Hollywood’s William Morris Agency Throws Coin At New Media
Exciting news out of Hollywood today: the town’s oldest and most prestigious talent agency, William Morris, has joined up with a couple venture capital firms (Accel Partners and Venrock), as well as AT&T, to form a vehicle for investing in Internet-based businesses. For those of you living outside Lala land, William Morris represents a huge portion of your favorite celebrities: everyone from Quentin Tarantino to 50 Cent to Jesus Christ - yeah, even Jesus needs Hollywood representation.
The goal is to discover, fund, and help build these businesses, which include social networking sites, platforms for mobile devices, video services, and advertising applications.
With this dip into new media, William Morris is expressing a particular interest for innovative systems, rather than innovative content creators. This distinction represents a change for the agency that has forged Hollywood’s path into web 2.0 talent – signing youtube stars like blamesociety films and bloggers like stuffwhitepeoplelike. At the same time however, the “innovative systems” are a way to encourage more web 2.0 talent to blossom – providing a stage for the Steve Shmoes of yesterday to morph into Steven Spielbergs of tomorrow. We live in an age when the power to disseminate information and entertainment is more and more democratized, and William Morris’ new endeavor will only speed along this process.
According to the Hollywood trade paper Variety, the fund is rumored to consist of “tens of millions of dollars, with the average investment in startups said to range from $300,000 to $500,000.” Other top Hollywood agencies are also starting to demonstrate an interest in new media. The United Talent Agency (UTA), for example, owns a significant stake in the digital entertainment studio 60Frames.
“It’s something we’ve talked about for a long time as a way of expanding our business,” said Jim Wiatt, chairman-chief exec of WMA. “It’s an opportunity for us to help foster growth, as well as help our traditional clients.”
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