But Kemper focuses most of his attention on the two biggest ten-percenters of this period: Myron Selznick and Charles Feldman. Hidden Talent introduces readers to a range of figures they may not be familiar with, such as small-time agents Ivan Kahn and Sam Jaffe and writers’ agent Harold Swanson. This diffused industry operated through a number of players and venues, not simply from the corner offices. Kemper conceives of “Hollywood as a business world embedded within a social network” and draws from the field of economic sociology, which studies “how markets remain deeply and internally structured as social systems” (pp. Hidden Talent presents a more decentralised view of Hollywood in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. In previous important works of Hollywood film history such as Thomas Schatz’s The Genius of the System or Douglas Gomery’s The Hollywood Studio System: A History, the authors ultimately ascribe control to studio management – the production chiefs and producers in Schatz’s case, the New York corporate chieftains in Gomery’s (1).
Kemper brings to light many hitherto unknown accomplishments of agents, but the book’s greatest contribution lies in its challenge to the traditional top-down approach to studying the classical Hollywood motion picture industry. Exceptionally well researched and written, Hidden Talent is a major contribution to the field of American film history and suggests that the classical Hollywood period remains fertile ground for new research. Kemper’s book examines the rise of talent agents in the late 1920s and their impact on the industry through the 1940s (a second volume covering the 1950s through the 1970s is already in the works). In Tom Kemper’s eye-opening new book, Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents, he reveals that talent agents wielded power in Hollywood long before Lew Wasserman crossed the California state line.
Most standard histories of the Hollywood motion picture industry date the rise of powerful talent agencies to the 1950s – the decade when the weakened major studios abandoned long-term talent contracts and MCA became a major industry player.
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