He’s launching “SportsCenter” for Hollywood assistants. Will you succeed?

The inspiration for Warner Bailey’s popular Instagram account, Assistants vs. Agents It was a joke among support staff at WME in 2017. Knowing that casting assistants would check their mail before their bosses, then-assistant Billy and his friends would hand out printouts of internet memes in interagency communication envelopes for their colleagues to enjoy. “It gave us a little bit of the game to play during the day,” explains Bailey, who is now represented by UTA.

Eight years after that publication turned into a social media account, Acolytes vs. Agents has swelled to 163,000 followers and expanded beyond memes (although it still posts its share). It’s now a full-fledged brand that caters to ambitious professionals at the start of their careers both inside and outside the company, with a job board, newsletter and live events. Bailey is led by 12 employees, some full-time, and major brands including Disney, DoorDash and Meta have been involved in creating Bailey. And on April 8, AvA will present a weekly live show, focused on bringing hope and information to the Hollywood stair climbers who are the brand’s bread and butter.

The 30 minutes Ava Live It will stream on YouTube on Wednesdays when helpers typically take a well-deserved lunch break (12:30 PM PT) and will be available later on other social channels. The show will include two or three curated interviews with industry and news industry professionals, as well as some other elements that Bailey has yet to announce — though he says the trailer for the show, which shows him putting headlines about the death of Hollywood through the shredder, is teasing one.

Ultimately, Bailey says, “The underlying theme of it all is this feeling of optimism in a world and an industry where there is so much negativity and headlines.”

However, the assistants versus agents approach is not fanciful. This is the account that jokingly set up a GoFundMe to buy Warner Bros. Discovery after Paramount won the bidding war for the historic studio and portrayed new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro as the sly Tom (played by Matthew Macfadyen) from HBO. succession.

As traditional film and television shrink in size, Billy talks to… Hollywood Reporter On what makes him feel positive about starting his career in Hollywood in 2026 and why “young people just have to be flexible in their definition of what entertainment is.”

Warner Bailey, photographed March 30 in Los Angeles at his office. Photography by Yasara Gunawardena

Why does Hollywood need a new weekly offering of assistants versus agents in your opinion?

I think there’s a ton of good content out there. But what I decided [on] It was a curated live show that specifically caters to this next generation of entertainment and gives students direct access to the people, ideas and opportunities shaping the industry in a very approachable way. Much of the shows and content out there today are curated for professionals with a deep understanding of the industry. We’re here to make a product that’s accessible, to be honest in a world of abundance, to help provide a road map that didn’t exist when I was trying to break into this industry. It offers approachable content designed and tailored for early-stage professionals, as well as students. We now have ambassadors on 135 campuses in eight countries. We have WhatsApp groups. It’s a valuable feedback loop to listen to [those audiences] A lot of the content out there goes over their heads. So what we’re trying to do is create content that’s approachable for them on a human level that speaks from a place of authenticity, which hopefully, again, will be easy to understand for the younger generation who may not have that level of understanding of the industry yet.

So why live? Can people ask questions during the presentation?

Yes, exactly, it will be interactive. I think the great part about live streaming is that it provides a sense of authenticity and real human connection that a lot of polished content doesn’t provide. The polished content, the podcasting, that we’ve been involved in, I listen to a lot of great podcasts out there, but sometimes it’s too convoluted and you lose that sense of real human connection where you can directly interact with your followers and take questions directly. I think the thing I struggled with when I was trying to break in was that I had a lot of questions and nowhere to ask them. So we’re taking that and creating a more equitable environment [access to] Executives who will allow our community to have their questions answered in a live format.

Do you have any creative inspiration for this show?

I’m a big sports fan. I grew up watching Sports CenterI think there are current offers, TBBN [[Technology Business Programming Networkwhich was just acquired by OpenAI]is the one that did this in technology, Breaking and entering He does that now in the world of marketing and advertising and I was on this show Breaking and entering The show, I’m very close to Breaking and entering youths. They did a great job.

