David Simon, screenwriter.
Photographer: Heather Sten for Bloomberg BusinessweekDavid Simon, Hollywood’s Foul-Mouthed Antagonist Fighting for Better Pay
More than 7,000 screenwriters fired their agents in April, a month after he published his widely circulated post advocating for the mass uprising.
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.