Ol' pal Andy Ihnatko wrote in about the Marvin Kaplan Story I posted here the otherday…
What an amazing story you posted this morning! It left me with a couple of questions, though I imagine that they're unanswerable. I'm blown away that he tried the same trick twice, even after it cost his client a job the first time. Do agents of that ilk have terrible memories, or are they just that dumb?
And have you ever wanted to reach out to one of these clients about their rep's behavior? I have a book agent and I'd hate to learn at her funeral that I was the top pick to write George Lucas' official biography, but she insisted that I get cast as Darth Andy in a future film and made it a dealbreaker.
Your story reminded me of something that occurred to me while listening to an interview with the principal screenwriter of WALL*E. He talked about how everything clicked into place when he happened to listen to that song from Hello, Dolly and how intensely he and the rest of the team hoped Pixar/Disney could make a deal to use it. I immediately imagined a Broadway Danny Rose type of agent, fantasizing that he was back in the good old days when he routinely held the big boys' feet to the fire, smelled blood and an infinite checkbook in Disney…and ruined everything.
Ego is a terrible thing when aimed in the wrong direction, isn't it?
There are agents who harm clients' careers by being greedy. More often in Hollywood, I think that happens with managers who don't just want to get their clients a job but want to get one for themselves.
A friend of mine, a stand-up comic, was picked for a regular role on a new situation comedy. It was not the lead role, but it was a good one and the money offered was quite acceptable — or at least, it would have been had the offer reached my friend. When they called his manager to present it, he did not check with his client before demanding twice as much, plus he [the manager] had to be credited as Executive Producer and paid even more. The show said hell, no. The manager stood firm. The show hired someone else for the role.
That kind of thing happens a lot but I'll tell you what happens more often: The client and agent playing Good Cop/Bad Cop with the agent as Bad Cop. In the story I told, we don't know (and will never know) if it was the actor calling the shots, telling the agent what to demand. Sometimes, especially when the actor has a rep for being nice and easy-going, it's because he stays out of those battles, pretends he's totally uninvolved and lets his agent be the heavy.
The actor may have been unaware of what his agent was doing. Or maybe the actor told his agent, "I don't want to do any jobs for under X dollars." That's a perfectly ethical thing to say. Everyone has the right to set his or her own price. There are even offers in this world so low, I won't accept them.
The actor may have done that and the agent, wanting to earn a commission, may have been trying to manipulate me into an offer that his client would accept. Or maybe the actor was telling the agent, "Agree to it, then call them at the last minute and raise the money." There are people who do that. There was a famous stand-up comedian who was notorious for trying stunts like that. His agent would agree to, say, $1000 for the gig. Then the client would show up at the job, ask to confirm the fee and when told what it was, feign shock: "That's not possible! I don't work for that and my agent knows it! Either you pay me $2500 or I walk right out that door!" Occasionally, he got away with it, getting a small raise if not the whole thing.
Come to think of it, I had a comic book artist do that to me once back when I was editing funnybooks. He agreed on the rate and accepted the job…then he handed it in late and knowing I was desperate to get the material to press, told me we'd agreed on a different, higher fee. We argued and I told him I was paying what I said I was paying and he backed down. Later, he apologized and told me that one of his mentors — a rather famous comic artist — had told him to always try that.
While I was writing the above, this message came in from Jim Houghton…
The ethics-challenged agent for the unnamed actor may have been using these tricks with his client's full knowledge, but it seems like maybe not. Is there any ethical and/or socially acceptable way for you, as a producer, to check with the actor and let him know what happened? Obviously, a producer going around an agent to "talk" to an actor directly is potentially an ethical red flag. But if the guy was not that famous and maybe didn't have enough work, and if his agent was losing jobs the actor needed through the use of sleazy tactics, well, it sure feels like the actor is entitled to know. And of course, one can imagine what the agent might have said to his client: "Sorry, this Evanier guy cancelled your job at the last minute again!" So you may even have had a personal reason to let the guy know what really occurred.
I suspect I know the answer to my question — no, unless you run into the guy and he asks what happened, you can't reasonably take pro-active action. But this isn't like going out of your way to let a friend know their spouse is cheating on them (not necessarily a "favor"), and — if the agent had, say, asked for a kickback, I assume it would be your moral or even legal responsibility to let the actor know. Still, this wasn't fraud in the stricter sense. How does it work in this case?
You answered your own question: Unless you run into the guy and he asks what happened, you do nothing. The actor has a right to designate the person who is going to negotiate on his behalf. If he picked wrong — if the agent is not representing his interests the way he wants them represented — it's his problem, not mine. It's not ethical to go around the agent (or lawyer or manager) to the client and it isn't like a child who is disciplined by Mommy rushing to Daddy to see if he can get better treatment. It's trying to change the rules of the negotiation. You shouldn't do that.
Now, if the actor had contacted me directly and asked, "Could you tell me why I didn't get that job?"…well, that's different. I should also have mentioned that I believe this agent had represented this actor for quite a long time. That led me to believe that the actor knew he was setting his price higher than the market might suggest, even if he didn't know about the last-minute extortion attempts. There are actors who would rather do two or three high-paying jobs a year than twenty jobs for scale that would collectively pay a lot more.
If I had to guess, that's what I'd guess…but like so many things in life, we'll never know for sure.