Leave it up to the NYT’s to create somewhat of a sensationalistic forum on the agency aftermath of the William Morris + Endeavor merger takeover. Under the headline “Mogul Ascends With Old Hollywood Clout,” the Times serves up little more than innuendo around golf games with outside investors, anonymous Hollywood insiders fearing both Ari and Rahm Emanuels, and finally, musical chairs or board seats with Ari on the Live Nation board. From Silicon Alley Insider - our preferred business read although they ditched their Entertainment blog “The Biz” somewhat quietly - made mention of the Ari Gold Ascendency of Emanuel, but both articles seem to only paint Ari as a hard ball player on the rise with a brother in the Obama Chief of Staff hot seat. One wonders how that fraternal conflict of interest can be of any use to either brother outside of easy sleepovers at the White House.

With the metaphor of Ari not being able to afford rent in his first agency trainee role to the $10M house in Brentwood he now holds court, and works to build partnership between his two agency sets of agents. Not a bad rise, and largely due to him bucking the traditional agency system, or being in our favorite paradigm, very “anti-agency or -studio”.

Emanuel’s ability to game-change the agented world has made his new, combined firm a challenger for CAA. With both mega-agencies working up various financing entities to protect against decreasing production and talent fee structures, Ari claims one anonymous associate, per the Times, “wants an empire.”

The problem with empires is that they usually fall, i.e., Michael Ovitz’s with said CAA. So, while Emanual now shares his CEO title with two others, there is no doubt that he is the agency head, or “emperor” to quote the anonymous… With the obvious “Ari Gold” based character on HBO’s “Entourage,” the Huffington Post posts and the now very public lunches (see the second story in Slate), it becomes hard to wield power and growth quietly with so much attention.

The infamous private agency shadow to the talent, in effect, becomes a public agency personality as talent recesses.

On the positive, this rapid aggregation of talent management and resources leads to potential capital for financing new productions (aka “financial firepower”), financing/rights companies like Media Rights Capital, and potentially a new turn on the Mail Room Fund that WMA set up with AT&T a while back to fund digital startups. 

To that end, Joseph Ravitch, an investment banker formerly at Goldman Sachs, and Jeffrey A. Sine, from UBS Warburg, have been working quietly for months to assemble a firm and a fund that would involve William Morris Endeavor and Mr. Emanuel… Mr. Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell, a fellow co-chief of William Morris Endeavor, have been spending time, on the golf course and off, with Theodore J. Forstmann. A friend of both, the private investor controls IMG, a powerhouse sports and media agency that produces lucrative events like fashion shows and golf tournament programming.

At New Medici, we’ve projected that agents have the power to restructure value in the Hollywood ecosytem, but it has to be done systematically; i.e., by aggregating enough of the right pieces of production and distribution to steer around traditional media icebergs, both bureaucratic and upcoming.

What was insightful about the SAI article, or Times link, was one reader comment, by Dean Wermer (resurrected from Animal House, with a vowel change, and with a whole lotta Ovitzian love, it seems):

[Michael] Ovitz, for all his considerable faults, presided over a Hollywood where talent was ascendant and he achieved real increases in talent compensation at the expense of the studios. Ovitz also expanded CAA into a whole host of additional revenue streams. Ari, on the other hand, is operating in a world where talent compensation is on the decline, where talent is being asked to share considerably more of the production and distribution risk, and where many of the alternative agency and industry revenue streams are beset with issues. Hard to see Ari having the same impact, particularly since he lacks the ability of Ovitz and Geffen to be quite as smooth when he needs to be.

Finally, the Times finishes with a mention of The Charlie Rose Show, where all three intelligent Emanuels have shared a table. Rose comments on Ari’s ascendency:

It seems to have kicked to another level. A convergence of things has enabled him to be seen at a more commanding height.

Last, the Times doesn’t link, but mentions a YouTube clip on Ari speaking about his dyslexia, and perhaps giving some perspective on what makes him tick: