KEY POINTS:
Downstairs in a tiny Grey Lynn office, screen doyenne Robyn Malcolm is talking business with her agent, Imogen Johnson.
The cosy scene is at odds with the tough reputation Johnson has earned as a talent agent: Malcolm's toddler scrawls on paper strewn on the coffee table between them and, on wrapping up their business, the two women ooh and aah over the little artist before saying goodbye.
Johnson has a friendly smile and greets me in a soft, rather sweet voice. Her PR says she's "intense, savvy, loud, shrewd, intelligent, highly opinionated and utterly brilliant", so I'd expected the female equivalent of shark-like super agent Ari Gold on popular American TV series Entourage.
However, the woman offering green tea and a cupcake just seems plain nice. Still, you don't get the likes of Outrageous Fortune's Malcolm, local theatre stalwarts Michael Hurst and Jennifer Ward-Lealand or Hollywood film actor Martin Csokas on your books by being a pushover.
The 37-year-old's reputation isn't just rumour, say her clients. "I'd hate to be one of those producers in the same room with her when they're bargaining, because she's a really good negotiator," says actor Paolo Rotondo.
"Actors are useless, we use emotions and if you want to do negotiations you've got to take that out of it. You've got to be tough and do the business." Rotondo is the lead in Auckland's Silo Theatre production of The Little Dog Laughed, a play about the celebrity status of superstar agents and the lengths to which they will go to ensure their clients' success.
Fresh from its Broadway debut last year, the play, written by Douglas Carter Beane, is receiving rave reviews here. Rotondo explains that the title (from the nursery rhyme, "Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon, the little dog laughed to see such fun, and the dish ran away with the spoon") relates to the artifice in nursery rhymes.
"The play is about peeking behind the fairytale, you have a look at the dirty mechanisms that operate." Rotondo plays the sweet "boy next door" and movie star-in-the-making Mitchell, whose "slight recurring case of homosexuality" (his agent's words) could derail his career before it gets started.
Terrified of ruining her own chances in the business, Mitchell's razor-tongued power-agent Diane plots remorselessly to keep him firmly in the closet. However, local acting wannabes can relax.
While the play portrays the Hollywood scene with only a little exaggeration, the New Zealand industry is not quite so cut-throat and Johnson is nothing like Diane. Johnson insists she doesn't get involved in industry bitchiness. She's worked hard to forge connections with agents overseas and now counts many as her friends, people she stays with when she travels to Australia and Los Angeles. She doesn't poach other agents' clients either - for a start, she's too busy. "It's a small country.
I'm sure this industry is really bitchy but I think you attract what you give out, don't you? It's a whole lot of entrepreneurs working in the same industry and everyone wants the top talent." There's an argument that New Zealand doesn't have celebrities as such, just people famous for being on TV a lot, and model Rachel Hunter. So who are our celebrities, and what's the measure? Actors have what the industry calls "marquee value" - their recognisability and celebrity status, explains Johnson.
In New Zealand, Robyn Malcolm has a lot of marquee value. Others on Johnson's books include LA-based Melanie Lynskey and Grant Bowler (now in the US shooting Ugly Betty) and in Australia, Aaron Jeffrey (best known in Australia as larrikin farmer Alex Ryan in McLeod's Daughters).
In Hollywood, actors are deemed stars by their box office receipts and the amount of magazine covers they might grace each season; Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are celebrities. The levels under them are called working actors. And while Johnson hasn't rubbed shoulders with the likes of Brad and Angelina, the lifestyle is a glamorous one, she acknowledges. She goes to theatre openings, film premieres, awards ceremonies, parties.
"You're well known by lots of people, you get to go to photo shoots, organise publicity, collaborate on things with famous people and deal with fans and charities - that can be quite exciting too. I've met famous agents and managers, my contacts at the top 10 US agencies I consider to be my personal famous people." As a mother of two and business entrepreneur, Johnson has also done the hard yards. She set up her agency Johnson & Laird (Laird is her family name, her lawyer brother Gervais was a financial partner for a while) on returning from a successful stint in public relations in London.
