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"Tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT, E! will premiere new reality show Scouted, which follows young women as they&amp;#x27;re plucked from their hometowns and brought to New York by Michael Flutie&amp;#x27;s The Scouting Company. The girls are coached and preened and sent to photo tests&amp;amp;#8212;all in hope that they&amp;#x27;ll land a contract with One Management, one of the top modeling agencies in New York. Ever wonder what it takes to make it as a model in New York City? Check out our in-depth interview with Flutie, a 30-year veteran of the cutthroat industry, after the jump. He dishes with us about the end of the supermodel era, what agencies mean when they talk about &amp;quot;natural talent,&amp;quot; and the pitfalls of being a new face on the scene. I sat down with Flutie last week&amp;amp;#8212;he&amp;#x27;s a legend in the modeling industry and someone I&amp;#x27;d long admired, ever since I thought I might want to work as a model booker back in the late-90s. In 2000, when I was applying for internships at top agencies in the city, it was around the time when all the bad press was blowing up around the modeling industry&amp;amp;#8212;it was a few years after Michael Gross&amp;#x27; book Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women had been published and the BBC had recently aired a horrific documentary about how some of the top agencies in the world had been exploiting its underage talent. Flutie&amp;#x27;s agency, Company Management was one of the few that had a stellar reputation for taking care of its models&amp;amp;#8212;as did the agency I wound up interning at, Marilyn Agency. Today, Flutie&amp;amp;#8212;who once managed the careers of supermodels such as Cindy Crawford, Stephanie Seymour, Amy Wesson, Frankie Rayder, Milla Jovovich, Jaime (a.k.a. James) King, and Alexis Bledel&amp;amp;#8212;runs a production company and The Scouting Agency out of a gorgeous loft space in the Flatiron district in Manhattan (where they filmed Scouted). Glamour: Let&amp;#x27;s talk about model archetypes. In the industry, we always hear about new girls who are the &amp;quot;Baby Helena&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Baby Naomi.&amp;quot; What are some classic model archetypes and why do agents look for that in new faces? Flutie: There&amp;#x27;s something I call telegenekicity, and it&amp;#x27;s not about just models. Of course, I can reference Iman, Tatiana Patitz, Kelly Emberg, Bonnie Berman&amp;amp;#8212;I go all the way back&amp;amp;#8212;but I think that you develop an eye to register iconic images&amp;amp;#8212;like Greta Garbo and Elizabeth Taylor. And when you see someone, you automatically start putting those people together&amp;amp;#8212;the eyes and the lips. And what that does is that it creates an identity with that person, so when they actually start working, the audience sees exactly what you&amp;#x27;re seeing, and they become recognizable. So instant recognition is when certain women and men have features that look like other people. So baby Gisele is, like, Linda V&amp;amp;#8212;that&amp;#x27;s what she was called for a long time. But Gisele doesn&amp;#x27;t really look like anybody, you can&amp;#x27;t say she looks like this girl or that girl. And I think that&amp;#x27;s what&amp;#x27;s makes her interesting&amp;amp;#8212;that she really does have a very unique look. I think you&amp;#x27;ll see in the show we tend to go for breaking ground with how beauty is perceived. It&amp;#x27;s not typical. I think that the idea of looking for baby Helena is not as interesting as finding the next whoever that is. Glamour: What do you look for in new models? Flutie: You have to look for a unique quality in that person and it&amp;#x27;s not just always physical. I don&amp;#x27;t think models are great models because of their face or their body. Obviously, I think their physical characteristics are important, but I think it&amp;#x27;s very much about your personality and inner beauty and really understanding how to be a great model instinctively. And that&amp;#x27;s where it all comes from. If you look at the greatest models, it was because they were muses to photographers. They collaborated with the artist and they created the kind of images that become iconic. Glamour: Does that still happen now? Flutie: No, because it&amp;#x27;s short