Nick Roses.

Has there ever been a more perfect name for a Hollywood talent manager? It’s so perfect that one might wonder whether the guy had turned his lemon of a real name into lemonade, as per Hollywood tradition—the way Irving Lazar became Swifty Lazar and Sam Goldfish became Samuel Goldwyn. But damned if his birth certificate doesn’t read “Nicholas Tomas Roses.” The name of his hometown in Florida? Hollywood. Some guys are just naturals.

Last year, Roses started his own company, Total Talent Management, where he handles the careers of 50-odd actors. It’s a manager’s job to arrange auditions, shape a client’s career path, and generally do whatever he can to get the clients jobs. If you fail to see a distinction between a manager and an agent, that’s because there barely is one.

Roses’s business is a bit more specialized, in that most of his clients are between the ages of 6 and 17. He is among the subset of managers who focus on what Hollywood calls “young performers” and everyone else calls “kids.” The child-rep business, once largely ignored by the biggest agencies and management companies, is booming like never before. The onslaught of kid-friendly cable TV networks (Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), coupled with the rise of TV talent competitions, puts every child just one audition away from becoming the next Miley Cyrus or Zac Efron. This makes for a motivated client base.

Roses has been in the management game since 2002. Which isn’t all that noteworthy until you discover he was born in 1989. Which means Roses was younger than some of his clients. And he looks the part. At work, he favors cuffed gray jeans and a formfitting T-shirt, and he tends to tug and flip his shaggy blond hair. To visit him in his office in Burbank is to find a flaxen-haired cherub surrounded by big gym balls (for exercise) and little squeak-toys (for the office dog). But he talks the talk, albeit in the voice of his generation. He says, “What I think is funny is that a lot of people are like, ‘Here’s this kid who hasn’t paid his dues.’ Like, ‘Who does he think he is?’ But I’ve been doing this since I’m 12 years old!” He tugs his hair in mock frustration. “You know what I mean? I have 110 percent worked the mailroom bullshit. I’ve done all that. I might not have done it at William Morris. But I did it. And I did it way earlier.”

Howard Meltzer, a longtime casting director, calls Roses “Bernie Brillstein in a 20-year-old’s body.” Many others in Hollywood deem him either a gimlet-eyed child prodigy prone to the occasional youthful indiscretion or a shark-eyed huckster with the face of a Mouseketeer. Or both.

Roses’s status as a communal lightning rod began in April, when the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office charged him with seven counts of, in essence, criminal Hollywood skulduggery. Parents of children that Roses represented complained that he, among other things, baited them into moving to Los Angeles and becoming clients at a poorly run management company which bilked them out of money. In July, the case was settled when he pleaded no contest to violating a new law prohibiting managers from charging fees to clients for the promise of work or auditions. Such fees are deemed red flags by the Hollywood Establishment; mainstream talent managers work on a commission basis—they don’t make a penny until the client does.

But that was only part of the problem for Roses, who already had a reputation for generally outrageous behavior in Hollywood. “There is one reason for this case being on everyone’s lips,” wrote the ubiquitous Internet publication Deadline Hollywood, which quoted a rival talent manager as saying, “I can’t think of anyone else of that age who is more hated. He’s wronged a lot of people.”