Peters Fraser & Dunlop, the UK's oldest literary & talent agency, is on the skids. It's a big, dirty, rude, unedifiying & legally privileged story, and we'll try to bring you up to speed.PFD has been going since the Empire itself was in short trousers, representing the main firepower of British creativity across the decades: writers, actors, directors. Its client-roster represented all the really big names in British publishing: 'owning copyright to titles that read like an Oxbridge reading list'. Around about 2001, in a clear illustration of the respective powers of the two industries, PFD was bought outright by an American sports talent agency, CSS Stellar.
CSS Stellar then sat on its British acquisition for 6 years, pulling profits out and not reinvesting, while its own shareprice collapsed - the very shares in which the previous owners had been part-paid for the acquisition. In the summer of 2007, PFD's top agents - the previous owners - clubbed together to mount a management buy-out, with financing in place, valuing the firm at around £8m or a third less than they'd sold it for not long before. CSS Stellar's management, supposedly, didn't even acknowledge receipt of the offer.
So, understandably perhaps, the agents decided enough was enough and began to make arrangements to move themselves and their client lists to an entirely new company. They would hollow out PFD. The backlists - the roster of titles already published - would remain, as contracts are signed between the firm and the author, not between agent and author. The corresponding income streams from the backlists would therefore also remain. But the new outfit would have autonomy, control, and above all either reinvest the profits into the firm, or, obviously, take them home and spend them. Either way, not just allow them to be siphoned off to a parent American corp that couldnae give a fuck either way.
Around this point presumably CSS Stellar became aware of a certain disgruntlement, and decided to rectify the situation exactly how the MBA textbooks said: by changing the management to something really shiny. In September the high-profile, heavily-styled, well-connected agent Caroline Michel was poached from William Morris to be CSS's man on the ground at PFD. Something of a hospital pass: although there had already been resignations, it seems she knew little about the imminent agency-wide mutiny when she agreed to head over there. Although she did know that she was accepting a role as boss of PFD's various literary figureheads, like Pat Kavanagh, figures much more experienced and revered than she herself. If she ever wondered what the catch was, it became clear pretty soon.
![closeup220feb[1].jpg](http://www.themake.co.uk/pictures/closeup220feb%5B1%5D.jpg)
Caroline Michel (left) took over on September 17, and within 7 weeks, 23 of PFD's 36 agents had resigned. Michel and CSS tried everything they could to make people stay: first threatening to sack anyone who even mentioned defection, for misconduct and hence without severance, and then, when that proved insufficient deterrent, they switched tactics and started burying people in gold if they would only please just don't go. But still the agents left en masse, like New World settlers, to set up an exact replica of what they were leaving behind: this time another private limited company, to be called United Agents, whose top agents brought, as far as I know, every single one of their clients with them. Leaving CSS Stellar and Caroline Michel in charge of not very much.
I went into the old PFD offices on Drury Lane in January, and it was a sorry-looking place. It looked ransacked, with junior staff trying to get their charisma to fill the former offices of heavyweight figures. We used to be Romans but now we are merely Italians.
Course the shell of PFD is fighting back. They do have some agents and clients still. And they're firing legalesque letters all over the place (disclosure: including to me) and generally trying to scare people into paying them the money they reckon they're still owed. Which, it turns out, they're probably not: in April, one agent's case came up before an employment tribunal, which ruled that PFD owed him £125,000 in back pay. There's another 19 of those tribunals to go, of which 9 are said to be 'almost identical'. Even if it had all its revenue-streams intact, PFD wouldn't be able to withstand a lot more of those. Last week, the head of PFD's New York office resigned.
Who knows what the valuation is now, whether it's economical for CSS to bring its many legal wrangles to court, or even if PFD will still be going by Christmas. It's sad to see such a longstanding monument of the British publishing industry falling to bits, but, equally - this is the country of cockfighting and bairbaiting - hell of exciting too.
So, understandably perhaps, the agents decided enough was enough and began to make arrangements to move themselves and their client lists to an entirely new company. They would hollow out PFD. The backlists - the roster of titles already published - would remain, as contracts are signed between the firm and the author, not between agent and author. The corresponding income streams from the backlists would therefore also remain. But the new outfit would have autonomy, control, and above all either reinvest the profits into the firm, or, obviously, take them home and spend them. Either way, not just allow them to be siphoned off to a parent American corp that couldnae give a fuck either way.
Around this point presumably CSS Stellar became aware of a certain disgruntlement, and decided to rectify the situation exactly how the MBA textbooks said: by changing the management to something really shiny. In September the high-profile, heavily-styled, well-connected agent Caroline Michel was poached from William Morris to be CSS's man on the ground at PFD. Something of a hospital pass: although there had already been resignations, it seems she knew little about the imminent agency-wide mutiny when she agreed to head over there. Although she did know that she was accepting a role as boss of PFD's various literary figureheads, like Pat Kavanagh, figures much more experienced and revered than she herself. If she ever wondered what the catch was, it became clear pretty soon.
Caroline Michel (left) took over on September 17, and within 7 weeks, 23 of PFD's 36 agents had resigned. Michel and CSS tried everything they could to make people stay: first threatening to sack anyone who even mentioned defection, for misconduct and hence without severance, and then, when that proved insufficient deterrent, they switched tactics and started burying people in gold if they would only please just don't go. But still the agents left en masse, like New World settlers, to set up an exact replica of what they were leaving behind: this time another private limited company, to be called United Agents, whose top agents brought, as far as I know, every single one of their clients with them. Leaving CSS Stellar and Caroline Michel in charge of not very much.I went into the old PFD offices on Drury Lane in January, and it was a sorry-looking place. It looked ransacked, with junior staff trying to get their charisma to fill the former offices of heavyweight figures. We used to be Romans but now we are merely Italians.
Course the shell of PFD is fighting back. They do have some agents and clients still. And they're firing legalesque letters all over the place (disclosure: including to me) and generally trying to scare people into paying them the money they reckon they're still owed. Which, it turns out, they're probably not: in April, one agent's case came up before an employment tribunal, which ruled that PFD owed him £125,000 in back pay. There's another 19 of those tribunals to go, of which 9 are said to be 'almost identical'. Even if it had all its revenue-streams intact, PFD wouldn't be able to withstand a lot more of those. Last week, the head of PFD's New York office resigned.
Who knows what the valuation is now, whether it's economical for CSS to bring its many legal wrangles to court, or even if PFD will still be going by Christmas. It's sad to see such a longstanding monument of the British publishing industry falling to bits, but, equally - this is the country of cockfighting and bairbaiting - hell of exciting too.
Leave a comment