From his years at Miramax, Newman knew foreign sales agents who could tip him to emerging talent around the globe. But he had no client list, no track record. Newman’s first clients were films — he represented The Beastmaster, for example, finding distributors and making pay-TV and video deals. It wasn’t glamorous. “But once I started,” he says, “I realized it had all been leading to this.”

One of Newman’s first acts was to contact the French producer Robert Hakim. Belle de Jour, Luis Bunuel’s erotic classic starring Catherine Deneuve, had gone ten years without being seen in the United States. Hakim was its producer and, with Newman’s help, he arranged for a screening at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. Not long after, Miramax re-released the film. Newman made no money. But he accomplished what he wanted: A film he loved got seen.

A FEW MONTHS AFTER The Full Monty became 20th Century Fox’s runaway hit of 1997, Robert Newman took director Peter Cattaneo to lunch at Spago. Together the agent and his client read the studio’s accounting report, which concluded that while The Full Monty had cost just $3 million to make and had made almost $200 million worldwide, Cattaneo was not yet due any back-end money.

So perplexed was Newman that when the head of the movie studio, Bill Mechanic, walked by, he invited him to sit down. He pushed the accounting statement across the table. Mechanic read it and pushed it back. “We owe you some money,” the executive said. A few days later Fox sent over a check for $1 million.

It is the job of an agent to say things his clients would find difficult to say. It is also an agent’s job to say things his clients would love to say if they had time enough — and were savvy enough — to say them. This is a tricky business, speaking on behalf of another. To do it successfully, you must know each client as well as you do yourself. Misjudge and your clients won’t be your clients for long. Anticipate correctly and you’ll be indispensable.

When Richard Gere won a Golden Globe this year for his tap-dancing and singing role in Chicago, he thanked his agent “for talking me into it and talking them into it.” Those are an agent’s two fundamental goals: to persuade movie studios and TV networks of the merits of each client, while also guiding clients to make shrewd choices for a long-lasting career.

“Great agents are really emissaries,” says Baz Luhrmann. “The coalition between money and art is always precarious. Creatives get wildly out of control and emotional and impractical. You need agents to communicate to the artist the reality of the studio’s point of view, because the studio is not always wrong. But creatives can also get squashed like a fly when it becomes about economics. You need a champion in your corner.”

Luhrmann had made just one film, Strictly Ballroom, when he chose Newman from a throng of agents who were vying to represent him. Newman made his pitch at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival: “I can’t raise the dead, I may not necessarily be your friend, but this is what I can do, and this is what you may need.” From the beginning Luhrmann told Newman he was not a director for hire — that he had several of his own projects he wanted to get made.

“Robert is not about ‘Who do I want you to be?’ but more ‘I need to learn who you are,’” Luhrmann says. “He backed the vision of not taking the big bucks early, and I can tell you it’s been a far less exciting thing for him financially in the short term. He and ICM could have made a lot more money after Strictly Ballroom if I’d gone out and done slapstick comedies.” Instead, when Luhrmann’s audacious interpretation of Romeo and Juliet was competing against a more traditional treatment at 20th Century Fox, Newman convinced Fox executives not only to pony up the $17 million Luhrmann needed to make his movie but also to pay $5,000 to get the director his green card.

Romeo + Juliet made more than $150 million worldwide. Luhrmann’s next film, Moulin Rouge, grossed about the same and garnered two Oscars last year for Luhrmann’s wife, the costume and production designer Catherine Martin. C.M., as she’s known, is also a Newman client.

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