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UPDATES WME May Lay Off 2 Big WMA Grossing Agents
FRIDAY AM: There may be 15 to 18 agents laid off in coming weeks at WME. The Morris China office is closing. Miami will be kept open but with a miniscule staff. Sports will be gutted if not shut down.
I hear that WME co-CEO Ari Emanuel flew to NYC to personally have that wrenching “you’re out” conversation with 30-year Morris veteran Jim Griffin who’s under contract until January. The agency has promised to find him a gig. “No one is enjoying the process, but you can’t be afraid of tough decisions in these economic times,” an insider tells me. This layoff was a big deal internally because Griffin is a former WMA board member with big clients like Regis Philbin and Emeril who made gobs of money over the years for the Morris agency and transformed Griffin into one of the highest grossing tenpercenters there. But WME showed him zero loyalty and figured that all the money that needs to be made off packages like Regis & Kelly is already coming in.
THURSDAY PM: Paul Bricault was the former William Morris board member, EVP, and head of Morris Worldwide Consulting, working over the years with MySpace, General Motors, Anheuser-Busch and others. Now Endeavor’s Mark Dowley will run the department.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Must be a lot of empty offices over there.
If Paul is out then the end is near! He is a great agent and the smartest guy on the block!! Unbelievable that Jim Wiatt blew up such a great company!
mark dowley is not an agent. he’s not even a nice guy. he has two clients and other than that he’s worthless. at least paul bricault understood agents and hollywood. what are they thinking over there????
paul’s door is always open to anyone from a CEO to a floater. he’s always happy to listen to fresh ideas, share his thoughts with you, encourage you to do more. he’s honest and insightful not to mention very generous. one of the best guys out there. i have no comment about mark dowley, but, this is such a disgusting thing to have happened. this new company is a disgrace.
dumbbusinessanyway- you are right, Mark Dowley is not an agent and no one claimed he was. He started Momentum Worldwide, sold it to IPG and was a President of the Sports/entertainment consulting group there and then came to Endeavor. He has great corporate business (he has the Amex acct that has the great celebrity ads) and is one of the smartest people in the sports/entertainment ad and marketing group I have met. I don’t know Paul Bricault, so I can’t comment on whether ousting him was a good or bad thing, but I can say that Mark Dowley knows what he is doing.
This is a long way from the days when Stan Kamen set the tone at Wm Morris. It was a gentleman’s business.
We never went after clients from the smaller agencies.It was a spoken agreement.
Wiatt gutted William Morris. Took the money and ran.
And Ari Emmanuel isn’t much better. What a mess.
What a shame. Hey, Norman, how do you feel about this?
Or do you still have your Hillcrest membership and could care less?
such a sad time for all the legacy wma folks – so many good people and great agents and assts who have given many years and made millions of dollars for that company are being pushed out solely for the fact that they had a wma business card at one point. if you really compared the corporate earnings of some of those laid off vs those legacy endeavor agents that are keeping their jobs it would be disgraceful. Jim Wiatt, Irv, and Dave W should be ashamed at what they’ve done, for the hundreds of their loyal employees lives that have been turned upside down, and for the 110 year old legacy that the three of them personally destroyed for their own greed.
William Morris China? I’m surprised it lasted so long…
How much money did Grace Chen bring in to the agency?
Jim Wiatt destroyed an over 100 year old legacy in under ten years and left with a rather pricey door prize. Ari Emmanuel is just a high priced undertaker in a Gucci suit; cutting out what was good and decent of WMA’s remains.
I’m certain both will get their due.
DS
Who would believe the mass destruction thats happening inside the walls of WME. The truth is, Ari, Patrick, RIck and Adam had no clue how much money they would be losing when agents were fired, paid off and clients left. Its a real shame that Jim Wiatt and his hench man Irv Weintraub let lets happen. We hear, from the internal emails we get to read, that, more consulting agents are being fired , Miami agents Raul?, China Grace and Roy, London Agents, Sports Jill, Syndication this will surprise you and supports staff most of the the William Morris people. The agency will soon go back to using the Endeavor name. look for the guilds to look closely into Joe Ravitchs business.
This has been a very toxic time for the agents from William Morris. Many of the one’s that have been fired are doing great some are still struggling. The part that WME did’nt count on is how badly the clients are being serviced. Get ready for my sad days at WME but happy days for CAA, UTA, ICM, Gersch etc
@formerMPLitagent It’s 2009 baby, lean and lean.
The business is contracting – don’t like it? You can always write poetry.
