SECRET AGENT MAN.(Dave Wirtschafter)

On a cool evening last October, rain was soaking the photographers who lined a red carpet in front of the Buffalo Club, in Santa Monica. They were waiting for the film star Ewan McGregor, the guest of honor at a party celebrating "Long Way Round," a miniseries on Bravo that documents how McGregor and a friend rode their motorcycles around the world, more or less. Under a tent in the club's garden, one could hear a convivial rumble from the usual mixture of models, ad executives, and prowling young men with ambitions to direct.

In a corner of the tent, also waiting for McGregor and looking even more miserable than the photographers--he was clutching himself as if his appendix had burst--was Dave Wirtschafter, the president of the William Morris Agency. Agents from William Morris and its leading competitor, Creative Artists Agency, C.A.A., customarily sweep through parties in identical Armani suits and Prada shoes, swinging their arms wide for vaguely urban handclasps--Dude! Have you been handled, drinks-wise?--as they sift for news, guard their clients from rival agents, and aggressively seek to poach from those rivals. Hey, Tom Hanks! Huge fan. You, sir, are a national treasure. Agents are the moths of Hollywood, drawn to the town's brightest lights.

Wirtschafter, however, hates going out, hates being called bro or dude or buddy or baby, hates "Santa Clausing" clients with gifts, hates schmoozing and toadying--hates all the aspects of being an agent that have traditionally defined the profession. A fit, watchful man of forty-seven with a thatch of Dry Look-style hair, Wirtschafter was wearing a brown leather jacket and jeans and a jade Maori talisman on a thong around his neck. He looked as if he might be there to replace the keg.

He was there because his agency had put together "Long Way Round" after McGregor's own agency, C.A.A., turned it down--and because William Morris hoped to poach the star. "C.A.A. basically told Ewan it was a stupid idea," John Ferriter, the William Morris agent who orchestrated the miniseries and a companion book, says. "When I heard that, I was dumbfounded--you always have to pursue what the client wants to do." If Mel Gibson wants to make a Biblical epic in Aramaic, his agent's only sensible response is "Judea is lovely this time of year!"

There are some two hundred talent agencies in Los Angeles. The five largest, which represent about seventy per cent of Hollywood's working entertainers, have nearly ten thousand clients among them, a number that includes musicians, novelists, athletes, corporations, and Regis Philbin. Yet the Big Five's movie-division business depends, in significant part, on a few dozen stars. Because stars can green-light a film, having a cluster of them at one agency draws the best scripts and directors there, too. C.A.A., which represents, among others, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Jennifer Aniston, has by far the best actors' list; other agencies compare it, bitterly, to the New York Yankees. "They're all in blue suits and they're all named Josh and they're all coming at you," Cara Stein, a William Morris board member and the co-head of the New York office, says.

William Morris began to rejuvenate itself when Dave Wirtschafter and Jim Wiatt, who is now the agency's C.E.O., were hired away from International Creative Management, in 1999. It makes some two hundred and twenty million dollars a year in commissions (plus about five million from investments) and is, financially, at least, within striking distance of C.A.A. But William Morris is by far Hollywood's oldest agency--it started in New York in 1898 as a vaudeville booking service--and it has a lingering reputation as a canasta room of yesteryear. It represents only about a half-dozen lead actors, including John Travolta, Reese Witherspoon, Kevin Spacey, Morgan Freeman, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kirsten Dunst, and one superstar: Russell Crowe.

For years, Wirtschafter represented mainly directors and writers; among his forty clients are Ridley Scott, Gus Van Sant, Larry and Andy Wachowski, Paul and Chris Weitz, Bill Condon, Brad Bird, Ron Shelton, and Spike Lee. Within the past fifteen months, however, he has branched out to sign Halle Berry and Chris Tucker and the pop stars Alicia Keys, Ciara, and Lil Jon. And, ever since he was promoted to the agency's presidency, there has been mounting pressure on him to meet, to greet, and to poach.