lived. A girl&amp;#x27;s career today doesn&amp;#x27;t have the same kind of life span, whereas it used to be a collaboration and a partnership and it continued. Peter Lindbergh still uses girls&amp;amp;#8212;like, look at Amber Valetta&amp;amp;#8212;so there are some photographers that have relationships long-term with models. I also think that the industry can&amp;#x27;t support the amount of models that exist right now and therefore the relationships between photographers and models and even the clients is short lived. Glamour: There aren&amp;#x27;t supermodels like there were in the 80s anymore, are there? Flutie: Designers had a lot to do with that. In the early 90s when designers started to feel that models were becoming more important than their own personalities and own brand, and girls were asking for all this money to go and walk the runways? Designers decided that they were going to switch models out every season. Designers themselves they destroyed the whole process of the supermodel. Glamour: So many of the models these days seem to come from Eastern Europe. Flutie: America has always been the most fertile ground for models&amp;amp;#8212;and they were always exported to other countries. When Eastern Europe opened up its doors to the rest of the world, a lot of the girls that were basically working there for $1 a month realized that if they were beautiful and that they could go to Paris and work for $1,000 a day versus the $10,000 that the other girls were demanding. So it created a huge imbalance in the financial structure of how clients could budget out campaigns. The market became flooded. American girls are much more financially savvy&amp;amp;#8212;for example, if a girl went to Paris and she was going to do a fragrance campaign, she would say she wouldn&amp;#x27;t do it for less than half-a-million dollars. Whereas a girl from the Czech Republic would do it for $100,000. I think that&amp;#x27;s a really big imbalance that created the demise of the modeling industry&amp;amp;#8212;and it also created a gap in giving girls an opportunity to become or gain super-status. Glamour: These days, models aren&amp;#x27;t just pretty faces anymore&amp;amp;#8212;they&amp;#x27;re out there, giving interviews, blogging, tweeting, becoming their own brands. How do you scout for someone with a strong personality? Is it harder than it was before? Flutie: I think as a scout you have to pick. It is harder. You have to talk and explain that this is not just about standing one-dimensionally in front of a camera. Today they have to be three-dimensional. Technology&amp;#x27;s changed, the communication, the marketing and advertising community supports beautiful girls that can be articulate and smart. And also Anna Wintour doesn&amp;#x27;t want to sit next to some girl who can&amp;#x27;t say two words. As an agent, you have to be responsible for discovering those girls. If you think somebody has potential, you have to create programs within the agency that aren&amp;#x27;t just about wellness and health, but also about etiquette. I think that&amp;#x27;s what Eileen Ford did that was so brilliant in the 1950s and 1960s. Models didn&amp;#x27;t just live with her because they needed a place to live, they lived with her because she really wanted to groom them. I think that America lost that&amp;amp;#8212;and I think that the whole world lost that, the whole idea of being polite. That&amp;#x27;s what we have to do, to bring all that back. Glamour: So you scout a new face and you find a girl who has lots of potential. What are some reasons the promising new girls fail? Flutie: Lack of discipline. First of all, I think some of them fail because they just don&amp;#x27;t have natural talent, and they shouldn&amp;#x27;t even be in the business to begin with. Glamour: We hear a lot about natural talent. Besides looking good in front of a camera, what is natural talent? Flutie: It means to have the ability to transform, to evolve, to play and role-play with the photographer and the stylist. And really be an actress rather than just a mannequin. So that involves a tremendous amount of confidence and your ability to expose yourself to anything that will make a better photograph. When you look at Steven Meisel&amp;#x27;s pictures and you see girls rolling around in mud or cars are blowing up? It takes a tremendous amount of courage to be able to do that. I think you have