The title of this piece comes from “Much Ado About Nothing,” and no truer words were ever written. Not even by the great Shakespeare. Compared to this pithy piece of advice, that whole rigmarole about to be or not to be was just a load of malarkey. As some of you know, I am a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit. The defendants are movie studios, TV networks, and a number of major Hollywood talent agencies. My favorite part of this undertaking involves going after the agents. In a TV writing career that goes back to the late 60’s, when I broke in writing for Jack Webb’s second version of Dragnet – the one with Harry Morgan as his sidekick – I have probably been represented, so to speak, by roughly two dozen of these two-legged parasites.

Inasmuch as I regard myself as a reasonably loyal person, you might wonder why I switched so often. The answer is quite simple. In all those years, no agent ever got me a single writing assignment or got me a dollar more than I would have otherwise been paid. No doubt you think I’m exaggerating. But I’m not.

In the course of those 36 or 37 years, I had five TV movies produced and was paid to write another 15 or 20. I wrote, I’m guessing, eight or nine pilots, and probably about 50 episodic scripts for everything from Mary Tyler Moore to MASH, from McMillan and Wife to Diagnosis Murder. And I’m telling you, even swearing to you, that not a single one of those jobs was brought to me by an agent.

So it was that every couple of years or so, I’d get fed up with handing over 10% of my earnings to one agent and I’d go seeking another, hoping against hope that the new one might actually do something to earn his commission. Alas, it never panned out that way, but at least I wasn’t tithing the same lazy ingrate for all those years. Emotionally speaking, forking over a tenth of one’s money to an agent is a whole lot like paying alimony. You just don’t have to give them half your furniture or fight over who gets custody of the cat.

Speaking of alimony, I had a number of female agents. Like their male counterparts, some of them were bright and personable, some of them were as dumb as doorknobs and as charming as sharks. Males and females alike, they rarely enjoyed reading. What they really lived for was lunch. In other places, people make lunch or they eat lunch, but in Hollywood they do lunch. And nobody does lunch better than agents. They go hog wild on their expense accounts. It never helped one’s own digestion knowing that it was your money that was helping to subsidize their meals at the town’s most expensive eateries.

No doubt you’re wondering why, if I held them in such low regard, I didn’t simply cut my losses and stop sharing my hard-earned loot with them. The fact is, in Hollywood you need to have an agent for the same reason that an executive needs a really big desk and a really small, really expensive, car. It’s mainly for show. The folks who hire writers and directors expect you to have an agent. Unless you’re a Steven Spielberg or a James Cameron and are so rich and so much in demand that you can simply pay a lawyer an hourly fee to write up the paperwork, to be agent-less is to be like a leper in lotus land.

To be fair, agents, as a rule, are not as sleazy as they are often depicted to be in books and movies. On the other hand, some are even sleazier. To be perfectly honest, I have heard about caring, hard-working, truly nurturing, agents who treated their writer clients like friends, even like members of their own family. So far as I can tell, these agents have two main things in common. One: I have never met one. Two: They’re all dead.

In my entire career, I’ve only had two agents I liked personally. The first of them was a young guy who actually made an effort to get me employment. He failed, but it was probably because by the time our paths had crossed, I’d turned 50. And as the class action lawsuit points out so clearly, Hollywood treats its aging writers the way the greyhound racing industry treats its old dogs, the way that midnight treated Cinderella. My next favorite was my last agent. She was, I must admit, very nice, extremely friendly. And God knows she tried to sell me. That is, she tried right up to the time she was arrested and sent to jail for embezzling a lot of money from her clients. That was, as you can imagine, the only time I was ever ecstatic that an agent had once again failed to find me a job!

Burt Prelutsky

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©2004 Burt Prelutsky

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