Verve, the literary and talent agency, is the latest Hollywood company to undergo belt-tightening as the industry weathers what appears to be shaping up as a year of austerity in some quarters.
Verve agents and employees who have earnings that hit a certain threshold will now see salary adjustment on a temporary basis, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. Additionally, the agency is cutting overtime expenses for assistants, who are hourly workers that generally work 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. shifts.
The moves arrives amid a new wave of cost-cutting measures across the entertainment industry in response to studios’ content spending pullback on feature films and television series. Namely, episode counts on series that have gone into production have fallen steeply over the last few years as big broadcast-style orders have given way to streaming era shorter season runs.
The number of television episodes produced fell from 13,300 episodes in 2023 to 11,069 last year, a nearly 17 percent decline, per a tally from data-provider Luminate. TV writer jobs fell by 40 percent from 2023-2024, the Writers Guild of America said in its report on own members in April.
Verve, founded in 2010 by a trio of agents who left WME, had set its sights on expansion during a rocky five years for the industry. It branched out from literary clients into talent representation in June 2020 during the pandemic, then opened an East coast office months later. It now has 100-plus employees.
Two of those co-founders, Bryan Besser and Adam Levine, are still with the company. The third, Bill Weinstein, is now at Paradigm after exiting Verve and suing the agency in 2024 over his ouster and claiming that his former partners were looking to sell the company “without Weinstein’s participation or cutting him in on the sales proceeds.”
Unlike Big 3 agencies CAA, WME and UTA, which have large client bases across multiple sectors, including sports, music touring and comedy, as well as advisory businesses, smaller representation companies may not be as insulated from some of the pressures caused by studios’ retrenchment in film and TV project spending.
In the past month, Verve has touted the signing of Mad Men actress January Jones, as well as writer-directors Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, who sold Paramount the feature script Guys with No Friends. And it has noted a steady stream of deals for its clients, including for Joe Ballarini (scripting the 20th’s Ripped with Dwayne Johnson) as well as Ben Queen and Jason Shuman (sold Drift to Skydance as a feature adaptation).
