The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (2 page)

“A-LIST HONCHOS . . . DISH ON THEIR RISE FROM PEONS TO POWER PLAYERS.”

—US Weekly

“This is indeed Hollywood history, more specifically a cogent account of how talent agencies have evolved since [William] Morris was ruled by executives in size 36-short suits. Rensin’s clever use of personal memories as mosaic pieces, arranged in patterns to form an industry-wide portrait, is history for grown-ups.”

—Variety

“Coming from the William Morris mailroom as I have, [I found] this book [to be] the truth of what I experienced. . . . It’s hilarious, a bit crazy, and it should make anyone wonder why people put their careers in the hands of these idiots . . . and remember, I’m one of them. If you have a child, make sure he or she reads this before starting at the bottom—anywhere.”

—
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN Founding partner of Brillstein-Grey, WMA 1955

“A riotous history of all the Hollywood movers and players who came into the industry through the mailrooms of the big talent agencies.”

—The Globe and Mail
(Toronto)

“A worthy successor to Studs Terkel, Rensin delivers not only a riveting history of one of the most powerful springboards in Hollywood but a must-read for anyone with grand ambitions.”

—
CATHERINE CRIER Author of
The Case Against Lawyers

“As the maven of the mailroom, David Rensin puts forth an often-hilarious glimpse of life at the bottom.”

—
PETER BART Editor in Chief,
Variety

“A THOROUGHLY ENTERTAINING ORAL BIOGRAPHY OF A TINSELTOWN INSTITUTION.”

—The San Francisco Examiner

“Here is the quintessential Hollywood Roshomon. . . . David Rensin has impossibly and heroically channeled Studs Terkel and Harold Robbins all at once. This is a pinball machine clanging secret truths that move and careen as brashly as the movers who blurt their guts onto every shockingly entertaining page. And the best part is that we learn that people who are now very, very rich were forced to do very, very humiliating things to achieve such. What a refreshing equalizer for all of us.”

—
BILL ZEHME Author of
The Way You Wear Your Hat:
Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’

“David Rensin’s book offers a fascinating look at some of the most powerful people and institutions in Hollywood. It’s packed with entertaining anecdotes . . . cautionary tales, and survival tips for those who dare to try their luck in one of the world’s most unpredictable businesses.”

—
KIM MASTERS Author of
Keys to the Kingdom

“Rensin captures the ambition, manipulative plotting, and hustler mentality . . . in this series of raunchy, realistic interviews . . . making [the] book an uncompromisingly truthful tell-all of what it takes to make it in the movie biz. . . . The stories are amusing, intriguing, and sometimes horrifying, but Rensin, to his credit, never dilutes sordid details.”

—Publishers Weekly

“An oral history of a crucial Tinseltown institution, related by some folks who make Machiavelli look like a pussycat . . . Edgy, frenetic, and entertaining reports from the room that launched a thousand deals.”

—Kirkus Reviews

For Suzie, for Emmett, for always

For Bernie

You
don’t get
what
you
deserve
in
life;
you
get
what
you
negotiate.

—Dr. Chester Karras

No
kid
ever said
to
his
dad,
“You
know
what
I
want
to
be
when
I
grow
up?
An
agent!”

—Mike Rosenfeld Sr., cofounder of CAA

Introduction

EVERYONE HAS TO START SOMEWHERE

To
everything
there
is
a
season,
and
a
time
to
every
purpose
under
heaven.

—Ecclesiastes 3:1

Anyone can become anything; it’s the American dream. To become anything in Hollywood, to succeed in show business by
really trying,
the most enduring path to behind-the-scenes power and position runs through a talent agency mailroom.

There are other routes, of course, but none quite so romantic or romanticized, and none so deeply embedded in our can-do mythology that when someone says, “I started in the mailroom,” we instantly know what they mean.

There is a universality to starting at the bottom.

An old William Morris Agency ad once promised, “The little mailroom employees of today are the big power brokers of tomorrow.” Generations of movers and shakers kept that bargain: media moguls David Geffen and Barry Diller; supermanager-producer Bernie Brillstein; William Morris Agency (WMA) chairman Norman Brokaw and chairman emeritus Lou Weiss; producer-director Irwin Winkler; Jerry Seinfeld’s managers, George Shapiro and Howard West; Universal Studios chairman Ron Meyer; former “most powerful man in Hollywood” Michael Ovitz; motivational speaker–cookie king Wally Amos;
Cosmopolitan
doyenne Helen Gurley Brown; author/playwright Larry Kramer (
The Normal Heart
); bestselling medium to the dearly departed James van Praagh; and many more.

Most graduates of this classic Hollywood apprenticeship take their places as part of the star-making machinery, but not all. Some leave to become lawyers, writers, publicists, editors, waitresses, security guards. There’s a Deadhead, a few drug casualties, a cop, a missionary, a Christmas ornament kingpin, a psychiatrist, and a California state congress-man.

Everyone has to start somewhere.

The mailrooms themselves are not remarkable and have changed little over the years. Mimeographs and teletypewriters gave way to copiers and fax machines. A wall of wooden mail slots is now a wall of steel-and-glass post office boxes. But the workers still stand on the same linoleum floors, enclosed by the same industrial paint jobs, in similarly cramped quarters. Too many bodies, elbows akimbo. The smells of frayed nerves and intestinal gas. Cabinets are stuffed with office supplies. Celebrity head shots cover the walls. Stacks of scripts and videotapes teeter precariously. There’s always a half-eaten turkey sandwich in the trash bin and coffee cups littering the counter.

