Rewriting Hollywood’s Rules

[Sylph]

September 10, 2007

Rewriting Hollywood’s Rules

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 9 — Kevin Morris had just negotiated a landmark deal that set Hollywood buzzing, giving the creators of “South Park,” Matt Stone and Trey Parker, a precedent-setting 50 percent stake in the cartoon’s success on the Web and other emerging media.

For Mr. Morris, this might have been the coup of a career. But he is already onto his next project: trying to build bridges between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

In November, Mr. Morris wants to put entertainment and technology people together to hash out differences and dream up new deals. He will model it on the Sun Valley conference for media moguls, but plans to invite producers, directors, agents and others who understand the importance of the shift to new media — including the talent.

“It’s great that those guys all meet and talk and ride bikes,” Mr. Morris said, “but I’m not sure the exchange of ideas is happening at a more functional level.” He hopes to get people who think things up for a living to start asking questions — like why there is still no Hollywood soap opera, variety show or drama on the Web.

“Everybody says that content is king, but they’re not acting like it,” Mr. Morris said. “On the tech side, they don’t have any cultural understanding of the tradition of paying for talent. They’re enamored of user-generated stuff because they think ‘Entourage’ is real — that they’re going to get ripped off.”

He continued: “The media companies, meanwhile, are so big, they have no spirit of entrepreneurialism and they’re obsessed with being tough. Nobody wants to be the guy that overpaid. It creates a risk-averse culture, just at a time when we need risks.”

Though Mr. Morris’s clients include the likes of Mike Judge, Minnie Driver, Mike Newell and Matthew McConaughey, it is hard to imagine that there would have been much interest in his conference had he not just cut the “South Park” deal soon after his firm helped set up FunnyorDie.com, an attention-getting comedy site created by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay.

“It’s a very forward-thinking firm,” said Jim Wiatt, chief executive of the William Morris Agency, which also represents Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker. “Usually, it’s easier just to renegotiate and play by the rules that have been defined, rather than pulling back and saying, ‘We have an opportunity to create a model and use our leverage and creativity to find it.’ I think they spend a lot of time thinking about that.”

The new media landscape that Mr. Morris, 44, has been pondering is a long way from Media, Pa., ouside Philadelphia, where he was raised by a refinery worker and a school secretary. He bartended his way through Cornell and law school at New York University, then fled New York for Los Angeles, hoping to translate his penchant for pop culture into a job at a Hollywood firm.

But the boutique agencies that negotiated talent deals would not hire someone just out of school. So Mr. Morris got experience where he could find it, befriending independent filmmakers and offering to handle their contracts.

At the Sundance Film Festival in 1994 he met Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker at a party, watched their film “Cannibal: The Musical,” and was hooked. He represented them and for the next few years, Mr. Stone said, “he didn’t make a dollar off us.”

Around the same time, Mr. McConaughey met and befriended Mr. Morris, whom he remembered as “sitting in a cubicle with long hair and a rumpled suit wishing he could have an assistant one day.”

By 1995, Mr. Morris said, when Mr. McConaughey was asked to read for a supporting role in “A Time to Kill,” Mr. Morris, who had been working for him for nothing as well, urged his friend to “tell them you want to be the lead.” Mr. McConaughey did so, took a screen test, and won John Grisham’s approval. And though Hollywood’s top lawyers came calling, Mr. McConaughey stuck with the unknown Mr. Morris.

“For me it’s always been, take the leap, take the risk, throw yourself into the fire, and you’ll be rewarded,” Mr. Morris said.

That same year, Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker showed up in their still-unpaid lawyer’s office with a short animated film they had made featuring a fight between Jesus and Santa Claus. Comedy Central outbid MTV for their services, and Mr. Morris struck the deal for “South Park.”

Mr. Morris — by then married to Gaby Morgerman, now head of the talent department at William Morris — decided to take another risk by starting his own firm. Kevin Yorn, then an assistant district attorney, remembers Mr. Morris sketching a model for a new kind of firm on a cocktail napkin. “He had a vision. He was very, very serious about it, and I figured I had nothing to lose,” Mr. Yorn, a partner, said.

Their firm, now 11 years old, is styled after talent agencies like Creative Artists, with which it shares Century City’s newest office tower. Mr. Morris’s firm does hire lawyers out of school but starts them as assistants. Junior lawyers are assigned to track the media conglomerates. Partners and associates work in teams, avoiding the fiefs and silos of rival firms. All 18 lawyers attend free-for-all, seminar-style Monday meetings and Wednesday marketing sessions.

Mr. Morris and his partners consider their firm, Barnes Morris Klein Mark Yorn Barnes & Levine, a “media company,” and their standard 5 percent fee increasingly comes as equity in new ventures.

Paul Nadel, a former venture fund manager who joined the firm recently and helped set up FunnyorDie.com, remarked, “I could throw a rock and hit 5,000 lawyers, and I wouldn’t hit one who’d want to forgo immediate fees for the long haul.”

The “South Park” deal, in fact, came about over the long haul: In the late ’90s, years before anyone could guess how new media ventures might generate income for the show, Mr. Morris negotiated a provision giving Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker a stake in any non-TV profits. As a result, Comedy Central had little choice but to share the wealth, he said, if it wanted to fully exploit the show’s presence and profitability on the Web.

Entertainment lawyers are often suspected of papering deals to justify their fees, but Mr. Morris said he strives to add value. Creativity and entrepreneurialism can come from anywhere, he said, even from a lawyer.

And even a lawyer can be a source of valued creative input.

“He still reads the scripts I go do before I go do them,” Mr. McConaughey said. “He came to me to do ‘U-571.’ I’d read it and didn’t want to do it, but he came out to the beach and called me to the side, pinned me up against a wall and said, ‘Read this thing again.’ ”

“I’m always teasing him: keep your hair long,” he added.