Summer's talent agency battle royale

HOLLYWOOD IS all about bragging rights: who has the biggest box-office returns, the largest market share, the most Oscar nominations. Talent agents love the glory as much as anyone but generally prefer to keep the spotlight on their clients.

So we've decided to do the back-slapping for them.

As much as they say they dislike reading about themselves, agents very much have been in the news recently. While it's unclear if the Screen Actors Guild will go on strike and prompt a complete work stoppage, the agencies are still hurting from the recent 100-day Writers Guild of America labor dispute, which forced many to reduce staff, drop lesser clients and forgo bonuses.

Because most movie studios planned for the possibility of a SAG walkout this summer, they front-loaded their film production schedules and committed very few dollars to making movies in the year's second half, leaving agents scrambling to find their clients work.

At the same time, skirmishes among the town's five top agencies have been escalating, with a prominent agent or an important client switching sides nearly every week.

More worrisome to all talent agencies are the numerous A-list actors who no longer have agents at all, a list that includes Emile Hirsch (who left United Talent Agency as soon as "Speed Racer" bombed) and "Iron Man's" Gwyneth Paltrow (who is no longer being represented by Creative Artists Agency).

As the year's most important -- and competitive -- moviegoing season, the summer provides a perfect period to measure the agents' true clout. We've selected 25 of what we consider to be the summer's highest-profile films and analyzed which agencies currently represent the key creative talent in each movie.

Admittedly, it's a tremendously subjective exercise: Who says the upcoming "X-Files" movie is more worthy than "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2"? Well, we do. And isn't Sigourney Weaver's voice a critical ingredient of "Wall-E"? Sadly, not by our reckoning. "Hancock's" Jason Bateman makes the cut, but not "Wanted's" Morgan Freeman? We've seen both movies, and that's our ruling. And shed a tear for producers too, none of whom qualified because our focus rests on directors, writers and actors.