I worked as an assistant to Ben Silverman at William Morris for two weeks in July 1997. From CBSNews.com: "Blame it [reality TV] on 30-year-old Ben Silverman, the television agent who brokered the deal for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and represented the original producer of Survivor. Five years ago Silverman went to London to find new forms of entertainment and returned with reality TV. His agency, William Morris, represents most of the reality programs headed for American television." Michael Wolff writes for New York Magazine 6/4/01: "He had dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a fetching twist to his collar. I doubted if he was much out of his twenties. He was more dewy than smarmy -- self-satisfied yet eager to please. Ben Silverman, William Morris Agency. "I keep seeing Ben Silverman at dinner parties; he really is very entertaining. I hear his name everywhere. The other morning, there he was, in a little dot-sketch, in the Wall Street Journal. In some sense, he's like those boy geniuses of the eighties and nineties who invented new financial instruments -- junk bonds and derivatives and whatnot. The discovery and marketing of a new format is really like that. It's creating something that is negotiable and transferable and that people believe in deeply -- it solves all their problems. Now, obviously, there is a certain obsolescence to these formats (with junk bonds you had inevitable bankruptcies). And Ben, of course, is already searching the world for new formats. Variety shows might be a possibility." Ben left William Morris in March, 2002, to produce movies and TV. |