As happens with industry pioneers and their respective fields, original dance agent Julie McDonald and the business of commercial dance in Los Angeles have grown up together. After 20 years as a representative, first primarily for dancers and since 1998 for choreographers and stage directors exclusively, she speaks of the dance community's struggles and accomplishments in the timbre of personal history.
Breaking Ground
A dancer who trained in ballet and modern since she was 5, McDonald was moving from one life in dance to another in the mid-1970s. In 1976 she founded a dance studio in Venice, called Room To Move, with two other "girls at the time": Myrna Gawryn and Nina Lilly. Says McDonald, "It was a groundbreaking place that combined the elements of dance, exercise, and yoga—and this was way before the term aerobics was even in the vernacular." Room To Move also marked a seminal place and time in her life, during which she met many future clients—Russell Clark, Billy Goodson, Miranda Garrison—as well as her current partner, Tony Selznick.
When the studio closed in 1982, McDonald, whose performance career ended with a knee injury, was at an impasse. "Really, I had nothing," she says. "I was left with this bum knee and no idea what I wanted to do with my life."
She attended a boot camp-style seminar "for people who didn't know what they wanted to do in show business but knew they wanted to do something." It took her about a week to decide among being a manager for dancers, a casting director for dancers, or an agent for dancers. After researching, she decided she would be an agent and went looking for an agency that would pay her a salary to represent dancers. Every company offered her the same thing: a desk, a phone, and 50 percent of whatever she brought in.
Recognizing that commercials were the main area in which dancers were covered by union contracts, she decided to go with one of the top commercial agencies at the time, Joseph/Helfond & Rix, which became Kazarian/Spencer & Associates in 1988. She put a tiny ad in the trades that read, "Wanted: Dancers for Representation." Says McDonald, "I threw my first audition, and I had Russell Clark teach the jazz, Gene Castle taught the tap, Michelle Zeitlin taught ballet, and 300 dancers showed up."
She started out in 1985 with about five choreographers and 150–200 dancers. Though she was introducing a new way of doing business—until then dance jobs were simply handed out by choreographers or advertised in the trades—she found that producers and casting directors liked having a place to call for dancers. Her first major bookings were on choreographer Jeffrey Hornaday's Captain EO, starring Michael Jackson. "Jeffrey Hornaday was very supportive of me," she says, adding, "So many people weren't. I was kind of a threat to the status quo of choreographers and their assistants just calling up dancers. All of a sudden there was this agent there. It was odd because it was the new thing, and either the dancers were with me or they weren't with anybody. I didn't have any competition for two years, and I didn't really like it. In 1987 I got competition, and it sort of validated the field of dance representation."
Music Television
The launch of MTV came just four years before McDonald became an agent. By 1985 the music video phenomenon was in full swing. "I pretty much built my business on music videos," she says. "It was the new art form, and it was just thrilling. They were like minimusicals; everybody was discovering them and how to do them. Music videos were huge, and everybody hired a choreographer."
At the time, videos were being made in massive numbers, and there were no pay standards for the dancers appearing in them. "They were getting paid 50 bucks to be in a music video," she says. "So the first thing I did was up the rates, and that was not hard to do. I just told the producers. They knew they were getting away with murder, but it was kind of a new thing for everybody. Then I had to start introducing things like hazard pay. You would hear these horror stories about dancers calling in from the set, saying they were standing in water with electrical wires all around, or, 'This director wants me to put honey all over me and have the bees swarm.' I mean, crazy things. So I would be the one to interject on the dancers' behalf and say, 'Well, you know, you really can't do that. It's not about the hazard pay. It's just very dangerous.' Those were also the days when a lot of [the productions] would pay you in cash. It was so Wild, Wild West. It was a crazy time, and everybody was very young, creating this new field."
The sudden popularity of music videos created opportunities for choreographers—such as Paula Abdul, who came to McDonald in 1987—to step into the limelight. Signing Abdul was a boon to McDonald's career, she says, because the choreographer won such tremendous attention for her work with Janet Jackson. Clients Clark and Barry Lather were also music video stars. At the height of it, such talents were choreographing two or three music videos a week and "making good money," says McDonald.
Getting Their Due
For dancers, standardization of rates and working conditions in music videos came out of a dispute over the Soul Train Music Awards in spring 1990. "Don Cornelius had always given dancers AFTRA contracts, and one year he decided not to," McDonald recalls. "All the dancers who were booked on that show, plus a lot of others, we all met up at AFTRA. That situation never changed with Soul Train, ever, but that was the beginning of Dancers' Alliance, the dancers coming together and creating rates, terms, and working conditions in areas like music videos. The idea was that instead of just having the agents monitor it, the dancers themselves would be very active. Dancers' Alliance really set rates in music videos. That was very effective and still is."
Dancers' Alliance, which is not a union but an organization created by dancers to standardize nonunion work, also publishes guidelines for live shows and industrials.
Another milestone for dancers concerned contract status for feature films. When McDonald became an agent, dancers were under SEG (Screen Extras Guild) contracts for film appearances. "That was a big deal," she remembers. "Dancers were treated like extras, and extras weren't treated so hot…. I remember on a few feature films I was able to wrangle 10 SAG contracts, and the rest of the dancers were extras. Now, how weird was that for half the dancers to be treated according to SAG contracts and the others on extra contracts? But it was very nice of the producers to do that, because they didn't have to.
"A turning point came on a [1992] film called The Bodyguard, where the dancers really picketed and didn't go in to audition," she continues. "And then the big turning point came under a film called I'll Do Anything (1994) that Twyla Tharp choreographed. That's when SAG came in and took over jurisdiction again for dancers. I think the dancers today, if anything, should know what it was like before SAG had jurisdiction over their contracts. Dancers are so uninvolved in union work. Everybody takes it for granted, and it's always going to be like that. There are always the few who care about the rights of many."
Thinking Big
McDonald/Selznick Associates, an agency representing choreographers, dancers, stage directors, and production designers, opened its doors in 2000. Under the MSA name, McDonald is soon to achieve her longstanding goal of having her clients work on Broadway. "That was about 15 years ago that I set that goal, and next year we're going to have six shows on Broadway," she says. "That's really exciting for us."
McDonald encourages her clients to imagine their careers as she does: on a grand scale. "I think the direction of our company is to take our clients' ideas and help them realize them in bigger arenas, rather than just booking them out as choreographers on specific jobs," she says. "We try to expand their universe a little bit."
For the community of choreographers working in media, the next great objective is to form a union. That this hasn't happened yet is McDonald's biggest disappointment. One positive that arose from stumbling blocks to unionization is the American Choreography Awards, which was conceived by a group of dancers, choreographers, and agents—including McDonald—who decided to focus their energies on a show that would give the craft of choreography for the camera a higher profile in the entertainment industry.
In two decades guiding careers in the dance world, McDonald has facilitated historic movements in the business and, certainly, countless exciting moments in dance. When asked to name a highlight in her career, she says, "Highlights in my career are about my clients. They're about the people I represent, so it's really hard to pick out one thing. But to sit and watch the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics and know that your client has created that, or to watch even a fabulous commercial—a Gap commercial, an iPod commercial. These things for me, they're cultural moments. There's not that much rewarding work in commercial dance, but there is some. And when it's rewarding and it's beautiful at the same time