Going Down in La-La Land (8 page)

It seemed to me that many of the agents were nerds in high school or just ugly guys who never got a date. As a big Hollywood agent they could finally get a chick with big tits and have aspiring starlets blowing them every night, something they could only dream of before.

As for the women agents, especially the older ones, they looked like harried shrews with glasses falling of their faces and frizzy hair, ready to snap at you if you glanced at them the wrong way.

All in all, the whole operation was something to see. Why anybody would want to deal with a self-absorbed and temperamental actor or actress when they could work in a top-notch law firm making just as much money was beyond my imagination.

Stars came in and out of the place all the time. Alyssa Milano with her latest fling, smiling perfect white teeth and placing her parking ticket ever so softly on the desk to get validated. Dean Cain came in regularly to goof off with his rep, racing by the front desk without a word. Helena Bonham Carter dressed like a bag lady when bringing birthday flowers for her guy. George Clooney came in for a meeting once, and Toby the young receptionist nearly passed out when he asked him to validate his parking.

Being completely out of tune with the likes of the general public, I wasn’t impressed or blown away by any one of them.

I thought it was cool that Cyndi Lauper was a client, but since she wasn’t exactly a mainstream Hollywood actress, I didn’t expect her to come through the elevators doors anytime soon greeting me in her squeaky Brooklyn voice. There was, however, one name in the building that really grabbed my interest. But she wasn’t a client of Acclaimed Talent Agency.

On the lobby directory and in the elevators the top floor of the building was listed as Pia Zadora’s offices. At this point in time, most people probably have no idea who the former Golden Globe–winning, scandal-ridden, multimillionaire-marrying, singer-actress is. But being a John Waters fan and an oddball, I found her kitsch image and scandalous past fascinating. Now this was a large-sized building with an investment company and a large talent agency taking up four of the five floors. Why Pia Zadora, who as far as I knew hadn’t done anything in years, needed an office was a mystery to me.

Every day I kept my eyes open for Pia Zadora, but to no avail. And no one ever seemed to go up to the fifth floor. Finally one day I noticed an average, everyday-looking blonde girl going up to the fifth floor. I couldn’t resist.

“
Excuse me. Does Pia Zadora come by her office very much?” There were a few other people in the elevator with us. Until that point it had been pretty quiet, so all focus shifted to the demure blonde.

“
Umm, she comes in every now and then,” she answered very slowly and very cautiously, as though she was really thinking about how to answer my question without her answer sounding bad.

Translation—no, she never comes in, and just keeps expensive offices in Beverly Hills for the hell of it. Damn. After that I knew I’d never catch a glimpse of Pia Zadora. Now working at this place held even less promise than it had a minute before, if that was at all possible.

After a few weeks Acclaimed Talent Agency was beginning to wear on my nerves big time. At the end of each day my butt felt as if it had been flattened by a skillet from sitting so long. My throat was hoarse from constantly answering the phones and having to say the same words over and over and over again.

“
Thank you for calling Acclaimed Talent Agency, how can I direct your call?”

Also, because I was the last of the four receptionists hired, that left me stuck with a 10:30 to 6:30 shift, right smack in the middle of the day. With Los Angeles traffic and a schedule like that you could forget about getting anything done. I nearly killed myself trying to get to a hip-hop class at Crunch Gym every Tuesday and Thursday.

On top of it, I had been chewed out by a few of the boob-chasing prick agents for no reason whatsoever.

“
When I tell you to hold a call you don’t have to remind me twice, got it!” one particularly hirsute and sweaty guy yelled at me with foam at the corners of his mouth.

There had to be something better than this, if only I could get off the phones for a split second to look for it.

I worked closely with Kim, who was still being driven mad with love for the copier boy. They would call each other from the front desk to the copy room over the phone and have passionate, conflicted conversations in hushed voices.

“
Why are you acting like this to me?” Kim would plead into her headset, as I sat less than a foot away trying to ignore what I was hearing. I didn’t care to hear the details. Every once in a while she’d lose it and her voice would rise.

“
No, that’s not true!” she yelped into the line at her defense one afternoon right as Whitman was walking by. He glanced at her, furled his eyebrows, and just shook his head in a comical exasperation.

Kim took the bus every day back and forth from Echo Park on the other side of town, and she did performance art on the side. She was definitely the kind of person that could be described as a fringe dweller, which was saying a lot coming from me.

“
I’m throwing a barbeque with friends this weekend,” she would tell me. “And were going to read poetry, have body paints, and do Reiki. Want to come?”

I never made it out to Echo Park. Yet she was nice and entertaining, which made the days pass by easier.

On the other hand, Matthew was slowly becoming my nemesis on the job. For some reason the guy had it out for me from the get-go. He was just a complete wart on my ass and obsessed with every call that came in and out of the place, and every visitor that stopped by the front desk.

I rarely had to sit with him answering phones, but when I did it was like having teeth pulled.

“
You and Kim have the calls backed up to eight or ten at a time. When the four of us are here they should never be backed up more than three at a time!” he accused in his irritating Texas drawl.

One of the more excruciating aspects of the job was blowing off aspiring hopefuls and dreamers who called or came by the place. Acclaimed Talent Agency strictly took on talent by referral only with no exceptions. In other words, if you were not the kid or relative of somebody important or already known, forget about it. Don’t bother calling or sending your picture, because it just ends up going in the trash.

To say we got some sad cases on the phone is putting it mildly. Some people called saying they were actors looking for an agent, but you could hardly understand their speech. “Hi. I’m an actor and was calling to see if y’all can find me some jobs,” I’d hear on the other end of the line.

