What a Top Entertainment Lawyer Makes of Hollywood’s AI Fears

The Hollywood Reporter raised a glass — and a coffee mug — to some of the entertainment industry’s unsung heroes on Wednesday morning, hosting its Power Business Managers breakfast at Wolfgang Puck’s Cut in Beverly Hills.

The 15th annual event, presented by City National Bank and sponsored by Wheels Up and Delta Airlines, accompanied THR’s annual Business Managers Power List — recognizing the trusted advisers overseeing key strategic and financial decisions for their high-profile clients amid a year marked by disruption and economic volatility — with PTD Business Management managing partner Anna DerParseghian receiving this year’s Business Manager Icon Award.

The morning kicked off with welcome remarks from THR deputy editorial director Jeanie Pyun and publisher Lori O’Connor, followed by City National Bank senior vp entertainment Steve Shapiro. Uzo Aduba, a longtime client of DerParseghian, then took the stage to pay tribute to her, recalling how they first started working together in 2014 “because of one simple question that Anna asked: ‘What do you want?’ As we began to discuss my life dreams, it became clear to me that Anna would not only work to inspire my dreams, but she would work intentionally to secure them.

“She turns options into opportunities, setting a table for her clients for measured and thoughtful account planning to turn dreams into tangible realities,” Aduba continued, specifically citing both of their involvements with the Angel City Football Club. “Over the years, I’ve heard Anna repeat back to me, ‘Uzo, remember your dream,’ helping me to ensure that I remain on task, on message — and on budget.”

In accepting her award, DerParseghian — one of only a handful of female managing partners in entertainment business management — told the room, “I love what I do. I’m so grateful to go to work every day and do something that I really love, with people that I adore, and now to also get recognized for that work is really fantastic and such a privilege that I don’t take lightly,” before going on to thank her colleagues, family and clients. She noted, “I love helping our clients and nurturing them as they grow into the maturity of their careers and their success — to help them celebrate their first home, their first child, their first accolades, and to watch them flourish and allow them to focus on their art and what they do best.”

She concluded with referencing how last year’s Icon Award winner John McILwee referred to business managers as “the unsung heroes of the entertainment industry and we really are; if we do what we do well, we ensure that our clients’ financial health is safe and sound. We allow them to focus on their art and being creative. We do what we do best so they can do what they do best.”

THR business and legal writer Winston Cho then joined Lichter, Grossman, Nichols, Feldman, Rogal, Shikora & Clark, Inc. founding partner Linda Lichter for a keynote conversation, which began with an acknowledgement of the “pretty serious disruptions” the industry has faced in the last few years with the pandemic, strikes, L.A. fires, consolidation, AI and the Trump administration.

“My sense is that the community is on kind of a knife edge,” she admitted. “The people who are successful, already established, are doing great; they’re the first people that anybody goes to for a job. The people who are starting out are really having a hard time getting in because the opportunities are not necessarily there or the normal pathways to get in are not necessarily there. The people in the middle are just wondering if they’re ever going to get another job” with a “nagging concern about consolidation. Does that mean that people will lose their jobs? Does that mean that there will be less places to sell things? These are all concerns that the community has.”

Lichter also gave her endorsement to David Ellison taking over Paramount — “I think that he’s going to revitalize the studio and that’s a very positive thing for everybody” — cited YouTube as one of Hollywood’s biggest business opportunities and commented on the uncertainty of AI, as “even if you had an understanding between SAG and the producers about how do you use actors’ images, I’m not sure that anybody can actually control it. That to me is like the thing that we all have to really be thinking hard about, which is, how do we control this process?”

Overall, at an uncertain time in the industry, Lichter said she sees her job, in part, as “to try to get people enough money so that they can survive between jobs. I think your job is to make sure that they have invested wisely, that they’re conservative about what they spend their money on, that they are making a plan for the future, that they have life insurance — all those other kinds of things — and that they have investments that might support them when the business is not happening. If you’re an actor and you’ll be getting residuals and those kinds of things, you want to be able to invest in yourself for the future. And I would think that’s the main job as a business manager, is to figure out how to keep the clients’ financial life relatively stable in an unstable world.”