Hello.
My name is Esther Simon.
I am a junior here at Mount Holyoke,
and a double major in film studies and art history.
This summer, I had not only my first internship, but also
my first industry job at a talent management
company in Beverly Hills.
Before this internship, actually, the only thing
I knew about talent management came from the show BoJack
Horseman.
[LAUGHTER] A lot of new experiences for me.
The company that I was working for
was Silver Lining Entertainment, which
is a company that was formed just a few years ago, actually,
by a number of veteran managers, and has been joined
over the years by other really talented managers, some of them
coming from agencies, some of them coming
from other management companies.
We have about 130 clients, now.
Some of them you might have heard of--
Jason Isaacs, who was in Harry Potter,
and is now in the new Star Trek show, Josh Peck
from Drake and Josh, and Katherine Langford,
who was in the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why.
So, there's a lot of kind of recognizable names.
There are also a lot of new up and coming actors.
And a big part of what Silver Lining does as a company,
is help their clients find work, help
them manage their publicity, help them basically
with every aspect of their careers.
Which, when people ask, what's the difference
between an agent and a manager, that's the difference.
An agent finds you parts.
A manager runs your entire life.
So to kind of break that down more,
there are kind of three main parts of what managers do.
They find their clients work.
Often that means kind of sifting through all
of the different projects that are being done at any given
time, looking at scripts, looking at pitches
for reality shows, sometimes plays, even, say,
voice acting for a video game any of that.
You would just have to be aware of everything
that's happening at any given time, which is a lot.
Sometimes it also actually means telling your client
not to do a role.
We sometimes got scripts that were
so bad, that we would tell our clients, hey, don't do this.
It'll look really bad.
You know, it might have a really bad reception.
You might get in just a lot of bad publicity.
So that kind of brings us into the second part
of that, which is publicity.
Whenever a news outlet wants to do a story on one
of our clients, they call us, and they
ask to speak to the manager.
Usually they don't get to do that,
because otherwise we would be flooded with calls constantly,
so a big part of my job was actually filtering those calls.
That summer was the summer that there
was a big feud between Josh Peck and Drake Bell,
so I was just told, if they call about that, just say no.
Just hang up.
Don't deal with that.
And another big part is accompanying your client
to events that they are at, like one of our managers
who was working with Katherine Langford went
to a lot of Netflix premieres that summer, because it
was the summer right after 13 Reasons Why came out.
The last part of the job is just kind of helping clients
with creative projects.
Sometimes that means reading over a client's script
for their own film, or looking at their look
book for their reality show.
Sometimes it means helping them set up
the right lunch with the right person to pitch their show to.
It can be a wide variety of things.
Sometimes it's just these random tasks,
like we had a client who wanted us to call a hotel
and make sure that they have two-ply toilet paper.
It can be anything.
It can be everything.
It's a really just all-encompassing thing.
But what I especially was doing was actually also
kind of everything and anything.
I worked a lot with casting databases, predominantly
Casting Workbook, and the Breakdown which
are just websites where you essentially
go through all of your client's head shots,
their audition tapes, their demo reels put them
all together into kind of a package,
and send them off to the people who are making these projects.
So, if you get a script that has,
you know, three available roles, you'll
kind of send a whole little package of clients
for each role and then hopefully they
get called in for an audition.
Another thing I did was actually editing and uploading
those audition tapes.
A lot of our clients, and actually just,
a lot of-- a surprising number of people in Hollywood
are Australian, so it's really hard for them
to just fly from like Melbourne to Los
Angeles for a single audition.
So a lot of times they will send in a video with like seven
takes, and they'll just say hey, I really
like take one and take five, can you just edit it down to that,
and that would be my job.
I also read a lot of scripts, and wrote
coverage, which is essentially the way people in the film
industry write about film.
It's just a really quick summary.
This is what it's about.
This is what I thought of it, and this is the parts
that we want to cast.
So I read a lot of scripts.
I wrote a lot of coverage.
I did a lot of clerical work.
You know, just answering phones, directing calls, meeting
with clients, et cetera.
And just kind of random tasks for individual managers,
like assembling kind of a comedy calender
every week, from Comedy Bureau, of things
for one of our managers who also worked for Comedy Central to
[INAUDIBLE].
So the things that I actually gained are many.
So I learned a lot about the film industry,
which was incredible, because studying film academically,
you learn a lot about how film works,
but you don't necessarily learn how to work in film.
For example, writing coverage is the polar opposite
of writing an academic film paper.
Everything they tell you how to do,
it's like, "don't summarize the plot,
don't focus on the script, don't--" you know.
They always tell you to focus on the visuals,
which you cannot do when all you have is a script.
There are no actors yet.
There are no visuals, no sound track, nothing, just words.
And so you have to learn how to work with that.
I also learned a lot of personal skills.
I learned how to self-advocate, which was really hard for me
because I'm a naturally anxious person,
and to suddenly be in a position where they're like,
hey can you call customer service and complain for us,
is really scary.
But it's something that you have to do in this industry,
and it's something that, you know,
will get you even further.
It's important to know the right people.
It's important to go to the right events.
But most of all, it's important to know
how to introduce yourself, and how
to make an impression on people that they'll remember.
I learned a lot about how and when to trust my intuition.
I didn't really have a single boss.
I had five different managers.
A lot of times I couldn't always get help.
I learned how to decide kind of when to just do my own thing,
and when I had to ask for help.
And kind of going on from that, next summer,
next years of my life, I can't say
that I have a concrete plan.
I don't think many people, at this time in our lives,
can say that we know exactly where we're
going to be next week or next summer or after we graduate.
Hopefully, I'll find another internship.
Maybe it'll be in LA.
Maybe it'll be closer to home.
Maybe I'll work on a creative project.
After graduation, maybe I'll go to film school, maybe I won't.
I went in really sure that I would, and came out less sure.
Sometimes that's how experience works,
it actually makes you less sure in what you are doing.
And eventually, I want to go into screenwriting myself,
and I feel like this internship really
equipped me with the skills that I need,
not just to do the job that I want,
but also to know that I can do it.
Thank you.