Beauties, Beasts, Biz

Trevor Engelson, 29, is from Great Neck, Long Island, and he looks like a lankier version of Matthew McConaughey, although his patois is pure De Niro. Just a few years ago, he worked as an assistant at Endeavor in Los Angeles, but he felt he didn’t quite fit the classic Hollywood agent mold.

His superiors there didn’t necessarily disagree. In fact, Mr. Engelson came close to being fired on a few occasions, once for “taking a piss too far away from the urinal.”

“Somebody—the guy doesn’t work there anymore—walked in, and they thought I was standing too far away from the fuckin’ urinal while I was taking a piss,” Mr. Engelson said. “I got called in to a couple people’s offices and they yelled at me for a little bit.”

Mr. Engelson’s defense? “I said, ‘I had a nice suit on—I didn’t want any splash-back!’”

And so Mr. Engelson fled the old-school world of the Armani-drenched 10 percent club and joined up with the Young Turks of Hollywood in the literary-management revolution. Supposedly unconstrained by the regulatory bodies and laws that inhibit the gluttony of those agents who populate the gilded canyons of Beverly Hills just like Benzes on the I-405, a spiraling number of managers now represent not just actors, but directors, projects and writers. And as agents’ client lists have swelled from an old-fashioned dozen to as many as 40 or 50, managers have shown up to take up the slack.

Ultimately, Mr. Engelson and Endeavor parted on cordial terms. “They were nice to me—they said, ‘We like you, but you’re not going to be an agent here. But you can stay as long as you can until you find a job.’”

When he did leave, he worked as an assistant for Nick Osborne at O/Z Films for a while, and then he partnered up with Mr. Osborne to form Underground Films and Management five years ago.

“We’ve got about six new movies set up at studios now,” he said with pride. “We just wrapped a movie we’re E.P.-ing [executive producing] over at Revolution—Zoom, a movie starring Tim Allen and Courteney Cox. We’re doing a movie with Robin Williams in April at Warner Bros. We’re doing a movie right after that at Warners called Kiss the Bride Goodbye. We’re doing a movie right after that with Fox 2000, called Black Autumn. And that’s all in a 12-month cycle. Our life’s about to fuckin’ change!”

And so another Hollywood manager was born.

Nor is he the only manager to hear his calling while working in the my-client-list-is-bigger-than-yours halls of a big agency; more and more folks have realized that picking up dry-cleaning and Xanax prescriptions might just be a dead end. Mostly in their late 20’s and 30’s, and mostly men, they fashion themselves as canny visionaries who’ve forsaken the slick polish and perma-grins of the agency world for a homegrown, back-porch approach to the representation business.

They rarely wear suits—bathrobes, more likely—and work out of their apartments or small rented offices. Their clients are bloggers or comic-book-store managers or, in the case of Dan Hageman—who, with his brother Kevin, is adapting the novel Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom for Warner Bros.—former employees of the Department of Water and Power in Glendale, Calif.

In the last several months alone, manager-produced films have included Saw II (Evolution Management), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Firm Films) and A History of Violence (Benderspink). And many attribute Will Ferrell’s meteoric rise and ubiquity, at least in part, to the savvy acumen of his managers, Eric Gold and Jimmy Miller.

Where there is cash and success in Hollywood, there are, of course, bad feelings. “Who really needs managers?” spewed one agent. “Do writers really need managers? Baby writers do, but only because managers are the first one in, in helping them get an agent. Lots of people, once they become more established, end up getting rid of their managers.”

UNLIKE THE EARLY SCHOOL of flashy talent managers such as Bernie Brillstein and the pre-Paramount Brad Grey—who turned management into a powerhouse industry with clients such as Garry Shandling and, more recently, Brad ’n’ Jen, while producing mega-shows like The Sopranos—today’s managers operate more as partner-buddies as opposed to lords and overseers. There’s more handholding, more script polishing and an occasional loan of a month’s rent. The prototype of the New Manager is Jeff Garlin’s schlumpy, enabling, anything-ya-need-pal character on Curb Your Enthusiasm. (Yes, he’s a manager. Ari Gold on Entourage is an agent.)

Also unlike talent managers, literary managers don’t have to deal with preening prima donna actresses who call at 3 a.m. to demand tickets to Chateau Marmont galas and expect a constant drizzle of affirmations (“‘Flailing, hysterical ninny’ is a good thing!”; “You’re so not fat!”; etc.).

