Time Warp: August 12, 1982
On this day in 1982, the California Labor Commission awarded Richard Pryor more than $3 million in a dispute with his former manager. In Pryor v. Franklin, TAC 17 MP 114, Pryor claimed that his former manager, David McCoy Franklin, acted as both an unlicensed talent agent and a personal manager. Under California’s Talent Agencies Act (Cal. Lab. Code §§ 1700-1700.47), an agent — a person who seeks employment for his or her client — must be licensed by the state. Managers need not be licensed, but generally cannot seek employment for their clients. The Labor Commission found that Franklin obtained employment for Pryor in many areas of the business, that Franklin referred to himself as Pryor’s agent, and that he was often the only one who negotiated contracts on Pryor’s behalf. The Commission said it was irrelevant that the initial contact was made by the interested parties rather than Franklin. Regardless of who makes the initial contact, a talent agent’s license is required in order to negotiate an artist’s employment agreement. The Commission also found that Franklin misappropriated money that should have been paid to Pryor.
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And as the first case after the 1979 passage of the TAA, which left personal managers outside of regulation, the precedent of wrongly penalizing managers without any notice of them being regulated, without proper notice of what was being regulated, and most clearly, without proper statutory notice of what the penalty would be for engaging in the regulated activity, though that activity has never been defined properly.