The interesting part for me is that I am not a creator. I’m someone who has built a media brand, a brand partnership department, and a community without being a creator in the first place, which I think is pretty rare. So we’re trying to reverse engineer a lot of the content side of me being a creator, and yet people want the AvA label, but there are a lot of people out there that inspire me. And I think the goal is to go an inch wide, go a mile deep, stay in our niche, stay our course, and serve the addressable community that we’ve captured, which is about 300,000 young people in the entertainment industry and a lot of students.

I like the idea of a Sports Center For Hollywood assistants.

The way I want this show to be is that I’m learning from the viewers as our viewers are also learning in real time from the people I’m interviewing. So it’s not my show, it’s a show where we bring in experts in their fields. It’s a real interview show with built-in news, but it’s not my podcast or my show, it’s actually a curation package of everything that’s happening in the industry and lessons. A lot of it is career oriented and hopefully inspiring to this next generation. And the underlying theme of it all is this feeling of optimism in a world and an industry where there’s so much negativity in the headlines. The younger generation is passionate, and we want them to be excited to jump into this industry. And from what we hear, by many headlines and narratives, their dreams are almost shattered before they are broken. So we’re trying to turn that on its head and provide a really optimistic lens into the future of our industry.

What makes you optimistic about this business now as someone who speaks to those on the ground floor and also makes fun of Hollywood?

I want this to highlight that I love the industry we work in. And I’m so grateful to be a part of this because I grew up with no connections and no access to the industry, and I didn’t even go to Los Angeles. For me, I’m very fascinated by it. I’m so excited about it. And I see from the hundreds and thousands of conversations we have with students and young people that they are really passionate about this industry and they are just trying to find opportunity. I think negative headlines are completely fair and foolproof. There is a transformation and change in the industry that begins with consolidation, and it begins with strikes and the Corona virus. I felt like, I was furloughed from my job at Live Nation and a lot of those jobs never came back. There are mergers and consolidations that cause a lot of pain to a lot of people, and that’s real, and that’s very fair and valid. What we’re trying to find, what we’re trying to show is where the future and opportunities lie for this next generation. This is one aspect.

The other is that because of the fractured and fragmented industry, there are more ways than ever to work in entertainment. You just have to be flexible in your definition of what entertainment is. I also think that even though the gatekeepers are still there – and I’m not saying that’s because of AvA, I think just because of how things have changed in the last couple of years – the gatekeepers don’t control the… Nothing like they are used to in entertainment. And so I see people, young people building real careers offline first, bringing clout to Hollywood. The next generation, they don’t wait for permission, they build their own table instead of waiting for a seat at it.

We’ve touched on the challenges early-career workers face today. Are there certain things that worry you? Like artificial intelligence, or the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger?

I mean, I think you nailed two of them. I think [the] The job market, we have 250 jobs on our job board now that we’re spending [lots of time] Researching and trying to find opportunities, but the job market is very tough there. AI makes me nervous, especially on the production side. I think there are good uses for AI that I think can help people. But yes, I think generative AI is scary for a number of reasons, and the pace of its development and lack of guardrails makes me nervous for creatives in this industry, myself included.

If there was one thing you wish the entertainment industry’s top executives learned about the next generation to come, what would it be?

They are driven, they are smart, they want to work hard, they want to be in the industry, and they want to learn and adapt to where the industry is headed. I think there is a negative connotation around the next generation. There is always. And I don’t represent Generation Z. I’m in my 30s, I was an assistant eight years ago. But just by talking and talking to a lot of students, there’s also a lot of interest in working in established Hollywood. I know this next generation is worth betting on. They have a lot to offer and just want a seat at the table and a voice. I believe that listening to and empowering young people means seeing companies that succeed [due to that]whether it’s from streamers, production companies that empower young creators to take content, cut it, and create fan edits, or UTA when they bought JUV Consulting.

So I guess what I would say is that this next generation is worth betting on and giving them a seat at the table and you’ll be able to connect with the community that you’re trying to sell content to eventually. It’s better to have them in the room than just assume what excites them, and what kind of content they want to see. And I think Gen Z gravitates, especially on a theatrical level, toward content that represents them on an authentic level rather than telling them what’s important to them. They determine this themselves. So I’m excited to see this next generation come in and lead. That’s why, for me, I only hire people in that age group — 21 to 24 years old — because I want to keep my ear to the ground and hope other companies do the same.