The biggest perk of all, however, for managers of all stripes, is being able to produce movies and (more to the point) receive a producing fee—something that agents are forbidden to do by law, and something that at times is referred to as “leeching” or “glomming.”

But it’s exactly this freedom that introduces chaos into the system.

Back in 1998, it began with a $100 million lawsuit—since settled— against Mr. Grey for allegedly pulling the ol’ “triple-dip” on Mr. Shandling’s career earnings.

Last month, in the Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles, sparks flew between Marathon Entertainment president Rick Siegel and his former client, Rosa Blasi, who plays Dr. Luisa Delgado on the Lifetime series Strong Medicine. Mr. Siegel sued Ms. Blasi, who had fired him in 2001 when she scored her Lifetime gig, for unpaid commissions. Ms. Blasi then countersued, alleging that Mr. Siegel had violated the 1978 Talent Agencies Act, which states that managers cannot actively procure work for their clients.

It’s exactly the ambiguity of that clause—it can mean anything from passing on a headshot to scheduling an audition—that has provided ammunition for actors who decide to ditch their managers once they hit pay dirt.

In 2004, Mr. Siegel settled a similar suit with his former client Nia Vardalos, of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame, over the actress’ failure to pay Mr. Siegel his share of commissions from that film. In the end, that case was settled in favor of Ms. Vardalos—a bad omen for managers.

And in a life-skewering-art twist, Kevin Connolly, who plays Vincent Chase’s best buddy and manager on Entourage, fired his real-life manager at Evolution Entertainment after he found out that Entourage was being picked up by HBO; he was subsequently sued by Evolution for breach of contract and commissions owed.

Another headache facing managers is the particular way in which Hollywood is shrinking. In the last year alone, MGM, DreamWorks and Miramax all became significantly slimmed-down operations, meaning there are fewer buyers for the swarming hordes of managers. Those buyers are less hungry than they were a few years ago, when Hollywood was gaga over spec scripts. Finally, the outdatedness of the Talent Agency Act, and the degree to which it is disregarded, has many managers fearing that an overhaul of the system—one that will be detrimental to their bottom lines—is all but inevitable.

But despite this angst-inducing environment, which will surely see a dirty climax in the years to come, the management scene has continued to implode, creating an avalanche not seen in Hollywood since the D-girl (i.e., development executive) mania of the 1990’s.

“When I moved out here eight years ago, there were a handful,” said Mason Novick, a 30-year-old manager who produced this summer’s Red Eye. “Now, you throw a rock and you hit a manager.”

IF THERE ARE ANY UNOFFICIAL godfathers to this group of upstarts, it’s people like Warren Zide and J.C. Spink. Mr. Zide, a former ICM assistant in the early 1990’s, was one of the first managers to focus solely on writers and directors, and he hit it big with the American Pie movies. Mr. Spink, after working as an assistant to Mr. Zide, broke out on his own in 1998, at the age of 25, to form Benderspink with Chris Bender. This year alone, Benderspink has produced Monster-in-Law, Red Eye, A History of Violence, Just Friends and The Ring 2.

Mr. Spink, who has dirty-blond hair, a boyishly flushed face and the build of a college linebacker, runs Benderspink more like a frat house than an Ovitzian power temple. A recent telephone interview was interrupted by Mr. Spink yelling to someone in the room: “Hey, guys, can you stop throwing the football and riling him up?” (“him” being Misha, a ginger-hued Pomeranian who spends the day propped up on a sofa in Mr. Spink’s office). Benderspink employees tend to wear jeans and untucked shirts, and visitors waiting in the lobby gaze up at framed posters of the American Pie movies, which Benderspink co-produced—and in the case of American Wedding, produced—with Mr. Zide.

Mr. Spink said that “a ton” of young managers come to him for his advice. The advice he gives is this: “The most important thing is, if you get your hands on good material, you can have everything else. If you can find a great script every three, four months, you’ll be working forever.”

A caveat, though, followed: “The market is so much harder now, because there are way more managers out there,” he said. “As a member of the Producers Guild, I see people cracking down more on managers’ producing credits. I think all the reasons that appealed to people getting into management are now the things that are going to cause some streamlining of the business.”

