For Multimedia’s Emerging Superstars, are Hollywood Talent Agents. . . : The 10% Solution?

When International Creative Management agents Bill Block and Steve Stanford arrived at the Medford, Ore., airport last month to find a white limousine awaiting them, they were mortified.

Expensive cars are not generally a source of anxiety for talent agents. But the only reason Block and Stanford had ventured a visit to the depressed logging town was to persuade the ponytailed computer game programmers at Trilobyte, a start-up multimedia firm housed in an old schoolhouse, to let ICM represent them. They feared the customary limo might be, well, inappropriate.

Hollywood agents want a cut of the multimedia revolution. But to get it, they must breach a cultural gap as wide as the distance from Sunset Boulevard to the information superhighway. Most of the software developers and techno-entrepreneurs who are pioneering new forms of interactive entertainment have never had an agent--and aren’t at all sure they want one now.

Ten percent of the deal--the agent’s traditional fee--seems rather costly to many start-ups working out of their kitchens. And if your idea of a star is Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, an agent isn’t the obvious key to fame and fortune.

“You don’t hear a lot of positive stuff about them,” observes Rand Miller, co-creator with his brother, Robyn, of the popular CD-ROM game “Myst.”

Still, each of the major agencies has set up “interactive” teams to seek out deals in the new arena, and each has had some success. They were on the job at the annual Digital World conference in Los Angeles last week, schmoozing with people who often looked like they’d rather be reading their electronic mail. ICM chief Jeff Berg was on a keynote panel. The Agency for the Performing Arts even held a news conference to announce it had signed Greg Roach of HyperBole Studios, a CD-ROM developer in Bellevue, Wash.

But as the agencies jockey for multimedia domination, the main battle turns out to be not so much persuading prospective clients that they can cut a better deal than the others as persuading them that agents really do serve a useful function in life. Really.

“People definitely have preconceived notions about agents,” concedes ICM’s Stanford, whose previous work in the computer industry lends him more credibility than most in the eyes of the programming community. “It comes from a lack of understanding of what we do--that we’re on their side, we’re the guys who fight for them.”

Or, as William Morris’ Lee Rosenberg puts it: “They need to understand that we add value.”

Agents argue that their traditional role as catalysts--bringing people together to package deals--is essential in an industry as amorphous as new media, where no one is quite sure who is right for which job, or where to find them.

Programmers, they note, often fancy themselves “artists” and can be just as temperamental and in need of ego-stroking as any Hollywood client--though Rosenberg says they “probably need less hand-holding.”

Indeed, as the industry evolves, some new media mavens concede that agents may unavoidably have a role to play. But for now, the agents frequently find themselves running up against what one calls multimedia’s “carpetbagger reaction” to their advances.

Hence the ironically self-conscious attention to details such as cars and clothes. “They leave their Armani suits in the closet when they come up here,” says Drew Hoffman, a CD-ROM developer in San Francisco. “They wear their ‘new-media wardrobe’--Gap shirts and slacks.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t the ICM visitors’ vehicle that most annoyed Trilobyte co-founder Graeme Devine, recent winner of New Media magazine’s Programmer of the Year award for the CD-ROM title “7th Guest.”

Devine is a dedicated comic book reader who moved his family to the mountains of southern Oregon to escape Southern California’s frenetic pace and high cost of living. And he had trouble relating to Block, who is known as a particularly relentless Type A in a profession that measures aggression on a scale far transcending that of normal mortals.

For one thing, says Devine, he ignored a request to stay away while the 25-person Trilobyte team was in the midst of finishing its second title.

For another, “he’s a different breed of human,” Devine says. “I really believe it’s not an act with him. That’s the way he is. He might as well be from a different planet for all we have in common.”

It’s not that Trilobyte won’t use ICM’s services. It’s just that Devine expects ICM’s clients to pay for the privilege--not the other way around.

