Rob Long examines the latest indicator of economic change/technological progress in Hollywood: the difficulty in firing your agent:

A few years ago, a friend of mine tried to fire his agent. It didn’t go well. After a long, wearying phone call, in which the agent tried everything in his bag of tricks -– you owe me! This is wrong! I screwed up, I know! Gimme one more chance! This is a bad career move! — all of them, my friend finally agreed to the thing he had been dreading -– the thing that every single one of his writer friends told him, under no circumstances, to agree to. 

He agreed to a meeting. 

So there he was, a few hours later, in a conference room of a sleek building in Beverly Hills, surrounded by agents -– his agent, other agents, there were cupcakes, you know. They turned it into a thing. 

And in the end, after all of the we-love-yous and you’re-important-to-usses and the cupcakes, he ended up staying put. My theory is, all he really wanted were the cupcakes. 

Read the whole thing here.