Sample 11/29/09 - Tenaya's Travails
The Premise
by Nobody Special
From the earliest days of my tenure in this business, I've explained the philosophy behind the approach very simply: "I'm just selling shoes. I'm selling very pretty shoes, but I'm just selling shoes." As odd as it may seem, like any entrepreneurial venture, sound business principles applied to the process will more often than not lead to relative success in the field. Although lacking the sexiness one might expect (or prefer) in the pursuit of an adult movie career, performers would be happier overall if they'd understand the boring economics behind their chosen profession. More to the point today, if the people allegedly enlisted to help these people understood the issue, we might have a lot more talented people in the talent pool.
Obviously you might expect that the companies, particularly the ones that have been producing and distributing the fare for many years, will follow basically typical corporate rationale as they make their decisions. True, some of them may not recognize their actions as such, but don't make the mistake of underestimating the raw intelligence of the owners in this business. At its core, they all still make a living off of producing material that polite society feels uncomfortable talking about, regardless of how often they may be direct or indirect consumers of the material. You can't make a career out of bucking tradition unless you have a great deal of confidence and more than a usual amount of keen vision as it relates to the venture.
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Dealing with the savvy companies, however, almost always falls to a third party. In my opinion, actually understanding the position of that third party remains the most critical decision that someone wanting to work as talent in the movies faces. If I could point to one consistent failing in the representation — to use the word very loosely here (so to speak) — that aspiring performers can actually get these days, it would be that the agents (slash) managers (slash) business advisors making money off of these people consistently remain more concerned with their own situation rather than what may be best for the talent they have supposedly promised to represent.
I decided to use Tenaya here as an example both because her situation wonderfully illustrates the point and her "comfort" set we shot provides a completely separate wonderful illustration all by itself. If you've been a member of the site for any length of time, you should be familiar with Tenaya, but you may not have pieced together her story since we've never really laid it out as such. When you work in the business day after day, sometimes it becomes difficult to remember whether you mentioned some detail or another in an actual post on the site, just told the story to someone in person, or did neither of those things and just privately contemplated the puzzle.
You see, for the last six months or so, Tenaya has been having a devil of a time trying to find someone she believes in to represent her. As with all women that fall into the "atypically attractive" category, the work at the first of her "career" came fairly easily, but once the new naked girl aspect wears off, finding quality jobs to do becomes much more difficult. After Tenaya's original manager had to go back to a more financially constant position in movie sales and no longer had the time to manage anymore, she found herself in a position all too many performers see all too quickly in the business. Much like the more traditional Hollywood actor or actress circumstances, quite simply too many people want too few available jobs. Basic supply and demand principles tell you that this not only drives the price for the service down, but it also will eventually limit the supply itself. People have to eat. Dreams do in fact die. (OK. So if "The dream never dies, just the dreamer," it can at least go into a deep sleep for a very long time.)
Good management should not only be able to deal with this problem, but should more importantly be able to anticipate it as they're making recommendations early in the career process. It's not rocket science here, but it helps to at least pay attention to the history you're living. Before taking her clothes off for a living, Tenaya spent 60 hours a week going door to door selling vacuum cleaners, and, yes, apparently people still do that. (Who knew?) She's young, pretty, bright, witty, and doesn't feel "entitled" to mega-cash just because genetics blessed her. Moreover, she doesn't mind working hard. She's even a Penthouse Pet, and there aren't that many of those floating around.
So what seems to be the problem? Well, she lives a couple of hours outside of Los Angeles, and her car basically fails the reliability test. Also, she has the audacity to be in love, and doesn't want to have sex with men in the movies, even though she revels in the sex with women she gets to have. … Now I've been rallying against the archaic thinking that male company owners have taken as gospel for years. For some reason without the "boy marking territory with ejaculate" segment at the conclusion of the scene, they think they haven't really filmed a "sex scene" in the full sense. … I cannot claim to have ever understood the opinion; I can just tell you what they think. Also, helping Tenaya would necessarily involve a not insubstantial amount of time dealing with LA traffic. (They might consider that conversation time with her valuable rather than an irritation, though, but there I go again not accepting the conventional opinion of a manager's role. I can be silly, can I not?)
So representing Tenaya wouldn't fall into the "easy" category, for sure, but since when was anything worthwhile ever easy anyway?
The crux of the fault here comes from the way that current agencies charge for their services. You may not know it, but the basic deal for talent today involves paying the agency a percentage (usually 10%) AND the company hiring the talent paying the agency a flat fee (usually $100). Again, it doesn't take a PhD in Economics to see that the agency, allegedly set up to help the people that trust them, makes more money with a person working 10 days for $100, rather than one day for $1,000. They've set this entire system up to deal in volume — pure quantity over quality. And that sucks.
Believe me when I tell you that pure quantity never built long-lasting fame in XXX. Of course agents and managers last a lot longer in the movie business than any star does, so maybe that doesn't matter.
If the people allegedly trying to help their "clients" here would just put the realities for the women first in their approach, this complication would disappear. Just hand over the "agency fee" for a job to the client as well. Earn your "management" dollars ONLY from the talent percentage negotiated. The more money your client makes, the more money you make. Period. … A client will have much more faith in your recommendations if she understands that the more money she makes, the more money you make. … Sounds simple, right? Of course if the Raiders had realized that JaMarcus Russell has absolutely no work ethic, they might have avoided a boat-load of embarrassment too. That chasm between understanding the theory and undertaking the solution can be a large one.
Underlying all of this, aside from the fact that you might do well to just ignore all of it as unimportant and inconsequential, of course, would be a final fact regarding human nature. No matter how liberal and altruistic we may be in our youth, the vast majority of us morph to a much less optimistic and decidedly more conservative mode as we age. Prospective talent needs to understand that agencies are for profit enterprises too, and the longer they're around, by definition the more aged those owners become as well. We're all susceptible to the traditional pitfalls as we become parents ourselves, but recognizing that trait in a group you're considering asking to help you reach personal goals can help. It never hurts for your manager to have a belief in a variation of typical parental concern: My new kid's certainly not going to make the same mistakes the earlier ones did!
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Now how do you find someone that comprehends a natural business progression in your chosen field? That would be the question, wouldn't it? (Hey, I've always been much better at posing questions rather than providing answers. Those have always seemed a most personal decision to me. … On the upside, enjoying Tenaya today can almost certainly provide enough distraction so that we don't even think about difficult issues like this anymore. Bleh.)
 More of Tenaya, and we're quite clear on this premise. (At least with members) |
