The Four Disciplines — A Vertical Argument
Four Conversations.
One Senior Partner on Every Call.
Big Fish does not run a roster. We represent four distinct crafts — each with its own deal mechanics, its own leverage, and its own room where the money is actually moved. What follows is the case for how the senior-partner model fits each one differently.
Since 2014 · 9200 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood
For Actors
Packaging, Options, Backend — Where a Junior Agent Loses the Deal.
Acting representation is not submissions. The work happens after the offer arrives — in the room where packaging is structured, where option windows are narrowed, where backend is converted from a producer's promise into contractual points. These conversations are conducted by showrunners, studio EVPs, and casting-driven financiers who do not waste time on associates. They want a principal at the table who has closed the same deal fifteen times before.
Big Fish structures actor deals the way they are actually negotiated: with a senior partner who has sat in those rooms at WME, CAA, and UTA before founding or joining this firm. For a current A-list film client, that meant converting a flat option against a director attachment into a three-picture structured backend with first-look provisions, all negotiated by the same partner who took the original call. For series-regular work, it means a partner who can read a showrunner's overall budget well enough to argue for episodic fee bumps tied to backend triggers — not an associate running a templated counter.
The actor's leverage compounds when the rep can hold the room on packaging, know what a streamer will pay versus a studio versus a mini-major, and refuse to let a talent's option be extended without a meaningful step-up. We don't run a junior pipeline because option windows close in seventy-two hours, and the answer is always the partner.
For Creators
You Are Not an Influencer. You Are a Rights-Holder.
Digital and emerging-medium creators operate under deal mechanics that did not exist a decade ago and are still being written. Brand-partnership contracts with usage windows and exclusivity cliffs. Platform residuals that depend on rev-share interpretation. First-look production pacts where the creator's owned IP is the actual asset being acquired. These deals are negotiated by people who have read the underlying platform terms, who understand that a "non-exclusive" clause can quietly become exclusive through cross-platform aggregation language, and who know how to structure an IP carve-out before it is signed away.
Big Fish represents creators as rights-holders and operators, not as audience-delivery vehicles. For a current creator client with a multi-channel platform footprint, that meant restructuring a global brand partnership into a category-exclusive arrangement with separate licensing tracks for owned-IP extensions — converting what arrived as a flat fee into a layered deal with a higher effective rate and retained back-end. For creators moving into scripted production, it means a partner who can negotiate a first-look that protects the underlying channel IP rather than licensing it forward to the producer's other clients.
The creator's leverage is the audience they own and the IP they retain. A boutique with partner-level bandwidth is the only structure that can hold both at the negotiating table at once.
For Musicians & Producers
Tour Grosses, Masters, Publishing — The Real Economics of a Recording Career.
Recording-artist representation lives or dies on five numbers: the tour gross per night, the master's ownership structure, the publishing split, the sync licensing rate card, and the catalog's long-tail valuation. None of these are negotiated by associates who have never closed a festival-routed amphitheatre run or read a label's controlled-composition clause end-to-end. All of them require a senior partner who has done it — repeatedly — and who can sit across from a label's business-affairs lead without losing an hour to deference.
For a Grammy-winning recording artist on the roster, that meant renegotiating a master-recapture provision in a legacy deal into a structured reversion tied to delivery milestones, then layering a publishing admin agreement that recaptured co-write splits the artist had signed away in a 2017 cycle. For a current producer client, it meant converting a flat-fee producer engagement on a major-label album cycle into a points-based overall with cross-royalty participation, structured so the producer retained a defined share of neighboring-rights and sync income.
The music industry's deal logic is unforgiving: a single unfavored clause in a publishing split can cost an artist the value of an entire catalog. We run senior partners on every conversation because the math does not survive an associate handoff.
For Producers & Writer-Producers
First-Looks, Overheads, Overall Deals — Architecture, Not Introductions.
Producer representation is the most architectural work in the talent-management discipline. The deal is not a single agreement — it is a layered structure of first-look arrangements, overhead and fee definitions, IP carve-outs, producing credits, passive back-end participation, and overall deals that bind multiple projects under a single umbrella. Every term interacts with every other term. A weak first-look poisons a strong overhead. A generous overall deal undermines a producer's leverage on the next project without it.
Big Fish approaches producer representation as deal architecture. For a current producer client with a premium-cable overall, that meant renegotiating the overhead structure to separate covered-from-non-covered projects, narrowing exclusivity to defined genres rather than all-media, and adding a producer-fee step-up tied to backend thresholds. For a writer-producer moving from a network overall into a streamer first-look, it meant structuring the IP retention so the underlying script and underlying pitch materials stayed with the client at the end of the term, regardless of whether the streamer had ordered to pilot.
Producer leverage is built across years, not closed on a single call. The only firm structure that respects that is the one where the same senior partner is in every conversation across the entire arc — including the ones that happen two contracts from now.
The receipts — four numbers a skeptical talent can mentally check.