to be malleable, and that&amp;#x27;s what makes a truly great model. It&amp;#x27;s not the perfect lip or the perfect face, it&amp;#x27;s your own ability to take on a character and that&amp;#x27;s, I think, something there&amp;#x27;s a misconception about. A lot of people don&amp;#x27;t make the correlation between acting and modeling, they think of them as two separate things. But I really believe that a model is an actress. Glamour: Do you have any favorite scouting stories? Flutie: I don&amp;#x27;t know if you remember a girl named Nadege&amp;amp;#8212;she was a huge model in the early-90s, she had really short hair, she did Versace, and she was in Vogue every single month. I found her sitting waiting in the lobby of a building waiting to be interviewed to be a maid. She didn&amp;#x27;t speak a word of English. So I took her upstairs and I was like,&amp;quot;Want to be a model?&amp;quot; And she was like, &amp;quot;Sure!&amp;quot; I personally cut all her hair off into a pixie cut. Another really cool story is a girl named Julia Van Der Molen. I was in Holland very late at night driving to my hotel, and I passed by a girl standing underneath a lamppost waiting for a bus. I told the taxi driver to stop. He stopped, but by the time I&amp;#x27;d convinced him that I wasn&amp;#x27;t a madman, she&amp;#x27;d gotten on the bus. We chased the the bus until she got off, and then convinced her that she should come and see me the next morning. She was absolutely gorgeous. I brought her to Paris and her first booking was with Ellen Von Unwerth. Glamour: What are some of your favorite places to scout now? Flutie: Malls are good, but there are geographical pockets&amp;amp;#8212;Wisconsin, MInnesota, that whole middle American north, they have the Nordic genes. I also love the northwest, San Francisco, and Seattle. I think it&amp;#x27;s easy to find girls in climates where their bodies are exposed. Obviously, if you go scouting in Alaska, you&amp;#x27;re not going to find anybody because they&amp;#x27;re always covered up. Anywhere there&amp;#x27;s a beach is great for scouting. And state fairs. I&amp;#x27;ve gone to a lot of state fairs. What&amp;#x27;s cool about state fairs is that you get these girls who are, like, showing rabbits. Or goats. State fairs are not just about technology, they come with their animals to show their livestock. So you see these beautiful girls stand up and they&amp;#x27;re, like, holding up a rabbit, and you&amp;#x27;re like, &amp;quot;Excuse me, have you ever thought about being a model?&amp;quot; Glamour: How often do you get turned down by someone you&amp;#x27;re scouting? Flutie: I think then more so than now. I think now people are much more receptive because they can just go online and just Google your name and make sure you&amp;#x27;re not, you know, psycho. But, before, I think lot of opportunities were missed by a lot of girls. Also parents! The girls would go home and would say, &amp;quot;Oh, you know, I was just scouted.&amp;quot; And the parents were, like, &amp;quot;You&amp;#x27;re not going to be a prostitute.&amp;quot; The cast of Scouted, from left: Nylon style editor-at-large Dani Stahl, Michael Flutie, casting director Julia Samersova, former model Beri Smither. Will you be tuning in to see the premiere episode of Scouted tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT on E!? I&amp;#x27;ve sneak-peeked the first episode and it is good. If you check it out, let us know what you think in the comments! PLUS... &amp;amp;#183; E!s New Show Goes Inside The Burger Joints &amp;amp; Rodeos Where Top Models Are Found &amp;amp;#183; Before they were supermodels: what your favorite catwalkers used to do &amp;amp;#183; Sasha Pivovarova For Gap Body Hits Stores This Week! More Ways to Get Glamour: Get the latest fashion updates via Twitter on @glamour_fashion Check out our chic Tumblr! Read Glamour magazine on your iPad&amp;amp;#8212;print subscribers, it&amp;amp;#8217;s now part of your subscription plan! Like freebies? Enter the latest Glamour sweepstakes! Sign up for our fashion and beauty newsletters to get easy style tips (it&amp;#x27;ll make your inbox 10x sexier, we promise). And, did you know you can read glamour.com on your smart phone?! It&amp;amp;#8217;s the ultimate boredom buster. Photos courtesy E!"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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