A top agent to the stars has caused a sensation with his plain-speaking views on a number of celebrities - including his own clients. Michael Dwyer finds out how Dave Wirtschafter made friends and influenced people
Hollywood agents and publicists always have been notoriously protective of their clients, and never more so than in recent years. Journalists are routinely vetted before interviews are granted. In the case of certain A-list actors, questions have to be submitted in advance for approval (for the record, The Irish Times refuses to accept such edicts).
Agents court and schmooze the movie stars who pay their wages, pandering to their every wild and crazy whim. As one agent commented: "If Mel Gibson wants to make a Biblical film in Aramaic, his agent's only sensible response is, 'Judea is lovely at this time of year'."
It was all the more surprising, then, when the head of one of the most powerful talent agencies in Hollywood gave a recent interview in which he was remarkably candid and indiscreet about clients, past and present.
Last year Dave Wirtschafter was appointed president of the William Morris Agency (WMA), which is second only to its bitter rival, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in the top ranks of the 200 or more talent agencies in Los Angeles. It is estimated that WMA takes in more than €220 million a year in commissions.
Last month Wirtschafter gave unprecedented access to a journalist, Tad Friend, who hung out at his office and his home, listened in on phone calls and elicited juicy nuggets of information. Friend documented all he gleaned in a fascinating 6,000-word article spread across 12 pages of upmarket weekly magazine the New Yorker, and the story became, to borrow the title of a regular New Yorker column, the talk of the town.
Wirtschafter's revealing comments were sprinkled throughout an article which went to some pains to depict the 47-year-old as an intellectual and philosopher among crass philistines who address each other as "dude" and "bro"; an agent who prefers to wear jeans and go barefoot rather than adopt the uniform of his profession - identical Armani suits and Prada shoes; and a man who chooses to spend nights home with his wife rather than licking up to clients on the endless Hollywood party circuit.
In the article, Wirtschafter makes the following comments on some former clients who fired him. On Michael Douglas: "You say to the trades, 'I wish him well', but your first thought is, 'That motherfucker!'" On Wesley Snipes: "He believed he was a €15 million movie star. The market doesn't reflect that." On Guy Ritchie: "Guy is not in the groovy, glamorous place he was then, and I think that's just unequivocally interesting, as karma."
Wirtschafter casually admits to offending director Wes Craven by leaving in the middle of a meeting and explaining he had an appointment to get his hair cut. "Everyone was very crabby about it, but I had to go get my hair cut."
Wirtschafter was at his most indiscreet in discussing his agency's own clients. For example, he divulged in detail the complex and lucrative financial terms negotiated by the agency on behalf of Halle Berry. On learning that the recent Hollywood remake, The Grudge, had earned more than €40 million on its opening weekend in the US, Wirtschafter said of its star: "And that takes our client Sarah Michelle Gellar, who now is nothing at all, and it makes her a star, potentially."
In an industry where most people talk shop day and night and where so many are made fraught by the sheer insecurity triggered by the fickle finger of fame, the New Yorker article plunged the US film industry into a frenzy."As a result," Variety noted, "the schadenfreude in Los Angeles was thicker than the smog. With Wirtschafter's client list in hand, competing agencies called to spread the news and met to discuss how they might further destabilise the Morris office."
Some WMA clients mentioned in the article needed no prompting from rival agencies. Clearly incensed at being described as "nothing at all", Gellar promptly dropped WMA as her agents. However, as Variety pointed out, Wirtschafter was merely being honest, given that "pre-Grudge, Gellar's big-screen profile was limited to membership of the Scooby-Doo ensemble. She'd also starred in a romantic comedy, Simply Irresistible, opposite a magical crab."
Two days later, Halle Berry was the next to walk. What is euphemistically described as "a source close to the Oscar-winning actress" said her decision to drop WMA as her agency stemmed wholly from comments Wirtschafter made in the article, which she felt compromised her rights and privileges as an agency client.
The story has hurt WMA, but the agency is still up there at No 2. Berry and Gellar have departed, but the vast WMA client list still includes Russell Crowe, John Travolta, Kevin Spacey, Morgan Freeman, Tommy Lee Jones, Kirsten Dunst and Reese Witherspoon, along with a slew of directors, among them Ridley Scott, Spike Lee, Brad Bird, Larry and Andy Wachowski, Paul and Chris Weitz, and Gus Van Sant, and singers Ciara, Lil Jon and Alicia Keys.
Dave Wirtschafter, who remains top of the heap at WMA, believes that Keys can be "a great movie star - she is it, she is the second coming."
