hotly sought after by all 26 clubs. The general bidding for Bonilla began in the $25-million range--and settled on a $29 1/2-million dollar deal for five years. Bonilla’s expectations are so high that he gets extra in his bonus if he makes league MVP. Bret Saberhagen is a Cy Young Award winner.

With Danny Tartabull, the option was for the Yankees. But Dennis Gilbert has a stable of some 50 clients who, if they all ended up on the same franchise, could make the 1927 Yankees look like the 1927 Toledo Mud Hens. Jose Canseco is on there. So is George Brett. Scott Erickson. Todd Zeile. Chris Bosio.

Are agents ruining the grand old game? Is the combination of owners’ ego and players’ greed pricing the game out of existence?

Dennis Gilbert is a rarity in agentry. He was a baseball player himself. He never got higher than Class A ball, so he sees the other side of equation, the side of the guys waiting for the break that never comes. Few entertainment agents ever played Hamlet. But Dennis Gilbert played center field. For Waterloo, Iowa.

He admits to being “a baseball junkie.” Explains Gilbert: “I don’t take clients in other sports. I know baseball.”

A Dennis Gilbert would not have been possible in earlier times. But baseball created the environment for Dennis Gilberts. Prior to 1970, it was the last stand of the plantation mentality in our society. Baseball’s infamous reserve clause indentured an athlete to it forever. The game was not a field of dreams, it was a field of slaves. You didn’t work for somebody, you were owned by somebody. Inequities were rampant. A Mickey Mantle wins a Triple Crown and is asked to take a salary cut the next year because the team lost. He has no recourse in any court. He can either play--or go home.

When baseball went to binding arbitration, it was like the sun setting on the British Empire. It still had a favorable Supreme Court ruling in its arsenal identifying it as a sport, not a business, but the game was afraid to trust it to a new court test. It lived with the loopholes. The agents lived on them.

Dennis Gilbert empathized with the $800-a-month player because he once was one of them. He later made his money selling life insurance at a time when he had to haunt the marriage-license bureau for potential customers, sleep in a van parked on the street and take showers at the public beaches.

He now says his services extend to more than certified public accounting and contract negotiation. “I become psychiatrist, marriage counselor, financial planner.” Everything but parish priest. “The scandal to me was not the money baseball was paying to its stars, but the fact the stars seemed to leave the game broke. I saw guys who set home run records suddenly unable to meet their rents--and some of these were guys in the big-money era.”

The salary explosion in baseball does not owe itself to agent manipulations, Gilbert insists, but to owners’ “commitment to winning.”

They buy a team for inflated prices, then they find they have to win with it to round out their fantasies.

Isn’t he afraid the game will get lopsided in favor of the have-nots? Certainly, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Kansas City Royals, already in an unfavorable marketing situation vis-a-vis New York, will take a turn for the worse now that the Yankees and the Mets have their stars (Pittsburgh lost Bonilla, K.C. lost Saberhagen and Tartabull)?

“You have to know a team’s financial position. The ancillary rights, for example. You know, a team benefits from the sale of every T-shirt, warmup jacket, cap, baseball and bat with the major league logo. They are on the threshold of pay-TV. You can’t get a look at their books. So you negotiate for the top dollar. They don’t want partners, they want employees.”

But shouldn’t he feel a responsibility to the game which sustains everybody? “My responsibility is to the client. Their responsibility is to the game. They own the game.”

But, the Dennis Gilberts own the talent. In old Hollywood, that was all the edge the 10-percenters needed to wrest the business from the moguls to the independent producers. The star system might have languished but the industry survived.

Gilbert thinks baseball will, too. Meanwhile, he has no desire to become the game’s czar. In a sense, he already is. The commissioner decides important things such as who will umpire the playoffs. Dennis Gilbert concerns himself with the minutiae. Such as where Bobby Bonilla, Bret Saberhagen, Danny Tartabull--and, maybe, Jose Canseco--will play. Such as who will play in the World Series.