Media Rights Capital/Endeavor Connection: The Manifesto
The press's recent getting all up in the shady business of Media Rights Capital—the non-Endeavor-controlled, totally independent finance entity whose letterhead only coincidentally bears the motto "Making Endeavor Clients And Agents Extra Stinking Filthy Rich Since 2003"—continues today with a Kim Masters follow-up to her MRCMania-kickstarting Slate story of last week, in which possibly fictional company co-CEO Modi Wiczyk's memo-writing past reveals how a clever agency's treading around conflict-of-interest laws in a vaguely MRC-like fashion just might theoretically/potentially make everyone involved a shitload of money:
Wiczyk's "Another New Ball Game" was, potentially, a more revolutionary memo. He wrote it as a young executive at a company called Summit Entertainment. The memo predicted the decline of the studios, with filmmaking talent as the beneficiary. He also predicted that a management company with a lot of big stars would start to produce and own films. "The most immediate and pressing challenge would be to get the studios to carry the product," he said. The likelihood of a studio boycott was remote, he said, because "whichever studio was suffering at the time would probably break ranks in the name of short-term self-preservation." Hmm.
Michael Ovitz eventually tried to launch such a management company and failed. But Wiczyk's memo said the agencies could also carry out the change. "A similar structure could be created which complies with the conflict-of-interest laws," Wiczyk wrote. "If [a] fund was created as a stand-alone entity and the agency had an arms-length service contract, they could avoid conflict-of-interest violations. ... Admittedly this is a delicate issue and a tough deal to pull off, but it's certain someone would try it." Why? The potential for enhancing agency commission was "too rich to ignore." In fact, he said, an agency could double its annual revenues.
Now that Masters has unearthed this seeming link between The New Ball Game Manifesto and The Suspiciously Lucrative Bruno Deal, we think it falls to the NY Times, authors of Monday's expose, to finally settle the question of the extent of Endeavor's MRC involvement by assigning a Hollywood beat reporter to waylay "Wiczyk" (allegedly photographed for yesterday's piece) on his way to his car (a Prius, we bet), tearing at his face until it can be determined beyond the shadow of the doubt that he's not merely the legendarily wily Ari Emanuel in some top-grade latex prosthetics.