One factor fueling the surge in managers is that there are no qualifications for the job. “There are no rules; it’s very undefined,” said Mr. Novick, who came to Los Angeles via the University of Arizona and, after a brief stint at ICM, found an empty office at Benderspink and set up shop as a manager. “Anyone can find a script and go, ‘Oh, well, I’m gonna manage you, and I’ll call my friend and they’ll hire you, and then we’ll produce your movie.’ You could go to the Coffee Bean and find four scripts and be a manager.”

Mr. Novick doesn’t scout for clients in the latte line, but he’s not above surfing the Net. Several months ago, when he was going through a time when “every script I was reading sucked,” he came across the blog of a 26-year-old ex-stripper named Diablo Cody (née Brook Busey-Hunt).

“She had a blog where she wrote basically about being a stripper in Minnesota. It was really funny,” Mr. Novick said. “Every day I’d go to her site, and every day it’d be funny, so I called her up out of the blue to see if she’d written anything else.”

She had—a book called Candy Girl, which was an account of Ms. Cody’s mid-20’s looking-for-book-fodder phase as an advertising-agency slave turned pole dancer. Mr. Novick zeroed in but was rebuffed by Ms. Cody, who was apparently more comfortable taking off her clothes in front of strangers than being wooed by men claiming to be in the movie business. “It took about six months before she thought she wasn’t on Punk’d, or that I was a crazy person who was stalking her on the Internet,” Mr. Novick said.

Eventually, though, Ms. Cody realized it wasn’t Ashton Kutcher calling, but Hollywood! With Mr. Novick’s help, she procured a book agent, and her racy oeuvre was published by Gotham last month. He then encouraged his budding star to write a screenplay. The result was Juno, a movie about a young woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. The film starts shooting this spring with Brad Silberling (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events) directing and Mr. Novick producing.

LAST NOVEMBER, Chris Ridenhour, 32, a manager at Evolution Management, organized a first-of-its-kind “managers’ dinner” at Chocolat, a Euro-y restaurant on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, which in recent months has become something of an after-work haven for Young Hollywood. It was a social happy hour, but the to-do was also strategic.

“The idea is, like, we help each other out,” said Mr. Ridenhour, who represents The Grudge screenwriter Stephen Susco and Saw II director Darren Bousman. “For example, I just talked to Trevor [Engelson] and said, ‘Hey, my guy likes your guy’s script’—that kind of stuff. This is more social, but it’s about getting to know each other for those kinds of pursuits.”

Mr. Ridenhour and his posse of a dozen other managers—all dressed in some variation of Casual Friday (sweaters, jeans, open-necked collars)—took up a long table in the restaurant’s covered patio and, over rounds of whiskey and plates of penne vodka, talked shop. The ritual was intermittently interrupted by the buzz of someone’s BlackBerry.

The night of Mr. Ridenhour’s gathering, Chocolat was also hosting a “Bollywood Meets Hollywood” fashion show and a Burning Man “Decompression” soirée—an after-party of sorts for people who attended this year’s Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Outside the restaurant, fire throwers tossed blazing sticks up into the air next to the valet station, in front of which purred a row of Land Rovers. Inside, women in saris wiggled their hips on a makeshift stage to an audience of young and fabulous Persians—Chocolat owner David Illulian is Persian—and junior studio executives. The Burning Man crowd, costumed in Matador suits, feathers and leather biker pants, huddled near the bar.

Would such a dinner even take place amongst agents, who are famously prone to poaching clients from other agencies? “Agents don’t talk to rival agencies,” Mr. Ridenhour said. “Endeavor is not so quick to call CAA guys—they fucking hate each other. We’re not competitive in the same way; it’s just the nature of managers. It’s just a more genteel part of the business.”

Or is it?

Mr. Engelson, who was in attendance, explained his business model at Underground this way: “Nick is the brains, and I’m the fuckin’ muscle. I set ’em up, he knocks ’em down—that’s just the way it is.

“We have a lot of fun doing it,” he said. “It’s a dream come true for us. And, you know, I have no other option. His father’s a cattle farmer, and my father’s a dentist in Long Island. I don’t want to be a dentist, and he doesn’t want to be a cattle farmer—so, you know, we have no other choice but to make this work.”