Wherever there are thrones, there are video games. Within the early 2010s, the leaders of Hollywood’s strongest expertise company, CAA, started telling senior brokers that the dominion would sometime be theirs. The timing definitely checked out. CAA’s trio of cochairmen—Bryan Lourd, Kevin Huvane, and Richard Lovett—had already led the company by a 15-year interval of super progress, and their contracts have been set to run out inside a half dozen years. However the brand new era quickly realized that coronation day was additional off than they anticipated. Lovett started reminding employees that 60 was the brand new 40, in keeping with two sources. “I used to be like, Fuck no, it’s not,” says considered one of them, who remembers pondering, Oh, you guys are by no means going to depart.
Lovett, Lourd, and Huvane at the moment are of their 60s. They appear extra engaged than ever, having simply guided CAA by a turbulent few years that noticed a ferocious battle with Hollywood writers, a crippling pandemic, and a $750 million acquisition of rival company ICM Companions. So CAA’s leaders-in-waiting requested themselves in the event that they wished to stay round one other decade or two to inherit the company, at which level a few of them could be pushing the brand new 40.
The defections, sparked by elements past succession in some instances, began with a trickle. In 2018, überconnected expertise rep Michael Kives headed out on his personal. So did Peter Micelli, the cohead of CAA’s tv division, who departed to hitch unbiased studio Leisure One. Leaving CAA felt “very similar to a divorce,” Micelli tells me. “It’s a tough change. I had an unimaginable enterprise there and left on the peak of my profession. I used to be giving up quite a bit and risking an unlimited quantity. But it surely was coupled with this new alternative to be taught and sit on the opposite facet of the desk.” Film agent Jim Toth and high sports activities rep Nick Khan left for brand spanking new alternatives too. The flood got here in 2020, when 4 high brokers—who repped Margot Robbie and Chris Hemsworth, amongst others—introduced that they have been quitting to reunite with Micelli. He was flush following Leisure One’s $4 billion sale to Hasbro and launching a brand new expertise administration agency. In a pitch deck that leaked to the press, the corporate—later named Vary Media Companions—trumpeted, “We have now by no means seen extra high-end representatives prepared to depart these establishments.”
All the main businesses have suffered a gentle stream of exits during the last three years amid what a former agent tells me is a “generational shift.” At WME, a lot of high-powered brokers of coloration walked out the door, whereas UTA stated goodbye to a number of leaders in digital and new media. Due respect to the reminiscence of Entourage’s explosive madman Ari Gold, however plenty of hard-driving brokers determined there was a greater method to generate energy and higher locations to hug it out. “It’s simply an ever-changing time within the trade,” says one other one that not too long ago left a plum company job. “Conventional energy buildings are shifting as a result of what purchasers need is shifting.” Some brokers have been clearly a part of America’s Nice Resignation: Going through layoffs and pay cuts due to the pandemic—and out of the blue stripped of the facility lunches and premieres—they merely reconsidered their careers. As a pacesetter at one high company says, “COVID was the hundred-year flood, and I feel individuals made choices about their lives at a scale that you just’ve by no means seen earlier than.”
However the pandemic didn’t trigger the departures, it simply accelerated them. Neglect that the final three years even occurred, and it’s nonetheless arguably more durable to be an agent proper now than at another time. “Brokers put on good fits and drive fancy vehicles, however it’s not all it’s cracked as much as be,” says a supply. “It’s positively a much less fascinating job at the moment.”
Within the occasion you’re weeping for them, the typical midcareer agent could make between $400,000 and $600,000, not together with a year-end bonus, whereas profitable companions pull in tens of millions. However the rise of streaming, the decline of cable, and the erosion of the theatrical enterprise have reduce into these fats paychecks. Persons are additionally insisting, as they appear to do each few years, that the film star is lifeless, which implies fewer new purchasers. And that’s assuming that expertise even need an agent. After the businesses’ battle with the Writers Guild of America, throughout which hundreds of writers fired their brokers, some (like Misplaced cocreator Damon Lindelof) by no means employed them again. Some trade heavyweights—Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio amongst them—have carried out with out them for years.
To maintain up with the altering panorama, the businesses have chased progress. CAA has expanded into seemingly each enterprise with even a passing connection to leisure, including a sports activities division to rep stars like Cristiano Ronaldo and launching a enterprise capital fund. To gas the enlargement, the corporate opened its doorways to a non-public fairness investor, TPG Capital, which now owns a majority stake within the company. Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor, in the meantime, has purchased up belongings as far-flung as UFC, the Miss Universe Competitors, Skilled Bull Riders, and New York Style Week.