At 23 Johnson was senior account manager for Dunlop Slazenger's premier golf brand Max Fly and another golf brand, Pringle of Scotland, organising events and functions, and getting media coverage. Johnson attributes her parents' support for everything she and her brother have achieved.
"My parents taught me there are no boundaries in achievement, you set your own limits and expectations and have to be careful about how you balance those." She had a rather "eclectic and idyllic" upbringing. At 14 she danced in an annual New Zealand Ballet production of Coppelia. Her parents Pam and Stuart Laird are both practising Tibetan Buddhists, and the family often had Tibetan lamas to stay and spent Sundays in puja, a form of devotion and meditation, at a Buddhist temple. She's still sympathetic to Buddhist philosophies but isn't a practising one herself.
On returning from London with husband Dennis (the pair married when Johnson was 21), Johnson worked as sales manager for style guru Paula Ryan's magazine Simply You, then nabbed a job with top talent agent Karen Kay, where she represented, among others, actors Miriama Smith and Theresa Healey, along with comedian Te Radar, an old friend of her brother's.
However, Johnson felt the industry lacked the "go get 'em" attitude she'd experienced in London. "It certainly appeared that much of the duties of a person representing these people were more like a booking service, they waited for the work to approach them. And many of the actors had to push themselves out by taking themselves into a foreign market like LA and Australia, and they lost their Kiwi identity.
There was no agent straddling both offshore and the New Zealand market." So she set up her own business, sharing the phone and fax machine in the front room of her Ponsonby villa with friend Rachel Gardner, now a producer at Great Southern Film & Television, who was setting up a similar business representing writers, producers and directors. It was an intense time. She and Dennis, who worked in graphic pre-print, were working full-time and Johnson's mum would often come to look after their first son, Jack, then a toddler.
Johnson aimed at the country's top talent, and she had no trouble attracting that talent. Miriama Smith, who describes Johnson as "ballsy" was one of the first to follow her from Karen Kay, followed by Theresa Healey and Te Radar. Nicole Whippy, who plays Casey in Outrageous Fortune signed on, as did Rotondo.
Since then business has been on an "extreme trajectory". Of the 150-odd people on her books, she estimates three quarters are working at any one time. Realising early that it's who, not what, you know, Johnson tried to meet as many offshore agents as she could, googling Kiwi actors overseas, trekking around their LA agents to set up meetings for her own portfolio of talent. The years of pressing the flesh has paid off; she has about 25 actors working between New Zealand and overseas, among them Danielle Cormack and Lisa Chappell.
Getting out and doing stuff is one of Johnson's strengths and points of differences, says Te Radar, who met her in a stage two drama class at the University of Otago. "Unlike a lot of other people, Imogen [goes to LA and Australia] at her expense to meet these people and say 'I've got X and X and X'. I've not heard of anyone else really doing that. It's not really in her job description. But she's interested in making sure that if people can possibly get a break somewhere, they'll get a break."
Recent shining examples from the Johnson & Laird stable include Anna Hutchinson, who played Delphi in Shortland Street, whom Johnson has represented since she was 14. Through Johnson, Hutchinson scored a part in the second series of the Australian crime series Underbelly. Emily Robins, another ex-Shortland Streeter on Johnson's books, has landed a role in The Elephant Princess, a children's TV series in the same vein as Hannah Montana. She's now got an Australian agent, has signed a merchandising advance for Australia and the producer reckons she'll be a "phenomenon", says Johnson.
It's clear that Johnson cares about her stable of talent, but keeps a businesslike mentality. Because of the smallish talent pool in New Zealand she's had to collect a diverse group of actors and entertainers, so to help her represent their various skills the business has divisions for acting, voice-overs, MCs and presenters.
"[Each person is] a brand in their own right, so [I ask] what can we do for each of them in these divisions. It can be seen as cold and business-oriented, but ultimately people come to me because they like my business orientation. They're all such extraordinary and creative people, I just get a real kick out of helping them and making sure that just as I didn't have boundaries and limitations placed on me, they don't. And they have someone they can trust." And trust is important when you're dealing with someone's career.
