William Morris Agency
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Founded in 1898, the William Morris Agency is the largest diversified talent and literary agency in the world, with offices in New York, Beverly Hills, Nashville, Miami, and Shanghai.
The Agency represents clients in all segments of the entertainment industry, including film, television, music and personal appearances, broadway theatre and theatrical touring, publishing, commercial endorsements, sports marketing and corporate consulting.
WMA has more than 600 employees.
[edit] History
In 1898, in New York City, a young German Jewish immigrant went into business as "William Morris, Vaudeville Agent." (The cross-hatch trademark - four X's, representing a W superimposed on an M - dates back to that time.) Incorporated in New York State on January 31, 1918, Morris was joined by son William, Jr., and former office boy Abe Lastfogel as directors of the company.
As silent film grew in popularity, Morris encouraged his performing clients to experiment in the new medium. Stars such as Al Jolson, the Marx Brothers, Mae West and Charlie Chaplin helped build the Agency's position in these new media. During the 1920s, clients included such luminaries as George Jessel.
By 1930, Morris passed leadership of the agency to his son and Lastfogel. With Morris, Jr. heading a new office in Los Angeles and Lastfogel managing the operation in New York City, the Agency featured clients, such as Jimmy Cagney, Louis Armstrong and Will Rogers. During this time, the Los Angeles office moved from Hollywood and Vine to Canon Drive in Beverly Hills.
In 1949, WMA acquired the Berg-Allenberg Agency, combining clients such as Frank Capra, Clark Gable and Judy Garland, with a roster that already included Sammy Davis, Jr., Milton Berle and Rita Hayworth.
With the arrival of television, WMA recognized opportunities to package stars, producers, writers and show concepts to the corporate sponsors who controlled television's early development. During the 1950s and 1960s, WMA represented Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra, Andy Griffith, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Katharine Hepburn, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Kim Novak, Dick Van Dyke and Bill Cosby.
By 1965, WMA had also emerged as a music industry player, representing the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, the Beach Boys and Sonny & Cher. In 1973, WMA established a Nashville office, extending the agency's reach into country music and beyond.
The 1960s also saw many future media industry leaders emerge from the famed William Morris mailroom, including Barry Diller, founder of the Fox Broadcasting Company and current Chairman and CEO of IAC, Helen Gurley Brown and David Geffen, founder of Geffen Records and Dreamworks Studio. These ambitious talents often clashed, sometimes in public, as when, in 1975, Michael Ovitz and four other agents left WMA to form Creative Artists Agency.
The mailroom concept pioneered by William Morris is common among the larger Hollywood talent agencies. In the early days, bright-eyed young men with little more than ambition and a willingness to work hard would take jobs sorting the mail in the basement of the agency. Here they would remain for a year or so, doing the mundane work of delivering scripts and contracts and other paperwork having to do with motion picture and television deals, to the various agents and their assistants throughout the building. In the process, however, they would have the opportunity to read the documents they were handling, to become familiar with the way deals were made, with who's who in Hollywood and what exactly it takes to get a picture made. They would be privy to phone calls and memos and the general buzz that pervades the company. And in the end, they would know how to be an agent.
From the mailroom, agency employees would be promoted to assistants or secretaries to an agent, being "put on a desk" to answer and listen in to all of the agents phone calls, and to handle his incoming and outgoing correspondence. Next would be a promotion to junior agent, whose clients were initially provided to him by the agency, and final to full agent status, where rainmaking was the key requirement.
Not much has changed in the mailroom system over the years, with the notable exception of the people working there. First, in a business once composed exclusively of men, there are now close to an equal number of men and women. The other major difference is that today's mailroom employees are highly educated: most have earned law degrees or MBAs, graduating near the top of the class at highly regarded schools. These people are overqualified for the menial task of delivering mail, but the agency values their potential in the highly complex world of entertainment law, negotiations, and business affairs. Future agents still need the "Hollywood 101" training that only the mailroom can provide, but they need professional education and skills as well.
In the 1980s, the William Morris Plaza was constructed, located at 150 El Camino Drive, directly across the street from its main building at 151 El Camino.
In 1992, the Agency acquired Triad Artists, and fifty Triad agents joined WMA, the largest talent agency acquisition in history. The deal was engineered by then-Chairman Walter Zifkin.
In 1993, WMA created the Corporate Advisory/New Media Department, which evolved into William Morris Consulting (WMC). WMC now operates in a several industry segments, including telecommunications, technology, lodging, gaming, publishing, retail, consumer products, apparel and cosmetics. In 2005, WMA spun gaming out into its own department, William Morris Video Games Group, in order to better assist the needs of this growing market.
In August of 1999, Jim Wiatt, one of Hollywood's leading talent agents and Vice-Chairman of ICM, joined William Morris as President and Co-CEO with Walter Zifkin. He is now CEO; Dave Wirtschafter is President.
[edit] References
- William Morris Corporate Site - http://www.wma.com/