The ballooning of the businesses may be good for enterprise—and for enriching leaders like Emanuel, who made $308 million following Endeavor’s IPO in 2021—however it’s essentially modified the day-to-day for expertise reps. A number of present and former brokers say that the businesses used to really feel like a household, at the least the type of household that ritually hazes the youngest children. Now these locations have lots of, if not hundreds, of staff who must put on identify tags to company retreats to allow them to acknowledge their very own colleagues.
What occurs when somebody wakes up sooner or later and realizes they don’t need to be an agent anymore? In the event that they don’t run screaming from the trade altogether, some grow to be executives, others producers. However many pivot to administration, the place they’ll focus extra on constructing a consumer’s profession and fewer on touchdown them their subsequent job. Theresa Kang-Lowe, previously a strong WME agent, now manages Alfonso Cuarón, Lena Waithe, and others whereas producing tv just like the Apple TV+ epic Pachinko. Phil Solar left WME and introduced Michael B. Jordan and Donald Glover to a brand new administration agency, M88, targeted on a various clientele. Two former brokers from UTA and WME, Ben Jacobson and David Stone, not too long ago launched the Framework Collective to handle TV writers.
The excellence between brokers and managers can appear nebulous, however there are key variations. Brokers usually signify dozens of individuals in a particular space of the enterprise (assume movie roles however not tv ones, or model offers however not public talking engagements) and concentrate on touchdown their purchasers new work. Managers sometimes have a smaller roster for whom they supply profession steering. Whereas they’re barred from negotiating offers—that’s the area of brokers and attorneys—they’ll do issues that brokers can’t, like producing and personally investing in a consumer’s tequila empire, say. Which means managers can doubtlessly earn more money, particularly at a time when stars all appear to crave the identical new standing image: a billion {dollars}. “You grow to be their associate versus only a rep,” says an agent turned supervisor.
The boys—and, sure, they’re nonetheless all males—who run the highest businesses know higher than to behave alarmed about defections. “Some brokers at a sure level both get managed out or they get burnt out—and a few grow to be managers,” says UTA CEO and cofounder Jeremy Zimmer. “We nonetheless proceed to develop, and we nonetheless proceed to thrive, and we proceed to work rather well with managers. We don’t essentially really feel it’s aggressive.”
However conversations with almost two dozen trade insiders recommend that administration is increasingly more alluring because the aura round brokers dims. Nobody denies that the fellows atop CAA, WME, and UTA are highly effective. However what occurs after they’re gone? Some sources say a brand new breed of managers—individuals who’ve been brokers and perceive dealmaking—will problem them for primacy. As one former agent places it, “Earlier than, the brokers have been probably the most highly effective. Interval. Now there may be a splitting of the facility.” This nonetheless doesn’t faze the previous guard. “Our entry to purchasers, our means to affect choices they make and create alternatives for expertise and for individuals who need to work with expertise—that makes us highly effective,” says Zimmer. “The subsequent era of brokers may have that additionally.”
However who will the following era be if youthful brokers preserve altering lanes, although? At six foot seven with a broad body, Micelli, the Vary CEO, is tough to overlook when he enters a room. A former faculty basketball participant who thought of enjoying professionally in Europe, he spent the primary 20-plus years of his grownup life channeling his competitiveness into the closest factor Hollywood has to a sport: working as a expertise agent on the legendarily cutthroat CAA.
However in 2017, through the company’s annual retreat at a resort close to San Diego, Micelli realized it was time to give up. “One thing inside me advised me this was the final retreat I used to be going to be on,” he says. “I wanted a brand new vitality.” At Leisure One, he received a crash course in working (and promoting) an organization. After his windfall, Micelli had presents from businesses: “However I simply stored coming again to, Why work for anyone once more? It’s their company. It’s their imaginative and prescient. It simply felt probably the most acceptable subsequent step for me was to do one thing that was at the least partly mine.”
Whereas Micelli had stepped away from illustration, the Writers Guild lawsuit towards the expertise businesses had created a fissure within the a part of the enterprise at which he excelled, packaging writers and stars, then hand-delivering full initiatives to TV studios. (The businesses later agreed to finish the controversial follow and divest most of their majority possession stakes in manufacturing corporations.) In the meantime, the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter actions pressured a reckoning on the businesses over their half in perpetuating systemic discrimination. “I began excited about what was wanted, and Vary began to type in my head—oh, the markets are altering this means and new applied sciences are coming which might be gonna shift content material distribution once more, and there’s a bunch of little issues we will do to create a greater tradition and a greater atmosphere,” Micelli says.
