A C-list talent agent moves through the world all but invisible, until he enters a pay-to-play audition room where actors looking for their big break mistakenly imbue him with a god-like power to change their lives.
Director’s Vision for ‘The Agent’
For actors in NYC, pay-to-play rooms are a shared experience. At one point or another, most of us have paid to meet an agent or a casting director, and 99.9 percent of the time it’s a waste. Everyone knows the business model is predatory, and we all leave feeling a little dirtier for having participated.
In most films, we see the audition experience from the perspective of the actor: the preparation, the hope, the anxiety. In THE AGENT, I wanted to explore this space through the eyes of the “decision maker.” My agent (like most agents) is not a very important person. He struggles to live off his 10%, and if he can’t change his own life he’s unlikely to change the life of an actor at a paid showcase. So, he experiences the audition much like the artists who want to please him: it’s a role-play. From his point of view the “entertainment industry” – and New York in general – feeds on deluded dreamers, and he’s just a cog in the wheel, representing himself as more than he is to maintain the fantasy that his potential “clients” need him to perpetuate to justify their own decisions. I hope that audiences will be left to question whether he’s a victim – locked in a lonely cycle of empty encounters – or a part of the problem.
