Motion Picture Herald (Oct-Dec 1956)

TOD A Y’S TALENT AGENT RUNS HOLLYWOOD SHOW The development and entrenchment of the institution of the talent agency has become a formidable influence on motion picture production. The talent agency is not new to production but what is new is that in recent years it has attained a position of virtual dominance with respect to important product. It has had significant influence in limiting product, in the fantastic increase in production costs— due both to the imposition of fabulous rates of compensation and also to extraordinary employment arrangements. The following highlight of the talent agency situation in Hollywood is presented for the information of theatre men which they may ruefully ponder while they are trying to fight their way out of the problems of rental terms and shortage of product.— EDITOR'S NOTE. by WILLIAM R. WEAVER Hollywood Editor Darryl F. Zanuck October 13 last became the first ranking production executive to say for publication some of the things nearly all of them have been known to say privately about talent agents and their current influence on production. To the Los Angeles Times’ Edwin Schallert, dean of the resident press corps, the former production head of Twentieth Century-Fox said, in connection with “Island in the Sun,” first of four pictures he is to produce independently for 20th-Fox release, that now he can “dedicate all his time to an individual production” and feels fine about it. Seasoned, sure-handed Mr. Schallert quoted the very active Mr. Zanuck as follows: “Six or seven years ago I was able to do this in a major studio. I didn’t have to deal with agents. We had our own contract lists, seldom got players from the outside. Later I became a negotiating executive on contracts. “Deals” Lose Time “I found I was devoting 80 per cent of my time to making deals and 20 per cent in considering the making of pictures, and you can even divide that in half, because there were other interferences. “Now I am back where I was when they started 20th in 1932 and 1933, when we didn’t worry about package deals, participation deals, and everything else that faces a man in the upper studio echelon today.” Producer Zanuck was on the point of flying to the West Indies setting of “Island in the Sun” at the time when the Schallert interview hit the street, but the circumstance by no means discounts the courage of his utterance. For it takes more than courage, according to people equipped by experience to know, to categorically charge “agents” with impeding, slowing down or otherwise hampering the progress of production. It takes, by Hollywood understanding, no less a thing than power, for there is always another picture to cast, director to hire, writer to contract, and these things are not easy for even the favored to do. Power of various kinds is a Zanuck attribute. The complaint finally publicized in the Schallert article is heard on every hand in this era of transition — but not for printing. Protests Not Neiv It’s been a rising tide of complaint since the curtailment of the contract lists on which the town and the art and the industry had muddled on, as the term then went, to the greatness now being so meanly sung in TV’s paid praise of its exhumed glories. Back in the great days the complaint was voiced by a few — eight or nine major producing studios, maybe as many stalwart independents— for even then, of course, actors had agents, as did directors, producers, writers, principal musicians, and so on. But it was a complaint by a few, a confined protest, so to speak, voiced by rich men in positions of fiscal plenty, and it didn’t get much attention, even less sympathy. It merely denoted a condition of trade. Today the complaint is more widely shared. The eight or nine major studios have not ceased to complain — rather •their criticisms have increased in number and variety, and sharpened in tone, as the golden flow of production funds thinned to a comparative trickle and the problems of producing pictures without contract employees multiplied. And the eight or so stalwart independents of way-back-when now number— as named in a somewhat astonishing accounting of them in this publication a few weeks ago — 165 (plus newcomers since completion of the QP survey). “Agents Are Running It” A chorus of that many voices — the eight or nine majors plus the 165 independents— joined in a single complaint sung out in concert on a still night could shake down the high hills around Hollywood, burying complainant, defendant and all without trace. A few days before the Zanuck quote broke the Sunday silence of the town another ranking production executive — this one an independent whose current release is doing quite well in the country’s theatres — particularized the complaint in something like these phrases: “The agents are running the business. Look what happens to an independent producer when he undertakes to make a picture. First he buys a story, oerhaps for several times what it’s worth, because he thinks it has market value. He hires a writer who’s done something like it before, to get the advantage of experience, and then he gets n touch with the agent of the actress he thinks is right for the lead. In a week or 10 days the agent drops in, if he happens to be in the neighborhood, to pick up the script, so he can see if he thinks his client would be interested. “Two weeks go by. You don’t phone him; he said he'd phone you. Then he ( Continued on page 14) 12 MOTION PICTURE HERALD, NOVEMBER 3, 1956