Graham Fenton

Entertainment attorneys Brandon Milostan and Graham Fenton authored "Swimming with the Stream" in Los Angeles Lawyer. Excerpt: Ready to feel old? If Bart Simpson were real, he would be three years away from AARP eligibility, and the primary time period in Back to the Future is about as close to World War II as it is to today. Moreover, it has been nearly 17 years since Netflix launched its streaming platform and started the biggest Hollywood “back-end” profit participation revolution since Lew Wasserman’s famed net profits deal for “Golden Age” star Jimmy Stewart. Despite still being viewed by some as an avant-garde, flash-in-the-pan exploitation medium and traditional broadcast boogeyman, exhibition via streaming already occupies 15-20 percent of the entire history of film and TV (depending on when the count starts), with no meaningful response from Hollywood to the back-end paradigm shift that Netflix and other streamers ushered in. That all changed in late 2023 when Hollywood responded as the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the Writers Guild of America (WGA), and Directors Guild of America (DGA) were each able to negotiate success-based streaming bonuses for actors, writers, and directors of made-for-streaming projects, a contrast to the back-end structure (or lack thereof) that has come to dominate the direct-to-streaming market, one that may crack open a door that agents, managers, and attorneys can now kick down.

Graham Fenton, a recent 2020 graduate of UCLA School of Law and current associate at Greenberg Glusker, published "Taming the Ticket Market: How a Closed Ticketing System Can Beat Back Scalpers and Recapture Lost Revenue" in "Entertainment & Sports Lawyer," a publication by the American Bar Association.  Excerpt:  Ticket resale for profit, or “scalping,” is seemingly as old as live entertainment itself. With the advent of computerized “ticket bots” and online secondary markets, what started as a street-corner trade has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar industry. In today’s music market, this is particularly unfortunate as concert revenue often comprises the vast majority of an artist’s income. Lawmakers have tried and failed to address the problem. Economists, on the other hand, question whether scalping is a problem at all, or rather an illustration of the free market at work. This paper argues that it is the artist’s, rather than the market’s right to determine the price at which tickets reach the consumer. This can eventually be accomplished through blockchain ticketing, but as the industry waits for blockchain technology to reach scalability, Congress should federally mandate a closed-ticketing system that mimics the blockchain. Part II of this paper explains the economics of the resale market. Part III looks at how lawmakers have tried and failed to curtail scalping. Part IV examines how the industry has responded with limited success. Part V proposes short-term and long-term solutions while Part VI concludes.