Here’s a secret from the Hollywood front lines that the talent agents at Ten Percent’s Nightingale Hart know only too well. The lifeblood of the movie business isn’t money, fame or even power. It’s the deal. Nothing in Hollywood happens without a deal. Everyone has one, is getting one, has lost one, wants one. And the high priests of the deal are the agents.
In the 1940s the big agents were men like William Morris, Lew Wasserman and Irving “Swifty” Lazar (so named because he once negotiated three deals for Humphrey Bogart on the same day). But they all faced the same problem. The stars were almost always contracted to individual studios. They were paid a salary and had little say in the movies that they made. Agents negotiated with the studios to get the best overall deal they could, but ‘big six’ studios operated a kind of monopoly, keeping star pay in check.
