Agent Disappears With Actors Money - 2

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Agent disappears with actors money

The hard earned dollars of potentially hundreds of film and television actors has gone missing after a Queensland based talent agent appointed a liquidator last week.

Pacific Artists Management (PAM), run by Jillian Rollo with assistant Stefanie Parry, was representing actors in NSW for several years illegally and without a license.

"The problem is a regulatory one," said Simon Whipp of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the union which has been investigating Rollo and Parry for over four years.

"You don’t need a license to run an actors agency in Queensland, but in NSW you need to register with the Office of Industrial Relations before you start trading," he said.

One actor who has been affected by the dealings of Rollo and Parry is Charlotte Gregg, an up and coming actor who recently starred in a feature film that premiered at the Brisbane International Film Festival.

"I was with her for several years as she represented me while I was in Queensland and then when I moved to Sydney," she said.

"There were always inconsistencies with what I was earning and what I was actually being paid. I would chase up money months later only to be told by Jillian that ‘the production company has gone bust and we can’t pay you’."

"She was also charging me 'administration fees' which she wasn’t supposed to be doing. Thankfully the union got some money back for me earlier this year but there are other amounts of money that I don’t think that I will ever receive."

Others are less likely to recoup any of the losses estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands with a further twenty actors filing as creditors in the last week and with one individual actress owed nearly $30,000.

It seems, however, that the forced closure of the agency hasn't stopped the pair to continue representing actors. A union representative informed Arts Hub that as recently as July, Rollo's assistant Stefanie Parry registered two more companies through ASIC, Performing Artists Management (PAM) and Entertainment Playhouse at exactly the same address as the now liquidated company.

An article from last month in their local newspaper said that Parry was now looking for "Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian and Islander extras for the film Nim's Island, which is to star Jodie Foster and Abigail Breslin". According to corporations law it is perfectly legal for Rollo to now work under the umbrella of her junior assistant’s company.

Another actor, Barton Ware, who stars in the Government’s Ice drug campaign advertisement, is owed over $5,000 by PAM.

"We filmed the advertisement in mid-May and I started calling Jillian towards the end of June only to have none of my calls returned or emails answered. After a while I did some research only to find out other actors in other agency’s had been paid," he said.

It's a familiar story for many Sydney and Brisbane based actors and the union deems that actors should be paid within six to eight weeks of doing a job and that agents must pay their actors within ten working days of receiving payment.

One source said that it was a disgrace that Rollo and Parry should get away without paying money to struggling actors, especially when "Jillian [Rollo] is currently putting in a pool".

Neither Rollo nor Parry returned any phone calls.

As published in Arts Hub


Image Credit: descramble/flickr