Miriama Smith, for example, cut short an OE to fly to Melbourne for an audition. "I got a phone call the day before I was due to fly to London. She [Johnson] said, 'when are you going to be in London? I've got you a flight from London to Melbourne tomorrow.'
There's got to be an understanding, and she knows me well enough to say 'babe, sounds like a good idea, I think you should do this'." Rotondo values Johnson's ability to surround herself with people who "know how to talk to actors". "We can't stand up and say, 'I'm great, hire me' all the time. We have to be good at what we do and they're good at allowing us to do that without it being embarrassing. You know what New Zealand's like, it's not exactly the easiest place in the world to be confident. It takes a certain kind of tact and care and Imi ... [has that]."
Johnson's also a staunch supporter of New Zealand Actors Equity, which aims to align New Zealand actors' wages and conditions to those in the rest of the world. NZAE claims that New Zealand actors are among the lowest paid and worst treated in the world.
Overseas, casting fees total about 10-15 per cent of a film's budget. In New Zealand it's around 2-5 per cent. In the highly unionised industry in Australia, performers have standard contracts denoting minimum pay rates and working conditions.
According to Johnson, New Zealand is the only country in the developed world without a template for contracts, meaning each one must be drawn up anew. NZAE has become an independent branch of the Media & Entertainment Arts Alliance (MEAA), the 36,000-member union representing the media, entertainment, sports and arts industries in Australia. Johnson picked up "quite a few" actors from the fallout over the NZAE's alliance with the MEAA. To her it seemed logical that local contracts should meet world standards. Yet some actors and agents were concerned that too many locals would lose their jobs to overseas workers.
MEAA membership in New Zealand is low compared to Australia where 80 per cent of the industry is unionised, but Johnson remains positive. "It's an exciting time for actors. [Joining the MEAA] indicates New Zealand is getting more mature and that the industry is getting more professional." However, there are moments when New Zealand seems no different to anywhere else in the world. Johnson won't talk about specific incidents but says she does "fix" things, such as a potentially distastrous clash in schedules, or, more interestingly, a story that goes "astray". Astray? She thinks carefully before speaking, and hesitates, searching for the right word.
"An angle that might [be about] something naughty that they've done, [or] an association that one of my clients might have chosen which might just need to be signed off by my people. It's like anything as a brand, you need to keep your brand as clean as you can." It is hard to smother a story in a country the size of New Zealand, she says. Her strategy is "total honesty" and if it gets too big, she calls in the experts. So what's her reaction when someone is found to have done something "naughty"? "It can be quite 'oh no' to be honest.
As a human being that's always the first reaction. Then we sit down and take a deep breath and work out a strategy. And believe me, you have them coming out of left field like you wouldn't believe. You think you're having a quiet day and then something just goes 'pow!' That's just the nature of representing somebody. But boy, they can hit you hard. Like a train." She laughs.
"I quite often have to go for long walks." She acknowledges that her reputation is as closely aligned to her stars as theirs is to hers. "I will only take a deal as far as it will go without losing work. I work for them and I don't ever forget that."
Rotondo sees a similarity between the reliance of The Little Dog Laughed's Diane on Mitchell to keep her in business, and Johnson's position, although he admits that the stakes in the US are a lot higher. "She needs us to do well and to make her bucks. And I need her to get me into the right situations and to negotiate good situations.
So every now and then, two or three times a year, we might find ourselves in the same little dinghy out at sea and it feels like we've got a little bond there.
The relationship's quite tight." And while the theatre openings and parties make it sound glamorous, none of Johnson's talent would want her job. "It's tough and complex and, probably, relatively thankless," says Te Radar.
"I suppose she's got to be part stern auntie, part friendly mother figure, part talent nurturer and spotter, and part business negotiator. But the main part of it is managing egos and being the person who helps to find the middle ground so everyone can make wonderful projects."
* The Little Dog Laughed is at the Aotea Centre, Auckland, until tonight and at the Downstage Theatre, Wellington, until November 29.
