So much of television and film is packaged by the Big Four agencies — CAA, ICM, WME and UTA — that it is now said to be the lion’s share of their income, so much in fact that they are running to Wall Street for equity investment in their producerial role. Fuck repping actors or directors or writers to earn a living. What rube would settle for 10 percent of anything when you can play for 100 percent of your larger stake in a film or a movie?

But of course, the astounding conflict-of-interest that underlies the corruption of packaging doesn’t simply end with the fact that agents no longer have any incentive to properly service the smaller and less advantaged client when they are repping both sides of a negotiation. Never mind the relentless obscenity of telling a seller that you can also rep the buyer and claim to still fight for top dollar.

The greater offense is that packaging has now artificially reduced the salaries of all screenwriters over decades, so much so that entry-level salaries for staffwriters and story editors in television, for example, are exactly where they were a decade ago save for the cost-of-living increases that the writer’s union achieved on its own. For junior producers, it’s even worse: The salaries for co-executive producers are about 16 percent less than where they were two contracts ago.

The agencies themselves like to claim that this is because shows now order fewer episodes and shorter broadcast seasons than in the past and that this structural change has more to do with the stagnation than packaging. But of course, that also begs a question: Where the fuck have the agents been to argue on behalf of their clients for a different pay structure, one that acknowledges the changing reality of fewer episodes and more work in the production of each episode?

I’ll tell you where they’ve been. They’ve been in another room, counting cash.