EXCLUSIVE: The partners at boutique agency Verve have set a high bar for when they promote assistants to agents. This is the gang that told assistant Zach Carlisle to go build a swing set for the son of partner Adam Levine during a summer weekend day, only to get promoted–right after fellow partners Bryan Besser and Bill Weinstein conducted a career intervention on the poor guy– who got his agent stripes after singing I’ve Got Friends in Low Places karaoke style before he got his agent stripes. When they promoted Rob Herting, they enlisted clients and Red scribes Jon & Erich Hoeber and Summit production chief Erik Feig, and staged a bogus meeting forcing staffers to come up with a new title to pitch for the sequel.
So what did they come up with when they recently promoted Melissa Solomon from coordinator to agent? The partners staged a tour of Verve’s new offices for the whole company and in the lobby, they announced a competition called "Do you have what it takes??!" Solomon was selected to be the first contestant and her category was “Do YOU have what it takes to be….an agent? She was shown four doors, and had to answer a question from each partner before getting to open doors that contained an ingredient necessary to becoming a successful agent. Weinstein quizzed her about the importance of the power lunch; Besser grilled her on decision making in a hypothetical client crisis; Levine offered a riddle for her to solve. After Solomon crushed the tests, and won an iPhone, cordless headset, power dress and Amex Business card, she was promoted to agent. It has been a long journey for Solomon, who grew up around the entertainment business and worked at Broder Webb Chervin Silbermann through high school and college. She graduated Tulane and got a law degree before coming back and working in the motion picture lit department at ICM before moving to Verve in 2001 and getting promoted to coordinator a year later.
From my vantage point, forcing Carlisle to build the swing set on a hot summer weekend day, and giving him an intervention is still the high bar. I’ve also heard that this isn’t uncommon during the hazing process at agencies, inflicted on assistants who don’t get promoted. Can anybody recall the most awful tasks that agents have assigned to assistants over the years?
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