The Other Kind of Agent

"Agent" has such new meaning today. Agentic is everywhere — AI agents doing this, AI agents doing that. And yet we're forgetting about agents. People. Human beings who represent other human beings. There were some great depictions of them in media — Entourage, Jerry Maguire. We used to hear about Rahm Emanuel's brother Ari, still a big macher in the business. "Show me the money" still resonates, doesn't it?

Now we hear that AI PhDs have agents. Chefs have agents. Sports figures, actors, writers. It all makes sense when you think about it. How can you be a creative, talented person of some kind and also have great negotiating skills? Implausible, right? You need someone in your corner who loves what you do and knows how to make a room say yes.

I've been scanning websites and IMDb Pro, where you can see their pictures and their areas of interest. Quite fascinating, actually — the specificity of it. This one represents character actors over fifty. That one specializes in first-time screenwriters with indie sensibility. You start to imagine the conversations.

The agent of all time, most known, has to be Brian Epstein. Without him — right? The Beatles might have stayed in Liverpool forever. He saw something nobody else in a suit could see and then made the world see it too.

And one I think about a lot: Mike Appel. Even though he and Bruce Springsteen were mired in litigation for years because of his usurious contracts, you still have to wonder — how did he get John Hammond to agree to hear Bruce in his office, with an acoustic guitar? "He's the new Dylan," Appel told him. Insistent. From a guy who wrote songs for the Partridge Family. He was a Bruce evangelist, and that's what was needed.

Albert Grossman — creating the trio of Peter, Paul and Mary. How did he know? How did he look at three separate people and hear a group? That's not business. That's vision.

That person is out there somewhere. Maybe scanning IMDb Pro right now, just like me.