Download The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business AudioBook Free
For decades, covered from the public vision, William Morris realtors made the discounts that identified the fate of personalities, studios, and systems alike. Mae West, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Danny Thomas, Steve McQueen--the Morris Agency sold talent to anyone in the market for it, from the Hollywood studios to the mobsters who ran Vegas to the Madison Avenue admen who controlled television. While the clients got the limelight, the agency controlled behind the displays, providing the grease that made show business what it's become. The story commences more than a century ago, when a fiery young immigrant called William Morris exposed a vaudeville-booking office on New York's Fourteenth Streets and went up against the trust that ruled the key entertainment medium of the day. Led after Morris's loss of life by the legendary Abe Lastfogel, a cherubic little man who cared for realtors and clients as well as family, the firm transformed the agent's image from garish flesh-peddler to smooth-talking professional. However when Lastfogel's successor brutally sacrificed his best friend--the man who'd helped bring Barry Diller and Michael Ovitz from the mail room--William Morris provided birth to its own nemesis: Ovitz's new firm, CAA. Throughout the '80s and '90s, as the Morris Agency made, and lost, such personalities as Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts, Kevin Costner and Tom Hanks, Ovitz's power grew inexorably as Morris's waned. Lulled by the extraordinary success of Invoice Cosby and the upward spiral of the Beverly Hillsides market, Morris's board didn't act as loss of life and defection thinned its rates. Finally, using its flagship motion-picture division on the brink of collapse, the plank was faced with the stark truth of experiencing to buy its way back into the business it acquired once owned.
