Freddie Fields, 84, talent agent to stars
HOLLYWOOD - Freddie Fields, a one-time vaudeville booker who became a high-flying Hollywood talent agent for such stars as Judy Garland, Henry Fonda, Steve McQueen, and Barbra Streisand and who later headed production at MGM and United Artists studios, has died. He was 84.
Mr. Fields - who also produced the critically acclaimed 1989 Civil War epic "Glory" - died of lung cancer Tuesday at his home in Beverly Hills, his longtime friend and publicist Warren Cowan said.
Considered the Michael Ovitz of his era, Mr. Fields and his late partner, David Begelman, formed Creative Management Associates in 1960. The company became the forerunner of today's International Creative Management, one of the world's biggest talent agencies.
In 1969, Mr. Fields brought together some of Hollywood's biggest stars - McQueen, Streisand, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, and Dustin Hoffman - and formed First Artists.
Mr. Fields was an early advocate of the back-end deal, which saw top stars forgo their upfront paychecks in return for a percentage of a film's ticket sales. He persuaded Natalie Wood, for instance, to take 10 percent of the first-dollar gross, the practice of giving A-listers first dibs on a studio's box-office take, on Paul Mazursky's 1969 comedy "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." Mr. Fields later said Wood earned more money as a result of that deal than she did on any other movie.
Those were the days when such stars pulled down $1 million a movie, Mr. Fields told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. He could only marvel at how star salaries had rocketed by the mid-1990s.
"Actors are getting $10 million to $15 million to $20 million a movie; directors are getting $5 million; writers are getting $3 million - those are gigantic multiples," Mr. Fields said. Still, he refused to blame agents for the soaring cost of talent.
"Supply and demand is what drives the prices up," he said. "How can an agent drive a price up unless someone says, 'I'll pay it?' "
Mr. Fields wistfully wished that he had possessed the power that Ovitz wielded when negotiating with studio executives and pointed out that dealing with such old moguls as Jack Warner required more finesse on the part of agents.
"I could never beat up Jack Warner," Mr. Fields recalled. "I had to sell him and con him."
When two of Mr. Fields's big clients, McQueen and Newman, starred in 1974's "The Towering Inferno," it was Mr. Fields who came up with the idea of how to give both actors equal billing on the credits, Cowan said. Mr. Fields suggested putting one actor's name on the left side of the screen and the other's name, slightly higher, on the right. The practice is still in use today, Cowan noted.
Mr. Fields married actress Polly Bergen in 1957; they were divorced in 1975.
He married Corinna Tsopei, an actress and 1964 Miss Universe, in 1981. He leaves her, along with three children, Kathy Fields Lander, Pamela Kerry Fields, and Peter William Fields; four stepchildren, Andrew Zax, Steven Zax, Daniella Zax, and Paris Zax; and four grandchildren.