I doubted some of them could even read a script. More than half of the time I had to give an explanation of what “by referral only” meant since they didn’t get it.

“
So what does that mean?” some pathetic soul with bad diction would ask.

“
It means you have to be sent in from somebody they know,” I tried to explain patiently and politely.

Of course, it was somewhat agonizing for me being an actor and in the union to be surrounded by so many people who had the potential to start a career. But if I dared mention it to anyone, Whitman would have me out the door in a minute flat. I was here to answer phones, period.

Security was tight and kept people from walking in, but on occasion someone slipped by with a script or a head shot and tried to give it to me. Which was basically pointless, since nobody but administration and the other receptionists knew that I even existed. To the agents I might as well be invisible. It was like the Boulevard of Broken Dreams came through the phone every day.

Every once in a while something interesting would happen in the office. When I was working there a scandal occurred which involved a supposed teen writing sensation named Kaylee Reston. Hollywood’s creepy obsession with youth was getting out of control at this time, with programs on the WB Network such as
Dawson’s Creek
and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
the happening thing.

Kaylee Reston was supposedly nineteen years old and had just landed a two-year half-million-dollar contract to develop and produce shows for television. That fact in itself was disturbing enough for me, who after four years of college was answering phones for peanuts while a nineteen-year-old gets to write fun scripts for half a million dollars. Was there no justice in the world?

What rocked the agency was when a story broke in one of the trades and on
Entertainment Tonight
that Kaylee Reston was really a thirty-two-year-old who had been in Hollywood for years working under a different name.

For a week everyone made jokes about it, and it was the main conversation by the elevator bank.

“
Dude, I can’t believe she pulled that off!” junior agents would joke in amazement.

The gay guys in administration took particular pleasure in the episode, walking around the office and pronouncing with glee, “Tomorrow I turn sixteen!”

They thought it was just hilarious. As if lying about one’s age was something new in Hollywood. Christ, even Nancy Reagan lied about her age. What the hell did people expect in a town where at age twenty-eight a person is considered the equivalent of a geriatric patient?

It was like coexisting in a town full of pedophiles.

From my perspective Kaylee Reston was a hero that duped the business. And the business deserved it. She should have gotten a gold medal. She was just giving Hollywood what it wanted—youth, youth, and more youth. I hoped that Acclaimed Talent Agency was thoroughly humiliated, but I doubted it. They probably enjoyed the publicity.

I also hoped, at the very least, that Kaylee Reston was able to keep the money from her development deal, or at least some of it.

It was also amusing to observe the behavior of some of the agents when it came time to meet with clients or potential clients. One day a flashy black girl came through the elevator doors with a few huge thugs trailing behind her. She asked to see Ben Fassas, one of the egotistical pricks who had reamed me out for nothing.

Ben Fassas was the worst stereotype of a sleazy Hollywood shark, fat and ugly with an inflated ego. He handled all the rappers and hip-hop people, so I knew the moment she walked in she was probably going to ask for him before she even opened her mouth.

“
Hello. Tasty Jones here to see Ben Fassas,” she said sweetly. I thought she was a pretty girl as well. After complimenting her on her very noticeable diamond watch, I asked if she and her friends (homeboys, really) would like a bottled water. Taking me up on the offer, she grabbed a seat while I called up the asshole and let him know she was there.

“
Tell her I’ll be right out!” he barked over the phone, as usual sounding like I had inconvenienced him by letting him know his appointment had arrived.

“
I’ll be right out,” meant let them sit there for ten minutes before coming to get them.

When their meeting was over and she’d left the office he lingered at the front for a minute or so to talk crap with a few of the other agents who had seen her come in.

“
Man! Her face was wrecked!” he exclaimed, laughing like a jerk with his cohorts.

I thought this was ironic coming from a fat, hairy, greasy-looking eyesore with such a heavy beard that he could shave and have a five o’clock shadow ten minutes later.

Since I have canine hearing I heard a lot of dish while sitting with my ass glued to the front desk chairs. Which client was difficult, which one was demanding, and so forth. Some clients hung around way too much.

One child actor, who had been chosen for the role of a lifetime in a big-budget thriller over hundreds of other hopefuls, was always in the office. He ran around the place like bull in a china shop, pestering basically everybody and behaving out of control.

“
Yo! What up dude?” he’d yell down the hallways.

With a grandma in some faraway state, the agency seemed to be his daycare while he was in LA. Now well into puberty and entering his teen years, this kid was on his way to having an impressive arrest record to go along with his acting career. Not that the agency cared; as long as he was bringing in money they’d put up with his antics.

The cocky, aspiring actress who wore an annoyingly trendy choppy haircut and spoke with a squawky voice was almost as bad. She constantly hung around the office walking in and out of the place like it was her home, and it almost was.

“
Hey baby!” she’d coo to the male agents, hugging them and smothering her breasts against them.

“
Somebody get that girl a part on a location far away,” I told Kim after she passed by us the twentieth time in one day.

By the third month of my being there Acclaimed Talent Agency was beginning to be the ninth circle of hell. Even in bed the words “Thank you for calling Acclaimed Talent Agency, how can I direct your call?” raced though my head like a reoccurring nightmare.

What did I get myself into?
I thought. The phones never stopped there. The headsets we receptionists wore seemed to congeal to your head. Was this what I went to four years of college for?

“
Adam, can’t you at least try to become friendly with clients in the waiting room? Maybe you can get a job as an assistant or something,” Candy asked between puffs of her cigarette one evening when we were sitting out on her balcony.