David Simon, Hollywood’s Foul-Mouthed Antagonist Fighting for Better Pay

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Mocking Hollywood talent agents is hardly an original exercise. But David Simon's 4,251-word diatribe summoned a vitriol that would be familiar to fans of his HBO series The Wire. The F-word appears 17 times in various iterations, including, in order, “f---failing greedhead,” “f---squib,” “soulless f---bonnets,” and “grifting motherf---ers.”

The bee in Simon's f---bonnet? “Packaging,” an industry practice in which agents combine big-time writers, actors, producers, and directors from their companies into one project. Instead of taking a commission from each client, as they would for a solo endeavor, agents get something more lucrative: a share of the TV show's or movie's profits. Standard for decades, writers went along with it to avoid the 10% fees. But as streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have reshaped the entertainment business and generated enormous sums for corporate chieftains, writers have started to question whether agents are getting rich at their expense.

Along with the Writers Guild of America, Simon and seven other screenwriters, including Cold Case creator Meredith Stiehm, sued the big four talent agencies, alleging they'd breached their fiduciary duty and engaged in unfair competitive practices. The fight has turned Simon, who fired his team at Creative Artists Agency, into the face of Hollywood's biggest labor dispute in years. (Actors, producers, and directors haven't joined the fight.) It's an odd position to be in for the screenwriter, because he's made millions of dollars from more than 20 years of work in TV. But that success gives him power.

“People established in the industry can weather affronting the big four. The agency can't punish me like they can punish someone who is a co-executive producer,” Simon says by phone from the Baltimore offices of his production company, Blown Deadline Productions. He's at home for a couple of days in between work on the final season of The Deuce, a drama about the New York sex-trade and porn industries in the 1970s and '80s, and on an adaptation of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.

Although more money is being spent than ever to make TV—Netflix Inc. alone will lay out $15 billion on programming this year—the riches aren't trickling far down. Showrunners such as Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes are getting nine-figure deals, but the payment for screenwriters has stagnated at $14,000 per episode for co-producers and $32,000 for executive producers. Writers blame packaging: Agents are incentivized to want a show to be more profitable, so they're less likely to demand higher pay for writers because that would increase production costs. When the contract between the guild and the Association of Talent Agents expired in April, the writers saw a chance to demand changes.

The big four agencies— William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, ICM Partners, United Talent Agency, and CAA—reject the writers' claims as absurd. Packaging stars, agents say, lets them zero out client fees and get projects approved. Netflix isn't going to entertain a pitch from a no-name writer, but if Steve Carell and Martin Scorsese are attached, it will. The agencies argue that pay is stagnant because the industry requires writers to work longer on an hour of TV than they once did. What took two weeks now takes two months, something they say is Netflix's fault, not theirs.

Simon … disagrees. “F--- you,” he says. “This has been going on for a decade, 15 years. Per-episode fees have to go up.” He argues that big agencies say to agents, “If you fought to get your client an extra $85,000, you wasted your day.”

Simon has wanted this fight since the early '90s, when he hired CAA to sell the film and TV rights to his book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which was based on his experience with homicide detectives as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson bought the book in a deal that still bothers Simon. He felt he wasn't being paid enough, but when he pushed his CAA literary agent to get him more money, he got nowhere. Years later he found out why from his CAA TV agent: The agency, also representing Levinson, had packaged the two of them to make Homicide: Life on the Street, which NBC aired from 1993 to 1999. (CAA rejects this interpretation of events.)

It's a financial detriment now for Simon not to be part of the system. But, he says, “I don't want to be part of a process that takes money out of a class of writers.” He predicts that the big agencies will eventually share more of their earnings from packaging. If not, they'll be at risk of seeing smaller agencies sign writers to friendlier contracts or having actors join the dispute.

That kind of power shift would be a Hollywood ending, though—the kind you see in its films, not in its boardrooms. Simon and the guild withdrew the lawsuit in September, prior to reelecting its president. (The judge in the case could have dismissed it before elections, which would have made leadership look bad, and keeping it in place to continue the fight was more important, they decided.) The agencies aren't budging, and three of them—CAA, WME, and UTA—filed a civil suit against the guild seeking damages from lost commissions; the writers responded with a new suit of their own. The agencies haven't negotiated with the writers in months—some have gone back to their agents—and continue to package without them.

The writers do have one big card left to play: Their contract with the studios expires next year. The last time they couldn't reach an agreement, Hollywood shut down for 100 days.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bret Begun at bbegun@bloomberg.net, Jeremy Keehn

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.