Watch out, agents: Your assistants might be making memes about you.
In the spring of 2018, four assistants at WME kicked around an idea. Given their stressful environment — one that routinely saw them juggling phone lines, handling guest lists and working long hours for little pay — they thought: Why not work through their frustrations in a healthy way?
Thus the Instagram meme page Assistants vs. Agents (@assistantsvsagents) was born. Since its inception, the account has gained nearly 100,000 followers, cultivating a network of assistants who commiserate over the indignities, headaches and fleeting moments of hilarity from life in the Hollywood trenches. Former WME assistant Warner Bailey, a founding member of the page and currently its sole operator, says the account’s audience includes assistants from other agencies, aspiring assistants, agents themselves and actors like Glen Powell and Amber Midthunder, who both follow the page.
One memorable post uses a photo of Jason Momoa sneaking up on Henry Cavill at the premiere of 2016’s “Suicide Squad.” The text overlaying Momoa reads “Assistants”; emblazoned across Cavill is the message “Leftover food from a meeting.”
“That [meme] was so real,” recalls one former WME assistant, “because you would run [to the food] — because they paid us like fifteen dollars an hour; it was shit pay — and you’re like, ‘I make the price of a salad at one of the shittier places to go get a salad.’”
“People would take screenshots,” the former assistant adds. “They would hide all the personal information, but they’d take screenshots of the things that their bosses said to them, and they would turn it into a meme on the account. It was funny, but it’s also incredibly cathartic to be like, ‘Someone else is going through this too.’”
But Assistants vs. Agents isn’t just a meme account; it’s also a burgeoning media company. Bailey, who left WME in 2019 and runs his own agency, Sunset Nine, aims to use his specialty in brand partnerships to scale Assistants vs. Agents. The page has partnered with nonprofits such as Backline, collaborated on posts with brands such as Goldenvoice and launched a newsletter that shares job postings and interviews with industry figures like Wasserman Music booking agent Tom Windish. Bailey organizes Deuxmoi-style Instagram stories, inviting the account’s followers to share industry news confidentially and reposting the tips anonymously. (One tip, posted on June 13, was about the APA and Artist Group International merger; the news was officially announced on June 21.) Also in the works: short-form video “hyper-targeted towards the entertainment world,” in the vein of another Instagram page-turned-media company, Overheard LA.
In an amusing twist, Assistants vs. Agents is now represented by CAA.
Bailey’s plans for the account follow a path set by other niche media companies over the past decade. But his intention also is to build a resource for a community within an industry navigating uncertain economic times.
“There’s an irony of this juxtaposition between assistants working their asses off and not making a lot of money and having to scrape by next to working for some of the richest, most powerful people,” Ben Greenspan, another onetime WME assistant who helped start the page, says. “There’s a class barrier in a lot of ways to these jobs, because if you don’t have some sort of side income…it can be really difficult to sustain.”
Echoing that sentiment, Bailey says, “If I can help even one or 10 or 100 people, give them some advice from other people, that would be fantastic.”
After all, today’s assistants are tomorrow’s agents. And, in this case, media company founders too.
