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When Darrell D. Miller looks out at the crowd gathered to honor him at Variety’s Power of Law breakfast on April 9, he can be confident that none of the other entertainment attorneys in attendance have traveled a career path quite like his.
Like Miller, they may have attended a prestigious law school (Georgetown, in his case), boast an impressive job title at a venerable firm (he’s founding chair of the Entertainment & Sports Law Department at 108-year-old Fox Rothschild) and have decades-long records of brokering innovative deals for big name talent (his clients include Angela Bassett and her husband Courtney B. Vance, Oscar-winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Taylor Tomlinson and rapper-actor Chris “Ludacris” Bridges). But it’s safe to say no one else’s career was set in motion by an epiphany on Girgaon Chowpatty beach.
The year was 1986. Miller was playing the Jester in a production of the musical “Once Upon a Mattress” that was touring cities in India and Sri Lanka. He saw rows of sleeping bodies lined up on the side of the road, beggars who had mutilated their bodies to become better earners and a general atmosphere of overcrowding and poverty the likes of which he had never seen growing up in the American Midwest. But, for the most part, he was insulated from the harsh realities of daily life in the country on the trip.
“We were performing for royalty, we stayed where the president stays, we ate the best food,” recalls Miller. “But that was not remotely satisfying to me because I wanted to see the people.”
One day during the troupe’s stay in Bombay (now Mumbai), Miller and several like-minded cohorts ventured out to Chowpatty, where they saw locals fishing the ocean waters from makeshift rafts made of oblong hunks of wood lashed together with rope that they would untie and leave on the beach at the end of each workday. At that moment, he realized that if he wanted to continue to have these incredible experiences, he’d need a larger, more consistent income stream than his then-current vocation as a singer-actor provided.
“I started thinking how you get money in America,” he remembers. “Every parent tells you to become a doctor or a lawyer. I discovered lawyers need three years of school versus 12 for a doctor. And lawyers were integrated in every aspect of entertainment, whether it was the contracts that were made, the decisions about who’s going to do what or the negotiations of talent. I said, OK, I’m going to figure out a way.”
The fact that he found a way and succeeded to the degree he has is a testament to his will, his intelligence and his wide-ranging curiosity.
Fox Rothschild chairman Mark L. Morris recalls that when the firm hired Miller in 2009, “it was clear that he had a plan for becoming a well-known attorney throughout the entertainment industry. He was constantly networking and learning about the various aspects of the industry.”
Adds Mark Silow, Fox Rothschild partner and chair emeritus, “Because of his reputation in the industry, he was able, in pretty “Because of his reputation in the industry, he was able to help us build a
pretty formidable entertainment practice that now spans several offices around the country.”
Miller grew up in in Cincinnati, Ohio, a self-described “blue-collar, average kid.” His parents divorced when he was young, and his father, a career Army man who did three tours in Vietnam, wasn’t in the picture, leaving his mother to raise him and his younger brother alone.
The city was a hotbed of music in the ’60s and ’70s, serving as the breeding ground for artists including the Ohio Players and Bootsy Collins. Miller picked up the singing bug from his mother — who performed with noted local jazz guitarist Wilbert Longmire and fronted her own R&B combo — and he sometimes played drums with his own band as her opening act.
When Miller was in the fifth grade, he befriended another showbiz-obsessed classmate, Rocky Carroll, today best known for playing Leon Vance on CBS’ “NCIS” since 2008. The two young Black men were in the right place at the right time to take advantage of a forward-thinking initiative by Cincinnati school superintendent Dr. Donald Waldrip. That program aimed to integrate the city schools through an open enrollment program, which allowed students to attend a new, racially balanced school of their choice, starting with the School for Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA).
“Cincinnati was pretty racially polarized in the ’70s,” explains Carroll. “So the idea was why don’t we create a school focused on cultivating and shaping young creative and performing artists, put it in one of the most undesirable parts of the city and make it one of the most desirable schools to go to?”
