When he found an interested executive, he might make a deal for a studio to purchase a book by a prominent writer to be made into a movie. In the evening, he was socializing and gathering intelligence. Starting at 11 in the morning he would begin calling various high level entertainment executives to test the waters on possible projects. The agent typically receives the payments from a studio, takes their commission, and passes the remainder on to their client.įor most of his career, Swifty operated as a one-man talent agency, and he was working essentially all of his waking hours. Talent agents and literary agents negotiate movie deals and book deals for a 10% (more recently 15%) commission. The screenwriter Harry Kurnitz had an oft-quoted line about Swifty, “ Everybody has two agents, their own and Lazar.” This line is a little mysterious without some basic facts about talent agents. When I brought writers out to work in the movies, I organized everything for them-apartment, car, servants.”īy being the indispensable man, Lazar grew a fantastic network of friends and acquaintances that he could draw on when trying to make a deal. ![]() My friends became my clients.”īut, he didn’t limit himself to organizing salons, as he said, “I tried to make myself indispensable. But I did it on a regular basis-what the hell, it was all tax-deductible. As described by Lazar, when he started out as an agent, “Writers had never heard of an agent giving dinners for groups of eight to twenty in the most fashionable restaurants and picking up the check. Swifty was an original practitioner of the Grant philosophy. There is a professor Adam Grant at the Wharton School who has advanced the idea that helping others is the key to creativity and productivity. Today’s post focuses on Irving Lazar the negotiator. ![]() His career was bookended by negotiating deals for Henny Youngman in the 1930s and Madonna in the 1990s. “Swifty” was a sobriquet that accompanied Iriving Lazar through most of his storied career as a literary agent in New York and Los Angles. ![]() Bogart asked him, “How many deals do you think you can make for me and in what period of time?” Swifty replied, “ I could make you three deals in one day.” Within 24 hours, Lazar proceeded to do exactly what he had promised to Bogart, booking the actor with enough motion picture work for the subsequent three years and leading the actor to give Lazar the moniker “ Swifty.” No story about him illustrates his negotiating skills more clearly than the tale of how Iriving Lazar became “Swifty Lazar.” As told in Lazar’s autobiography, he was having lunch with the actor Humphrey Bogart.
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