It's hard out here for an entourage
I'd like to thank my agent, my accountant and my therapist. No, really.
By Debra J. Dickerson
Read more: Debra Dickerson, Movies, Lawyers, Celebrities, Opinion, Academy Awards, Grammys
Feb. 19, 2007 | Every awards season, we're treated to waves of bawling starlets, foreheads immovably Botox'd, clutching figurines and sputtering out their interminable thanks to the overpaid teams of lackeys and hangers-on who keep them airbrushed and opiated to perfection. At last weekend's Grammys, Tony Bennett pushed this icky envelope to a new extreme by thanking "Target, the best sponsor I ever worked for in my life." Mary J. Blige had to be surgically removed from the Grammys stage, she weepily thanked so many folks. They almost had to break out an oompah band to shut up the Queen of Pain. Next week's Oscars may well last till the next Super Bowl if this over-the-top, overdone gratitude continues.
Like clockwork, every awards season, we snicker at these narcissistic "shout-outs" to rent-a-friends and engage in vigorous eyeball rolling at the climate-controlled money-fame bubble these celebrity androids must inhabit. "I'd like to thank my attorney," indeed. How about a standing ovation on behalf of all A-list felons for the entire criminal defense bar of Los Angeles County?
Well, I'm going to take my latest brave stand. Those obscure folks who get red-carpet "thank-yous"? They deserve 'em. They earned them the old-fashioned way: with loyalty and hard work often far beyond the monetary call. When I say I'm pro-entourage I'm not defending the army-size posse of homies who drink all your Cristal, then get you shot at, sued, arrested and herpes-infected. I'm defending the professionals who take their work every bit as seriously as the artists they serve.
I always go squint-eyed at the snarking these podium thank-yous elicit because anybody in a position to feed said snark to a mass audience (like, say, a columnist) has almost certainly hired and depended on somebody in this supposedly tacky category. The ones who haven't thanked a long list of retainers wish they had -- hence the gotchas launched at those long-winded artistes who've actually grabbed a statuette at award time. If you don't have an agent to thank, that's only because you can't get arrested in the artistic field into which you're trying so desperately to sneak. If you do have an agent, it means someone believes in you and your work, in which case you need to thank that heifer because, without him or her, there would have been no movie/CD/book/stupid sitcom for which to receive an award. Movie studios and record labels (and let's not forget newspapers, magazines and publishing houses) don't hand out gigs via lottery or grade-point average; you kinda have to compete for them.
Imagine Carrot Top (or me) in a room full of suits. They're talking about secondary rights and first serials, I'm scrawling filthy haiku on my wrist, waiting for the boring meeting to be over (Carrot Top, I guess, would be smashing stuff with mallets. Or is that the other guy?) Guess what my agent's doing. She's such a pro, the suits never even know when she's kicking me under the table. They don't know how many times she has diagrammed, with Germanic precision, the exact construction of the publishing business (who owns whom, who publishes what, etc.) only to have me forget.
But now that I've found an agent I can trust with my work (and, more important, my potential), I don't have to worry about that stuff, or that other stuff I went to law school for. It's a lovely little division of labor; I make it, she rakes it. Agents, lawyers and accountants live in the real world so we doofus artists can live in our heads and make art. I've lost count of the number of bone-headed book proposals she has read and edited and talked me out of with such grave concern. I know how many we've sold, though: two. Given all the hand-holding, two-hour phone calls and rehab-facility-picking that agents/lawyers/accountants will have to engage in when you're between movies/records/books/stupid sitcoms, an "Atta girl" doesn't seem like much to ask.
Wait -- you don't have an accountant? Then you must be pulling in nothing but predetermined, slaving-on-the-plantation paychecks. Who you gonna thank? The coin of the realm for us artistic/entrepreneur/self-employed types is pure 1099-MISC, baby. I average about 18 of these "miscellaneous income" statements from different publications and speaking gigs every year and accumulate a six-inch stack of expenses. Without my accountant, my financial records would be mounds of coffee-stained receipts, all illegibly scrawled with middle-of-the-night dialogue drafts. You don't just FedEx receipts to accountants, you spend a hell of a lot of time talking with them about your life, which, for a writer like me, is inextricable from my work. An artist is an ecosphere; if one part gets out of balance, so do all the others (see: Britney's singing career these days).
