The Agent Dance: Endeavor and UTA To Get It On?
The agency world has inflicted a pretty severe case of blueballs on an entertainment industry ready for the release that only a major shark-shop merger can provide. Today's Page Six reports that the recently rumored Endeavor-UTA deal might be closing, finally releasing some of Hollywood's tension:
A BIG merger is about to rerarrange the talent agency industry. Endeavor - which is run by Ari Emmanuel (the inspiration for Jeremy Piven's oily character in "Entourage") - is said to be close to finalizing a deal to merge with UTA. The combined agency would be about as big as CAA, the industry leader. ICM is smaller, and so is William Morris, which lost some clients last year when its president, Dave Wirtschafter, was overly candid in an interview with The New Yorker. "Endeavor doesn't make that much money because Ari is paying huge salaries to the big-name agents he hired away from rival shops," said one source. "He wants to cash out." A spokesman for Emmanuel said, "We cannot and will not comment in any way."
If "he wants to cash out" means what we fear it means, will The Agent Dance lose its official mascot to a producing deal (or, God forbid, retirement), denying us an Ari-led United Endeavors of Emanuel vs. CAA war that would have the gutters of Wilshire Boulevard running red with the blood of junior agents and freshly poached clients? We don't even want to imagine a world in which Emanuel wouldn't be around to challenge CAA's baby-eating hegemony.