Acting Is a Job by Jason Pugatch

Author:Jason Pugatch
Format: epub
Publisher: Allworth Press / Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. (Perseus)

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Too Big for Your Agent

One last agent/manager/career craziness story.

Kat was represented on a freelance basis by a small agent named Judy. She desperately wanted a better agent—she knew justice was not being done in the freelance department. Then, a writer who liked her called.

“God bless Theresa Rebeck—she brought me in to audition for her pilot,” Kat says. It wasn’t a Series Regular, but it was a good guest-starring role. She books the role. Kat then takes the tape, worth its career weight in gold, and sends it to the more reputable, larger, better agents that she was chasing. Here I am, in a pilot.

“They don’t even respond. . . . This is a pilot with Stanley Tucci, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, Theresa Rebeck’s a big writer in the city . . . and they could give a shit. They want people who already have name.

But then, craziness of craziness, CBS calls Theresa Rebeck. They had just put the episode through audience testing. “Apparently,” Kat says, “my scores were so high with test audiences that CBS was like, ‘Who is this girl? You need to write her a whole episode.’”

This kind of heat gets someone attention. Boston Legal was starting up at the time and they want to see her for a Series Lead. And so what does her small agent do? She gets her a meeting with a manager named Toby Haggerty, who just took over the New York office of Vince Cirrincione (that’s Halle Berry’s manager).

“Why?” I ask Kat.

“Because Judy doesn’t have any fucking pull and Toby Haggerty does.”

Voilà. The agent/manager relationship swings back the other way. The next day, after meeting with Toby Haggerty, Kat is soon auditioning for ABC. “There was all this heat, all of a sudden. . . . It was just too much at once. That was my first taste of how quickly things can happen.”

Then her small agent calls her.

“Kat,” Judy says, “it pains me to do this, but really, you’re gonna need a bigger agency. We’re starting to sign people and we know you’re not going to sign with us, so we’re gonna let you go.”

A pilot, consideration for a Series Lead, a big manager interested, and where is Kat? Completely unrepresented.

Oy, to have such problems, you say. But the truth is, it doesn’t get any easier as your career develops. Perhaps you’re hustling less, but decisions have more weight, and the choices you make seem to have far more dire consequences. The agent game and the manager game only increase in competitiveness as you go. And the balance between who needs whom more is under constant reevaluation. Agents and managers have meetings to decide whom to sign, whom to drop. You have to engage yourself in these meetings too, with yourself. When is your small agent too small, when is the big one too big? When to make a switch from one to the other? By the point you reach this stage of your career, you will have a more innate sense of the way the business operates.

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