Miller’s focus was singing and Carroll’s was acting, but as students at the SCPA, they were expected to do a little bit of everything — acting, music and dancing — and they rose to the challenge. In 1980, Miller played Billy Bigelow to Carroll’s Jigger in “Carousel” and the following year co-starred as the Cowardly Lion in the school’s production of “The Wiz,” which was invited to perform at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C.
Although Miller enjoyed his high school experience, he says he thought he’d “do what 98% of most Midwesterners do and stay in a three-mile radius of my home and go get a job at Ford or General Electric, work for 30 years, get a gold watch and go away.” But his high school counselor Gwen Fields encouraged him to apply to college and coached him through the process. Accepted to several schools, including Syracuse University, he chose to stay close to home and attend the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
During Miller’s summer breaks from college, he progressed from working as a waiter-singer in the Golden Garter Revue at Dill’s Olde Towne Saloon in Traverse City, Mich., after his freshman year to being
a member of the chorus of the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, where he appeared in
productions of everything from “Jesus Christ Superstar” to “They’re Playing Our Song.” After a post-grad bus-and-truck tour with a production of “Guys & Dolls,” starring Tony Roberts, he did what ambitious musical theater talents do and moved to New York City.
Miller’s Broadway auditions for Debbie Allen for a musical adaptation of Stephen King’s “Carrie” and Bob Fosse’s final musical, “Big Deal,” were busts, but he did win the lead in the Off-Broadway jazz opera “Leo” and, all things considered, was doing quite well when he scored the role in the international tours that would change his life. First, he toured Poland and the Soviet Union with a revue of American music standards, then did his fateful stint with “Once Upon a Mattress,” produced by the Minnesota Opera Company as part of a cultural exchange program sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
Returning to U.S. after the latter, Miller put his plan into motion.
“My simple thought was I could actually produce international cultural exchanges for the rest of my life and be fulfilled, but I need the resources to be the initiator, not just the cast member, so I’m going to
go to law school and try to figure it out,” he explains.
Cast in a workshop production of a revival of the musical “Carnival!” at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., he’d secretly drive 45 miles to New Haven several times a week to take an LSAT prep course during the day, then return for the evening’s performance.
The subterfuge paid off. His LSAT scores earned him a spot at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. Upon graduation in 1990, he took the California bar — notorious as the hardest in the country — and passed on the first try. He joined the Downtown L.A. office of a venerable Chicago-based firm Lord Bissell & Brook as a litigator, with the understanding that he would be given the opportunity to branch out into entertainment.
“I remember very vividly how few people of color were behind the scenes with any sense of power, how many doors were still closed,” says Miller of his early days in Hollywood. “But my whole thing was, you
can’t set my measure because I established my measure.”
Miller joined the California Lawyers for the Arts, a nonprofit that provides artists with pro bono legal services, which enabled him to get acquainted with writers, actors and other creators and their contracts. “What I noticed is that the creators didn’t understand the business and the business didn’t understand the creators,” says Miller.
Early on, he was able to sign a few showbiz clients, including actor Kim Fields (“The Facts of Life”) and Carroll, but his entertainment practice didn’t really take off until he turned his attention to music.
“The biggest hip-hop acts were touring all over America, making hundreds of millions of dollars, but they couldn’t get a meeting two floors up with a commercial agent or one floor up with an acting agent,” recalls Miller, who went into private practice in 1996.
Taking note of the injustice, as well as the opportunity, he approached music attorneys he knew and offered to help their clients expand into film, TV and branding opportunities. By the late 1990s, his efforts began to pay off with a series of signings that eventually included Master P, Outkast, Busta Rhymes, DMX and Missy Elliot.
Miller developed “lateral strategies” to build their brands and their businesses across a variety of verticals in and out of entertainment. They’re exemplified by the myriad of deals that he’s brokered for Ludacris for everything from the animated musical-comedy kids series “Karma’s World” to commercials (State Farm Insurance, Movado watches) and equity partnerships in Conjure Cognac and Soul by Ludacris headphones.
