Self for Sale: Notes on the Work of Hollywood Talent Managers

Abstract

AbstractBased upon fieldwork data that the author collected while pursuing an internship at a Hollywood talent management company, this paper examines how Hollywood talent managers must sell themselves in order to sell the actors that they represent. In this marketplace where actors become commodities traded by their managers in exchange for ten percent of their film and television salaries, what is “made to matter” (Butler 1993) is not only the image of the actor, but also the appearances of the individuals who represent them. At the talent management firm in question—which represents about sixty male and female actors, a handful of whom are immediately recognizable names and faces among the American public—the talent managers and assistants invest a significant amount of capital in maintaining immaculately groomed, well‐heeled appearances, while at the same time performing a convivial, and at times even unctuous, persona in their relations with the professionals who cast film and television roles. The physical and social self becomes, in other words, a necessary and high‐stake investment in the talent management industry, which ends up demanding emotional labor, “bodily labor” (Shilling 2005) focused on one's appearance, and the labor of “networking” that entails a merger of business affairs and one's leisurely, domestic or even romantic social relations. In this scenario, the commodification of others therefore requires one's own objectification, so that “an agent"—or a talent manager—"who does not participate in the dialectic of control, in a minimal fashion, ceases to be an agent” (Giddens 1979: 149).