United Talent Agency’s (UTA) mailroom in Los Angeles is more modern: a carpeted labyrinth on the technological cutting edge where banks of VCRs copy tapes and huge duplicating machines spew out movie and television scripts from disks, collate them, and even insert the binding brads. At Endeavor the mailroom is decorated with decoupaged news clippings about the company’s revolutionary beginning, when four agents left International Creative Management (ICM) in the middle of the night with their files and Rolodexes. There’s also a congratulatory letter from Michael Ovitz, and on the far wall is the ultimate inspirational totem: a plaque with the names of Endeavor trainees who made it out and became agents.

But mostly mailrooms are mailrooms, wherever you find them. It’s the dreams they inspire that are different. At IBM the new recruit imagines maybe someday making division vice president, even running the company. Hollywood is the company in a company town. The dreams are bigger.

You come in early. Wear a suit and tie, or slacks and a pressed blue shirt. Maybe a Rolex, more likely a Schmolex. Sharp haircut. Always comfortable shoes—or else. Walk the halls. Fill in-boxes, empty out-boxes. Deliver packages around town. Learn names and faces. Run, run, run. Copy scripts and videotapes. Work the switchboard. Get up at 5 A.M. to buy groceries for the morning staff meeting. Close the office near midnight. Work sixteen-hour days like a dog in between. Make fruit plates. Clean dirty dishes. Scrounge for leftovers. Lift office furniture. Wash an agent’s car. Read and summarize—“cover”—scripts. Walk a client’s dogs. Haze your coworkers. Jockey for position. Eliminate the competition. Take a senior agent’s urine sample to the doctor. Fight exhaustion and depression. Try to make the rent on poverty-level wages. Ask yourself over and over how you got a college degree and managed to end up here.

But if you play your cards right, don’t tick off the bosses, make yourself invaluable, kiss some ass, get the big picture and the fine print, seize every opportunity, have brains and drive, are canny and cool, and don’t quit in disgust, one day you’ll be plucked from the crucible and become an agent’s assistant.

Now what you once did for everyone you’ll do for only one. Only more so.

Answer the phone. Listen in and take notes. Learn the business. Tell your boyfriend you “talked” to Tom Cruise today. Roll the calls. Keep the log. Baby-sit a client’s kids. Get the car gassed. Get the tux pressed. Make reservations. Book travel. Rebook it. Book it again, damn it! Hand-deliver Christmas gifts. Send flowers. Run someone else’s life. Please the boss’s wife. Give the credit. Take the blame. Yell at those idiots in the mailroom. Get it done yesterday. Find a mentor. Ask a million questions. Dream of your promotion but leave nothing to chance. Plot your escape. And, of course, find some poor sucker in the mailroom to deliver the urine sample.

From the ego-killing shit work to the ego-thrilling sense that the sky’s the limit, the minute you start in the agency training program, you’re traveling in another dimension, between light and shadow, on a journey worthy of a
Twilight Zone
episode. There’s the signpost up ahead. Your next stop: the mailroom.

The industry’s greatest launching pad.

“It started because they said, ‘We need somebody to do this shit,’ ” says Jack Rapke, William Morris mailroom class of 1975, who excelled as a literary agent at CAA before partnering with director Robert Zemeckis to produce movies such as
Cast Away
. “The system wasn’t designed to be a psychological crucible. But that was the benefit of it. It was, ‘Hey, you want to learn the business? You learn it from the absolute bottom up.’ ”

You have to. According to the
New York Times,
“The trade itself cannot be taught in a seminar, being smoke and mirrors, three-card monte and the ability to recognize talent. But in mingling with the real agents and navigating the city’s nightlife after work, the baby moguls can absorb certain lessons in the craft, including making connections, feigning importance (never place a call your secretary can place) and mastering the art of becoming someone’s best friend.”

Bernie Brillstein said it best: “There is no school for show business.” At least, no other school.

The hours are long, the pay is abysmal—now about $400 a week, up from $12 in 1937—and you put up with several years or more of virtual indentured servitude just for the shot at becoming someone licensed to get jobs and negotiate deals for other people.

Yet it all works because the bowels of the ambition factories are a microcosm of the show business life; like a hologram, every part contains the whole. “Each agency is a miniature Hollywood, and each mailroom a miniature agency,” wrote Johanna Schneller in her 1992
GQ
article “Is This the Next Mike Ovitz?” (To give you an idea of how fast things move, the article asked its title question only seven years after Ovitz began to be
Ovitz
. Hollywood, like marriage, has an inevitable itch.) “The skills one learns, if one learns them well, are primitive versions of the skills that get clients, which in turn yield the beach house in Malibu, the ski chalet in Aspen, the Mercedes, the reverence, the Power.”

To get them, the successful trainee is expected to absorb osmotically and use consistently these lessons during an eyes-wide-open, full-body immersion in a world based on information, relationships, glad-handing, backstabbing, manipulation, hyperbole, and the willingness to do whatever it takes to sell, sell, sell. “What’s needed,” says Jeremy Zimmer, a William Morris mailboy in 1979, who for a time ran the training program at UTA, where he is a partner and a legend, “is a person who says, ‘Hey, I can take care of it,’ and then takes care of it.”

In other words, it takes a person who is willing to make every sacrifice in the world to reach the promised land. It’s a high-pressure crap-shoot that weeds out the weaklings. But if you want in on the action, there is no place better to roll the dice. “Working at a talent agency is like working for the CIA,” explains Rob Carlson, William Morris’s affably whip-smart young head of Literary and Directors. “You get to know what’s going on at the networks, at the studios, you have access to all this talent, on-screen and off. At Sony or Disney or NBC they only know what they know about themselves. At an agency you know everything about everybody—even in the mailroom.”