Kohner Agency lays off three talent agents but stays open

The Kohner Agency has laid off its three talent agents in a downsizing, but the long-running firm is not closing.

That is the core of an exclusive report published by Deadline on 19 September Deadline. Three jobs go. The company stays.

The cut removes the agency's full roster of talent agents, the staff who find acting work and negotiate deals for performers. The talent department itself will remain open in a limited form. It will service existing contracts and collect commission only, meaning it will look after work already booked and take its agreed share from those jobs.

The agency said its talent representation team restructuring was necessitated by profound and unprecedented economic pressures facing the entertainment industry. That was its stated explanation for the change. No further detail on those pressures was given in the report.

Its literary department, which handles writers and their scripts and books, is staying in place. There is no reduction there. Owner and president Pearl Wexler will also continue to represent acting and literary clients herself, so current clients keep a named representative inside the organisation.

Wexler has owned and run the agency for the past 25 years. The firm was founded by Paul Kohner in 1938, giving it 88 years of continuous operation. That history makes it one of the older independent agencies still operating under its original name.

For clients, this means continuity on a smaller footing. Actors with existing agreements will still have those contracts administered and the commission collected through the talent department. Writers stay with the same literary team. Day-to-day contact for many clients will now run through Wexler.

What makes this stand out is scale and survival. A three-person exit would be minor at a large firm. At a small, independently run agency, losing every talent agent is a sharp change, even when the doors remain open and the books remain serviced.