Acting Agents???

[MusingFilmmaker]

What exactly is an acting agent, and what is their purpose?

Thanks,

 

[boogawoog]

to take your money!

to take your money!

To take your money! No seriously if you have a great agent you can find some awesome work! They submit your headshots to casting directors and go to bat for you so you can book the job.

Never under estimate how important a GREAT agent is for your career!

 

[Jade2000]

When a film or TV show needs acting talent they have their casting directors pre-screen to come up with the top choices so that the directors and producers don't need to sit through hours of horridness before hand. Now, Casting Directors don't usually do "open calls" unless no other option is available because then you have all sorts of headshots and phone calls to sort through that are primarily a waste of time. So, the casting director puts out a casting notice on Breakdown Services or LA Casting. Those are the two primary casting alert companies. Now, agents can go through and read pretty much all of these. Whereas actors don't have access to all of them. Actors can only see the open call ones. So agents go through the breakdowns several times a day and submit their talents headshots and resumes to the casting directors. Casting then calls in the talent that they see at a glance might work. It's a way to weed out the crazy starseekers and nut jobs like local "actor" Woodruff who drives around in a weirdly decorated car slathered in headshots and film paraphernalia apparently making a living being one of the most well known un-celebrity crazy persons in LA. They even blew up one of his cars in the film Volcano, but he had no lines. They just bought the car to do the scene. But I think you get my point. It's a workable weed out way. Plus, most actors are bad on how to promote themselves to begin with. So agents are good for everyone!

Agents take a 10% to 20% fee of the actors income. They can also negotiate contract, whereas managers cannot.

Make sense?