The Hollywood Byte #14: The Game Agent

The William Morris Agency (WMA) entered the video game space back in the PC CD-ROM days of 1992. The Hollywood agency worked with companies like Electronic Arts and Sega in those early days, where there wasn't a revenue stream as much as a new media that was worth exploring. Video games were evolving and opening up doors for a different dynamic for Hollywood talent and a new compensation model.

The Tony Hawk video game was one of the early successes for the WMA. The deal was brokered out of the New York office, which had a relationship with Activision President Bobby Kotick. A pair of agents introduced Kotick to the idea of a skateboarding game built around Tony Hawk, but Kotick wasn't very interested at first because he didn't know who he was. The programmers did know Tony Hawk well, and the deal was made.

"The deal didn't give Tony a huge up-front check, but it gave him a great royalty structure," said Cody Alexander, who joined the agency in December 1999, but was not involved with this deal. "Tony liked the deal from a creative perspective. And the game turned into one of the most successful franchises in gaming and is still going strong."

When Tom Clancy entered the video game space with his Red Storm Interactive studio and early deals with publisher Simon & Schuster Interactive, Alexander said there was virtually no money up front for Clancy, but he retained a significant stake in the development of the property. That back-end deal proved a huge success after Ubisoft acquired the development studio and gradually turned the Tom Clancy brand into one of the top game franchises on the market.

Cody Alexander Tony Hawk

At William Morris, Alexander worked his way up from assistant to agent over the course of two years. He is currently head of video games for William Morris Consulting, a division of WMA. Alexander works with clients like Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott, and Randall Wallace.

"Around 2003, we began receiving a lot of calls from publishers like Electronic Arts and Atari looking for a writer or an actor for one of their games," said Alexander. "As we saw more deals happening between Hollywood and the game industry, we saw a need for someone who understand the Hollywood world and the game world and could connect the dots."

Alexander, who's now 35, has been gaming since he was eight. He started out on text-based games like Zork and now plays a lot of World of Warcraft. His gaming expertise made him one of the primary agents to bridge the gap between Hollywood and game companies.

He said there are three areas of focus at the agency when it comes to convergence. William Morris works with writers or directors from film or TV that are interested in working on game properties. The agency sets up game licenses for film properties. And the agents work with game companies and creators. The WMA represented Rainbow Studios and brokered the sale of that studio to THQ a few years back.