Oh Ari…
Despite the fact that some extremely talented, proven money makers are being let go (much to our confusion)… there are definitely individuals who’ve had it coming for a very long time. They’ve enjoyed a free ride provided by bigger stronger protectors within WMA. They’ve been sheltered under the umbrella of personal relationships, pity and booking slips handed to them on a silver platter – enabling them to receive credit for deals they didn’t broker. For those individuals, and we all know who they are…the clock just struck 2pm and your free lunch is OVER!
They should honestly feel blessed that they’ve had such a long run on someone else’s dime/hard work/talent.
Grace is a joke. This Is long overdue
Miami is DONE. Raul and Eric are out today, leaving no one and nothing left, but the office cleaning staff that will come in over the weekend to tidy up.
Rick, sorry things do get out no matter how much you try to keep stuff on the QT. Be nice to the big poeple you are about ready to wack. Some of those people made lots of money for the company and deserve to be treated with class and diginty. Don’t try to fire for cause. They deserve to et whats in there contracts. Yes yes we know what you are thinking.
To all of the newly terminated we are sorry for the pain but know that life on the otherside will be better
Paul can go anywhere he wants now. he’s the shit.
Why can’t Griffin and all these other big timers in the agent world who are getting the axe go and start one big agency and take all their high paid clients with them. And also take in the rest of the WM’s who got laid off. It seems to me this what needs to happen. It may not make an overnight dent, but it might raise an eyebrow…
Griffin will do just fine outside WME, Truth is that he ran his own little shop inside it with no collaboration with anyone which was why he had nobody advocating for him once Wiatt sold the company out from under him and the other board members, He will take Regis and a handful of other broadcast types along with the tens of millions he was paid over the span of his career and hang out his own shingle before retiring a very wealthy and insular guy… We always said that his funeral procession will consist of only one car, now that is assured… WME will not remember his 30 years of service which is a fitting way for a selfish guy like him to go out anyway…
it’s rather sad that china was axed…what were they paying Grace and the overhead to keep that one person office going…WMA/E was probably supporting that office in Renminbi (the exchange is ridic) for nothing. Aren’t there over a billion potential consumers ready for a feeding frenzy in China? yes, short term there was probably not much profit over the last few years but come on…asia is exploding and hungry for content and what better way to service that market with someone who speaks mandarian and hollywood. someone better get to grace quick cuz she will certainly be worth her weight in RENMINBI….and then some.
gc floater: you are so clueless..hence you will remain a floater for the rest of your career.
formerMPLitagent….you are the coolest cat this side of the litter box….arrogance lives….perhaps it’s your and certain fatcat William Morris agents ninth life….we can only hope. GAWD–what happened to gentlemen? As far as poetry…how about the Cat In The Hat who’s a rat?
Asian and proud, Gcfloat may be clueless, but you will always be that one person who let a CAA that’s late to the game take over china.
Nikki you stopped the big layoff today. When the big boys read what was about to happen they stopped it for today. We were supposed shut down computer systems for the terminated. its amazing how much you know and how much you effect what they do. The syndication department has some really interesting things about to happen. Consulting and Sports are getting rid of lots of people. Some people really have no departments but they know its about ready to happen
I wonder if the laid off WMA agents have some sort of legal recourse they could pursue to expose the snakes that caused this? Is anything that Wme is doing in violation of anti-trustaw? A contract breach? Hope Karma doesn’t exist, or Ari and Jim are going to be down a sorry load one day.
This is business. Period.
Just as these agents/consultants were being paid millions for being earners and not for being ‘good guys’, they are now being laid off because it is the right business decision. No one ever lays off a decent person who is earning the firm serious cash.
All of the comments above about these tough decisions expose the ignorance of those outside of the core of an agency … you dont fire people unless they are losing you cash or infecting your culture. In the case of these two, it simply seems that the former was true.
Griffin’s business was mature, his salary was large, and his revenues were locked in to the firm in the form of packaging fees. He was a decent person, but not what anyone would call a team player.
Bricault is just one of many in a long line of agency ‘consultants’. THey grab clients and collect monthly retainers … but have never built the giant businesses or created the synergies that were promised. Anywhere.
As for more firings, of course there will be. WMA was not some super-healthy firm when the merger happened. Remember those comments … it was bloated, overstaffed, overexpanded, and too diverse. The plan was to lean it up and refocus on the core. After a few months, the owners can now see where there are opportunities to save money and make the lineup reflect the size and growth of the business — with 5 less feature studios and less scripted tv, of course there are going to be layoffs in the agency business!
Last comment: these crazy notions that the all of the fired WMA agents should either band together or worse, sue, are simply ridiculous. People get fired. That’s life. If they are so great, they’ll get work in this or some other field. If they suck, they will leave town or take giant pay cuts to do something else.
This is reality, people …