His logic: The advances in technology that have so vastly expanded the market for computer software by making it possible to incorporate video, high-quality audio and sophisticated graphics have also opened up a new market for traditional Hollywood writers, actors and musicians. Devine and many other developers see themselves more as studio chiefs than as artists needing to be marketed.

“They came to our door; we didn’t go to theirs,” Devine says. “So if we’d like to use the voice of Patrick Stewart or someone, we’ll call them--but we don’t want to pay the 10%. They wanted to represent Trilobyte. We said, ‘We want it to go the other way. We’ll call you.’ ”

“7th Guest” cost $466,000 to make, sold 1 million copies and so far has recorded retail sales of about $45 million. Those numbers--for a game that, not unlike a movie, employed a screenwriter, a director and several actors--are what make the agents salivate. They’re also what make CD-ROM developers wary of people who claim they can “add value.”

“If you are calling to discuss some great idea you have on how you can make money with our product, please press five now,” recites the voice mail recording at Id Software, the Mesquite, Tex.-based creators of another popular CD-ROM game called “Doom.”

Yet Id Chief Executive Jay Wilbur says ICM’s dynamic duo--Block and Stanford have covered a lot of ground--knocked down a few of his stereotypes: “They weren’t sipping on Perrier when they walked in the door, and their cellular . . . phones were at least in their pockets. They didn’t even say ‘babe’ a lot.”

Wilbur’s ideas for the merchandising of “Doom” range from a movie version of the game to mouse pads and Doom GI Joe action figures. Talent agents, he concedes, might be able to strike better deals than he can. But at the same time, “10% is a hard pill to swallow. It’s not like we’re a one-man shop. We’re a well-oiled, 10-person machine, and we have someone whose job it is to oversee these opportunities.”

That attitude gets to the heart of why multimedia firms have proven such a hard sell for agents.

The stars of high-technology have traditionally been born in dorm-room obscurity and risen to greatness by building their companies’ stock value. So, unlike some Hollywood creative types who depend on agents to handle their business arrangements, would-be tech phenoms see business acumen and deal making as part of the job.

And despite the much-talked-of “convergence” with Hollywood, most multimedia entrepreneurs are following that Silicon Valley model.

“Most of the artists in the new-technology area are not looking for employment by others at the highest possible price, which is what agents are so good at finding for their clients,” notes Stan Coleman, an attorney specializing in multimedia at Beverly Hills-based Weissmann, Wolff, Bergman, Coleman & Silverman. “Bill Gates is the archetype, not Steven Spielberg.”

All is not lost, though. Spielberg’s agent, Creative Artists Agency chief Michael Ovitz, has also been hanging out with Gates lately, when he’s not discussing deals with companies like AT&T.;

Microsoft and AT&T; are in a slightly different category from start-up CD-ROM developers, and CAA’s recent talks with the two Fortune 500 firms reflect the agency’s strategy for multimedia: Concentrate on the bigger strategic alliances between entertainment and technology firms.

Indeed, the rivalry between CAA, ICM, William Morris and the smaller agencies has taken a new form in a field where everyone is starting from ground zero and long-held strengths may not apply.

“It has been difficult for a lot of the agencies to find the innovators in this area, because their network of sources isn’t as sophisticated as it is in the other mediums,” says Hollywood-Silicon Valley crossover Mike Bacches, who co-wrote the “Rising Sun” screenplay and is a founder of Palo Alto start-up Rocket Science Games. “A few really smart agents have done really well, but the rest of the pack isn’t even around the first turn yet.”

ICM chief Berg, who has been featured in the ultra-hip magazine Wired and plans to open an office in San Francisco, has been carefully building an image for ICM as the “interactive agency.” In a recent interview, Berg’s comments on how the agency is “platform agnostic” and on the lucrative potential of Hughes satellites as an alternative to cable TV were punctuated by phone calls involving Julia Roberts’ latest deal with Warner Bros.

The firm recently orchestrated a deal between Random House, Broderbund Software and Theodor Geisel’s widow for the electronic rights to the Dr. Seuss books.

