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On today’s episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast, host Cynthia Littleton breaks down the complicated business of being a business manager for clients who work in media and entertainment.
Variety is set to
publish its annual Business Managers Elite feature section, in print and online on Nov. 11, highlighting the industry’s top financial and accounting mavens who have their finger on the pulse of trends in entertainment and important macro-economy issues.
“Business managers are the Swiss army knives of personal representatives. Business managers do a lot more than pay the bills, especially for people who work in entertainment. Compensation can be lumpy. In some cases, the client gets paid with big upfront fees. In others, royalty and residual payments trickle down for years, if not decades,” Littleton observes. “Business managers have to connect with all the people in their clients lives, From investors and family offices to tax advisers, lawyers, agents, managers, doctors and coaches.”
Business managers are also often pressed into service as consiglieris on major transactions. This year’s top honoree is Citrin Cooperman veteran Arnie Herrmann. In the profile set to publish Nov. 11, Herman tells me that he finds real estate is one of the most emotional decisions that people make. Sometimes he has to guide people through the fact that they’re overpaying for a property. Sometimes they’re OK with that, and it’s Herman’s job to make sure that they have all the facts.
This episode also features highlights of Variety‘s “Doc Dreams” event held Nov. 9 in New York. The gathering features conversations with top documentarians, including Alex Gibney, the helmer and producer behind “Musk,” the controversial deep dive on Elon Musk. One of the most powerful discussions was held with Shakiba Adil and Elina Hirvonen, co-directors of “The Secret Reading Club of Kabul.” The two explain how the writings of Anne Frank more than 80 years before inspired them and the docu subjects to chronicle the horrors of living under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
“I had moved to Finland some years back, and a Finnish friend gave me ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ ” Adil explains.
“In the ’90s, when I was in Afghanistan, when the Taliban took over, I was told that I cannot go to school. And I always wondered if the world know what happened to us. Does anybody know what is going on in Afghanistan? Has everybody forgotten us? I always missed my school friends and I wondered what happened,” she says. “And when I got the book, I felt like, oh my God, there has been someone else also experiencing the same thing like as me. Because I thought that nobody understood us, the young women in Afghanistan. But then I read Anne Frank’s diary, and I realized that in the other side of the world, a young girl has experienced exactly similar thing, which is like everything is taken away and how your world becomes smaller and smaller.”