Ludacris praises Miller for his affable personality and his ability to explain things in layman’s terms.
“It’s one thing to just have a lawyer do the work, but it’s also great that you understand what’s going on and can truly utilize the information given, so that when future deals come, you’re knowing exactly what you want and how to proactively come up with different options in business and negotiation,” says Ludacris of Miller, who began repping the rapper-actor around the time he debuted as Tej Parker in “2 Fast 2 Furious” (2003).
Miller’s own career as a performer is just a speck in the rearview mirror — he doesn’t practice or keep musical instruments in his home — but Silow notes that he “brings down the house at our annual partners retreat” as a featured player in a makeshift employee band. And that long-ago life still informs his success today.
“I really believe that my creative experiences that I had allowed me to understand creatives,” observes Miller. “It became a secret ingredient, being able to talk in two worlds and be a ferocious advocate who could convince the other side of the argument they couldn’t quite see.”
Burn Scars: Miller Helps L.A. Fire Victims
Darrell Miller is one of the lucky ones. His Altadena home has been still and empty, like a museum after closing time, since he evacuated with his wife and 14-year-old daughter on Jan. 7, when the Eaton Fire came sweeping through their neighbor- hood at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. But at least it still stands. Across the street, a house burned to the ground, and on the street around the corner, eight of the 10 houses were lost.
“The firemen fighting the fires in the lower flats of Altadena looked up and saw the community was on fire,” recounts Miller. “By the time they got there, several had burned, very sporadically — two here, eight there. They told me tiniest of embers from the fire could go through vents in the attic, hit your insulation, and the house is gone.”
All told, the January fires destroyed 57 of the 271 homes in Miller’s gated community, and a total 11,500 homes across 60 square miles in Los Angeles, creating an economic loss that is estimated to be as high as $250 billion.
Miller knows many who were deeply affected by the tragedy, including his Fox Rothschild partner Scott Weston, who lost his Pacific Palisades home of 30 years. Miller’s been doing his best to help those impacted, but he prefers to do it directly, as opposed to through a massive charity like the Red Cross.
“We help people build their GoFundMes, and I’ll direct 20 of my friends and five of my clients [to donate], because I want to see the individuals that I know are right here in front of me helped,” says Miller.
With his home made uninhabitable by smoke and soot and the water unsafe to drink, Miller and his family were forced to move into a rental house in neighboring Pasadena.
“We had to rush to set up a new life for four to six months or maybe up to a year,” says Miller. “We are with the California Fair Plan and they are really treating their insured horribly by generally rejecting any claim that doesn’t involve your house burning down. Our and thousands of others homeowners’ toxic ash, soot and smoke damage is somehow deemed not covered by our insurance. We have been forced to hire public adjusters and litigators to fight on our behalf while we remain stuck in temporary housing.”
Book Smart: Miller’s ‘Guide’ Looks at Success in the Biz
When Darrell Miller advises his clients to branch out into secondary monetizable verticals, it’s not a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” In addition to being a busy entertainment attorney and a one- time professional singer, he is also the author of “The 16th Minute of Fame: An Insider’s Guide for Maintaining Success Beyond 15 Minutes of Fame.”
“Society does a great job of preparing us to be successful and a terrible job at helping us stay successful,” explains Miller. “When I arrived in Hollywood and saw how much money is made and how high people go, only to then crash down to the ground and lose the money, it kind of broke my heart. So I wrote the book as kind of a message to first-generation wealthy artists, entertainers and other people in the business, but also more broadly for people that get their first check who are really trying to build something.”
Published in 2014, the book touches on the disruptions caused by cable and music streaming services. In the second edition, which he’s looking to publish later this year, he will address the paradigm shift caused by AI, which Miller believes is “going to be another equalizer, like the internet.”
English (US) ·