Agents Are Casting About in a Torrent of Change

The industry’s top talent agencies have found themselves in the eye of Hollywood’s West Coast version of Hurricane Floyd--a storm that’s been sweeping some key agents and high-earning talent right out from under them.

The recent, back-to-back defections of Jim Wiatt and David Wirtschafter and dozens of their clients from International Creative Management to William Morris Agency is unsettling both of those agencies.

ICM is in danger of losing as many 60 clients--some of them A-list--and potentially more given the inevitability of more agents leaving to join Wiatt as their contracts expire.

While Morris is the much-in-need beneficiary, many nervous agents now fear for their jobs as Wiatt rebuilds the motion picture department to make the agency more competitive with its rivals.

Recent events have also shown that even an agency as dominant and internally united as Creative Artists Agency is vulnerable to the vagaries of a business as cutthroat as talent representation.

Just three weeks ago, the industry’s top-ranking agency lost one of its most coveted A-list clients, best-selling author Michael Crichton, to CAA founder Michael Ovitz and his start-up management firm, AMG.

Crichton, creator of NBC’s hit series “ER” and the “Jurassic Park” movie series, is one of about a dozen clients--including directors Martin Scorsese and Sydney Pollack--to defect to AMG since CAA’s partners vowed never to share clients with Ovitz.

CAA will continue collecting multimillion-dollar package fees on “ER” as well as billings on all of Crichton’s preexisting deals. They will no longer share in future Crichton deals.

To be sure, none of the defections will devastate any one of the agencies. ICM, which will suffer the worst blow in the current agency wars, still has megastars such as Julia Roberts, Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Michelle Pfeiffer and Richard Gere on its roster.

But the loss of top-drawer clients such as Eddie Murphy and Tim Allen, who left ICM for Morris, or of Crichton or Robin Williams, who went to AMG from CAA, represents tens of millions of dollars a year in commissions walking out the door.

The tumult is heightening insecurity among agents, already under pressure to find jobs for their clients when there are fewer and fewer jobs out there. Hollywood is retrenching, making fewer movies and overall talent deals.

Fallout from the tightened economy has also forced such agencies as ICM and Morris to cut back their work forces.

“Agents are a lot more desperate about losing clients, and there’s a lot of hopping around because there are fewer jobs,” observed one studio president.

Another top executive suggested that it takes longer to close talent deals these days because agents tend to be distracted and preoccupied. And, the more insecure an agent is feeling about a client’s commitment, the less apt that representative might be to advise a writer, actor or director to cut his or her fee in certain cases for fear a competing agent might use that as ammunition to steal a client.

“The greater the confidence an agent has with his client, the better able they are to give sound but tough advice,” suggests Tom Rothman, president of 20th Century Fox film production. “If an agent is looking over his shoulder with respect to his client, he’s less prone to take the long view.”

From a studio perspective, most executives say that upheaval in the agency world has relatively little impact on the process of putting movies together.

“In the macro sense, it doesn’t matter where you are calling an agent as what talent you are calling about,” noted Rothman. “Talent is going to respond or not respond to a piece of material--and that’s what’s really important.”

One studio head suggests that agency unrest would have had a much greater impact 10 years ago when some studios were more reliant on an agency such as CAA to “package” a number of their movies with their top stars and directors.

While CAA still prides itself on helping put together such hit movies as “Saving Private Ryan,” which was directed by client Steven Spielberg and starred client Tom Hanks, the studio boss says there’s a more “free-wheeling atmosphere” today.

“Artists are more self-reliant and more independent now,” he says, noting how the big stars typically have their own support systems in place for developing and producing movies.

The studios, meanwhile, are more focused than ever on concocting ways to minimize their financial risk on movies. They often turn to younger, less expensive talent.

While CAA indisputably has the best list of stars and directors in the movie business with such proven talent as Hanks, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Spielberg, Ron Howard and Robert Redford, the agency has made a conscious effort to bring its younger clients along. On that list are such sought-after young actors and actresses as Freddie Prinze Jr., Jamie Foxx, Billy Crudup, Heather Graham, Claire Danes, Neve Campbell and Gwyneth Paltrow.

“While our focus remains representing the most accomplished artists in all areas, we anticipated the youth explosion and made it a point to nurture young talent,” says Richard Lovett, the 39-year-old president of CAA.

“In the face of marketplace changes, we’ve been able to take advantage of opportunities to break young talent faster and make more movies with lesser known actors.”

CAA clients Matt Damon and Ben Affleck became instant stars after the Christmas 1997 release of their independent movie, “Good Will Hunting.”

Right now, there’s tremendous buzz about CAA’s 33-year-old Broadway director client Sam Mendes (“Cabaret,” “The Blue Room”), whose feature debut, “American Beauty,” opened this week to stunning reviews.

Some of Hollywood’s smaller and newer agencies, including Endeavor and United Talent Agency, have also been able to capitalize both on the youth craze and the explosion in popularity of independent movies.

Eight-year-old UTA represents established stars such as Jim Carrey and Martin Lawrence and directors such as the Coen brothers and Tom Shadyac and Curtis Hanson. But the agency also handles such promising young filmmakers as M. Night Shyamalan, whose first studio outing, “The Sixth Sense,” was a surprise summer hit, and David O. Russell, whose upcoming movie “Three Kings,” starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze, is already being touted as a likely hit.

UTA Chairman Jim Berkus said, “Financiers are realizing that there’s no such thing as a foolproof package, and they’re increasingly turning toward filmmakers with fresh ideas even if they’re not easily told in three sentences.

“When major stars like Bruce Willis and Tom Cruise are making movies with Night Shyamalan and Paul Thomas Anderson,” who directed “Boogie Nights” and the upcoming holiday film “Magnolia” starring Cruise, Berkus said, “you know we’re not in Kansas anymore.”