Film, Television and the World Wide Web.

This past Monday showbizzle.com, the digital showcase and destination website I created with my daughter Lindsey, finally re-launched.  I knew that mPRm, the Hollywood-based PR firm headed by industry veteran Rachel McCallister, had put together a fairly tight press release being sent out to various bloggers in the ‘trade press’ — many whom chose to ignore my direct attempts to contact them last Fall during our mostly abortive launch, which we ultimately scuttled.  My only hope this time around was that we would be treated fairly and not slammed for being  too Hollywood, too indy, too ambitious, take your pick. What I did not expect to find was this love-letter posted on Cynopsis Digital .

~ WEBSITE OF THE DAY ~

” Father and daughter team Charles and Lindsey Rosin go public with Showbizzle.com today, an intimate little site that documents Lindsey’s efforts to break into the entertainment biz. It’s the home for a breezy twentysomething cinema verite web series about Lindsey and her cohorts’ struggles to break into screenwriting, acting and directing. The show (think Swingers with a feminine point-of-view, a larger cast and a lower budget) looks entertaining and should be required viewing for kids thinking of moving out to LA LA land to chase their dreams of stardom as it delves into the frustrations of being on the outside looking in. But the show is meant to be the sugar coating for the site’s more practical features designed to provide resources to struggling amateur actors and filmmakers. For instance Lindsey’s Dad Charles, a veteran writer/producer whose credits include Northern Exposure and Beverly Hills 90210, will tap friends such as TV director David Semel to provide video primers featuring no nonsense advice about how to position the camera, run a set and direct actors. There’s also a requisite social networking component, encouraging users to form a community and share their stories. Too many of the entertainment-themed web series are nothing more than exercises in celebrity navel gazing. Showbizzle is refreshing in its honesty, its wary-but-not-jaded tone and its genuine desire to help others to succeed.”

Yay for the home team. I immediately forwarded this review via e-mail to our inner-circle. I heard back from almost everyone almost immediately, but my longtime agent did not reply until that evening with under the heading “FYI Let’s Discuss.”

After 35 years as an agent, Elliot Webb has elected to leave ICM to explore other opportunities in entertainment.  He will remain at ICM through August.  Webb began his career at ICM in 1974 and left the agency in 1983, joining Bob Broder and Norman Kurland to form the agency Broder Kurland Webb.  That successful television and feature literary agency, known in 2006 as Broder Webb Chervin Silbermann, was acquired by ICM.   Webb has worked with a very successful group of writers and directors, including Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Anna Hamilton Phelan, Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green, Barry Kemp, and other very talented individuals, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Garry Trudeau, and Chris Carter, the creator of the enormously successful X-FILES franchise.

Elliot started being my agent in January 1981 and has, in effect, represented my interests ever since.  During that first year, Elliot would invite me to his office at the old ICM building on Beverly Blvd. to discuss my career options — but for most of the hour I would watch this aggressively confident dynamo from the lower east side work the phones, three calls at a time. It was the best show in town. See, unlike today’s crop of agents with their multiple agendas and corporate approach, Elliot constantly put himself on the line for his clients. He seemed to know when to scream, when to cajole, when to ask for a favor — and as an added bonus, when asked he was surprisingly adept at giving script notes. 

We became very good friends in those years. We’d hang out, go to ball games, go to dinner. My wife Karen and I were invited to his first  wedding and his memorable 40th and 50th birthday bashes. In those early ICM years, he and fellow agent Beth Uffner would have these wonderfully low-key swim parties in the Valley for their mostly young clients — Glenn Caron, Josh Brand, John Falsey, Karen Hall — which gave us a sense of fellowship and community that can so often be lacking in Hollywood.  So it wasn’t all that surprising when virtually all of his clients followed Elliot out the door when he opted to leave ICM to join Bob Broder and Norman Kurland in a cramped one room office above the classy restaurant Scandia on the Sunset Strip.

Unlike Mike Ovitz or other “star agents” of that prosperous era, these guys shunned publicity and never put themselves ahead of their client’s best interests. They were considered to be tough and opportunistic, but also honorable and fair. Elliot negotiated a lot of rich deals over the years — and he knows better than anyone else that the terms he carved out on my behalf during my tenure at Beverly Hills, 90210 has given me and my family years of financial security and peace of mind.

But the business changed — and changed again — so by the time ICM brought BWCS under its fold in 2006, my name (and I presume the names of many of his clients) could no longer be found on the Hot Must Have Lists…but by that time Elliot had remarried, started his family, and adapted to the role of being a consigliere to the next generation of agents. He and I had stopped hanging out long before the merger, and after awhile had fewer and fewer career oriented conversations — especially after it became clear to both of us that what passes for ICM’s ‘New Media’ Department had no interest in helping me get showbizzle off the ground.

And now that he’s leaving the big agency to “pursue other options”, I want to wish Elliot all the best and truly thank him for never losing faith in my talent and for encouraging me to “reinvent myself”…which ultimately inspired to find a way to put the show back in the bizzle where it belongs.