William Morris has kept a lower profile, although it is working with several multimedia firms in New York and Los Angeles. The agency put together a video-game deal for the comic team Penn & Teller, for instance, that is expected to be released this winter.

CAA is working on deals that would create ways to link some of its clients who have expressed interest in interactive projects--John Singleton, Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola among them--into the technology world. Unlike William Morris and ICM, the agency appears less interested in representing a large stable of small start-ups.

“We’ve always kept a very small client list in every area of the agency,” says Dan Adler, CAA’s point man on new media. “We don’t intend to sign hundreds of young developers and see which become successful. When we work with developers, we’ll look for people we believe are making a difference in the landscape and help them reach their goals.”

One reason may be that there’s not a whole lot of money in interactive deals at the moment. Video games are a $6-billion-a-year business, but the bulk of that is still in cartridge games, which do not hold the sophisticated graphics of CD-ROM software.

“We don’t go to Spago or the Ivy with these guys,” concedes Louis Henderson, a member of William Morris’ new-media team.

The actors and directors who have ventured into multimedia productions have done so either out of personal interest in the trendy world of interactivity or a lack of more lucrative job offers in TV and film; stock options are not an unusual form of payment for both the talent and their agents.

Still, Berg, along with other industry analysts, believes the interactive software business will become big enough to warrant an investment in time and labor now.

“We’re looking to broaden this end of the agency,” he said. “We think a significant part of our future representation base will be people who work in the software development and digital creation area.”

Will ICM win the business? With developers who don’t know the difference, “it’s a lot of times just a matter of who gets there first,” one agent says.

“Creative Artists? The name doesn’t mean a whole lot to me,” says Chris Brandkamp, who spearheaded the recent search for an agent at the Miller brothers’ firm, Cyan.

They want “Myst” turned into a movie, and recently signed with Harvey Harrison of the Jim Preminger Agency (“Does everybody know Harvey? Is he a pretty well-known guy down there?” Brandkamp wants to know) in part because they failed to make it through the bureaucracy of the better-known firms.

“It was like, ‘Who do you know? Nobody? OK, bye,’ ” Brandkamp remembers. A few agents he talked with had never heard of “Myst.” “It’s an interactive CD-ROM,” he would explain. Came the response: “What’s a CD-ROM?”

The Cyan team thinks it will be better represented by a smaller firm, where the odds of being overshadowed by the traditional clients of a higher-profile agency seem lower.

But regardless of the agency, certain parts of the interactive pitch are essentially the same. The name dropping, for one.

“They come in and they tell us how big they are, how powerful. They rattle off a bunch of their big stars, and they say, ‘Oh, we could reach that person for you, noooo problem,’ ” says Drew Hoffman, the San Francisco software developer who created the CD-ROM “Iron Helix.”

And even the hardest-core programmers are not immune to the dazzle. The guys at Id were wowed by the idea of working with “Evil Dead” director Sam Raimi. Dinner with Kevin Costner sounded awfully nice to Cyan. And Devine at Trilobyte would love to team up with “Twin Peaks’ ” David Lynch.

Robert Kotick, chairman of Los Angeles-based video game developer Activision, has assigned two employees to working with agents.

“I love the agencies,” he says. “I want all the agents in Hollywood to bring us people and ideas. And unlike my counterparts in Silicon Valley, I do not begrudge them a single dollar.”

Still, all the attention is somewhat overwhelming for programmers to whom “agent” is more likely to mean the computer programs being developed to sift through and personalize the reams of information and entertainment coming soon to a TV or PC near you.

“Who knows how it will work out?” says Pepe Moreno, the Los Angeles programmer who created the best-selling “Hell Cab” for Time Warner Interactive and is currently in negotiations with CAA about making an equity investment in his firm. “The relations between the talent agencies and multimedia talent might not follow traditional patterns. But two years ago, I could never have talked to CAA. It’s all changing very fast.”