Light in the Dark

College of Charleston Magazine

by Mark Berry and Photography by Leslie McKellar

Suzanne Manseau Green ’79 walks down a hallway and stops in front of a display case. Inside is a colorful collage of pictures – made up of magazine spreads, advertisements, catalog pages, playbills, programs. Some are yellowed and starting to fade, others crisp, as if ripped from last week’s People magazine.

Green points to an image, then another. Then another. Each one has a story. Each one is special to her. And each one represents hours of cultivation, hours of work, hours of relationship building.

Smiling, she loses herself for a moment in these stories. And then abruptly cuts herself off and turns to the next display case, full of another rainbow montage of clippings and cut-outs, fondly remembering one more tidbit. “We’ve really been so blessed,” she says with the pride of a parent. “There are just too many great stories to tell.”

Waving her hand in front of these many display cases, she observes, “This is what we work for … this is what we do.”

What Green does is run a talent agency – Millie Lewis of Charleston, proving that you don’t have to be in New York’s Garment District or on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard to have an impact in the modeling and entertainment industry.

In fact, she’s doing just fine on Northside Drive in North Charleston.

If the entertainment world has a front line, Green is knee deep in the trenches. Like others in the placement agency game, she’s the first point of contact for many aspiring actors and models – what’s known as a “mother agent” in the biz. She’s the eyes and ears on the ground, uncovering new talent wherever she can and funneling it up the complex entertainment network.

And she has found talent in many different places. It’s there in the mall shops. It’s there in the beauty pageants she judges. It’s there in the classes her agency offers. It’s there at the national talent competitions, for which she prepares select students from her school. And it’s even here on the College’s campus, where she discovered Matt Czuchry ’99, Bryan Mayer ’06 (recent member of the Screen Actors Guild) and music major Josh Strickland (of American Idol and Broadway Tarzan fame) at the annual Mr. CofC Pageant, before helping them to the next level.

“Basically, I’m a facilitator,” Green explains. “I help and I guide. I educate those interested in the fashion and talent worlds, trying to bring light into a dark industry.”

And Green is no flashlight in the dark – she’s a veritable spotlight. Her portfolio of talent discoveries includes actresses Mena Suvari (American Beauty, American Pie and Rumor Has It) and Ashley Scott (AI: Artificial Intelligence, Strange Wilderness and TV’s Jericho) as well as international models Breanne Riggs ’10, Kimberly Robertson and Austen Brown.

Unfortunately, while fame may seem ubiquitous within Green’s agency, it’s not.

“It’s a tough business,” Green admits. “There are certainly a lot of highs. But – as we all know- not everyone makes it. Not even close. And it may have nothing to do with their talent – just the circumstances and what the casting directors, agents or entertainment executives are looking for at that time. I also serve as a support system for those low moments. I deal with the disappointed families, talking them through the process.”

Green has been learning this process for 20 years. During college, the business administration major was first exposed to the talent world when her father encouraged her to take some “poise” instruction with Millie Lewis, a former cover girl-turned-talent agent who offered courses in Charleston. Her father hoped that these classes would soften his daughter’s tomboy demeanor (Suzanne had played three sports in high school and “just plodded everywhere I went,” she laughs), ultimately preparing her for a successful corporate career.

Green enjoyed the classes and forged a relationship with Lewis that would be instrumental a decade later. “After college, I worked in a variety of sales jobs in the Carolinas and Georgia,” she says. “Being a woman in a man’s world – especially in sales in the late 80s – it toughened me up.”

Then, Green ran into Lewis in a chance encounter in Charleston and was convinced to start teaching some of Millie Lewis’ Saturday classes on personal development and modeling.

“Then,” Green recalls, “she gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Lewis wanted to grow the talent competition portion of the business and needed someone to take over her Charleston operations. Green took up the challenge, learning quickly the ins and outs of the divergent worlds of entertainment – the fashion side (modeling) and the talent side (acting).

“I didn’t understand the intricacies overnight,” she says. “Over time, I have focused on the building of relationships in the industry. You click with some, others you don’t. I don’t take it personally if they don’t work – I learned to just focus on the relationships that do work.”

She also learned to run a business along the way. Doing the accounting, the budgeting, the marketing, the managing, all the little things that keep any small company afloat. And she had to learn fast, experiencing a baptism of water, so to speak. She had only been in charge of the business for a few months when Hurricane Hugo slammed into Charleston in 1989, and in the process, flooded and wrecked her building. But Green, ever the competitor, was (and is) tough. She rolled up her sleeves and got everything going again – rebuilding it stronger than before. In 2003, Millie Lewis AMTC recognized Green and her team for their overall excellence and industry savvy with its lifetime achievement award.

You will often hear Green say, maybe to a dejected client, a prospective talent or a tired colleague, “Tomorrow is always another opportunity.”

It’s that optimism that keeps her going, keeps her ever-vigilant for those diamonds in the rough and keeps her working, day and night, to find her talent a place in print and on screen.

“This is a fascinating business,” Green marvels. “And I love that I play a role in helping people take their first step on the way to making it.”