The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (26 page)

I applied to both William Morris and ICM. They told me there was a four-month waiting list before I could even get an interview, and it would be a year before anyone would make a decision. I felt completely defeated, but the next day I called both companies again just for the hell of it and got interviews right away.

ICM offered me a job immediately, at $110 a week.

At William Morris I met with Kathy Krugel. She tried to scare me away: “It’s no picnic. It’s going to take three years. You may never make it.” Then: “Who do you know?” I said I didn’t know anybody. I knew she just wanted to see how I’d take it. That was the easy part. I didn’t know any other way to react than “I want the job.”

GARY RANDALL:
After college I knocked around and sold insurance to pick up some spare change. My stepfather said I had a distant relative in Los Angeles, Mike Marcus, and I should visit him and see if he could help me get work. That sounded fine; I was a pretty brash kid, and I figured I might even be able to sell him some insurance.

Mike was from Pittsburgh, like me. He lived in Topanga Canyon, and he invited me out for dinner. When I walked in, he was lying on his living room sofa, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, smoking a joint—and reading a script. I asked, “What do you do for a living?”

He said, “I’m a talent agent.”

It looked cool. I smoked a joint with him and spent the rest of the evening picking his brain. It was 1974—who wanted to be selling insurance? Mike offered to call a friend who ran the training program at ICM, to get me an interview.

At ICM I threw out buzzword after buzzword, with no idea what they meant. The personnel guy looked at me like I was insane. “Who the hell are you and why am I meeting with you?” he said. “You don’t know
anyone
or
anything
about the entertainment business. In fact, the
only
person you know in Los Angeles is Mike Marcus. I got Lew Wasserman’s best friend’s kid in here, and the kid of a senior agent’s buddy who just graduated from film school. Forget it, kid.” And he was right.

I called William Morris and got Kathy Krugel on the phone. I said, “My name is Gary Randall. I’ve been referred by Mike Marcus. I recently moved to Los Angeles. I’ve just been offered an opportunity in the ICM mailroom, and before I take that opportunity, I’d like the opportunity to meet the competition.”

She put me through to Chuck Booth, and he said, “Come on over.” My meeting with Booth was virtually identical to the one at ICM. He said, “Why should we hire you?” This time I was ready.

“A talent agent is a salesman,” I said. “I’ve been selling life insurance to college guys in exchange for their beer money. I have to believe that if I can do that, then I can sell a writer to a producer or an actor to some studio. All I need is to be educated about your product, and I guarantee you I’ll be a spectacular agent.”

Booth said, “Yeah, but how can you prove you’re a good salesman?”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “If I can convince you to buy an insurance policy from me, you give me the job in the mailroom.” Fortunately, I worked for an extraordinary company, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, that had great corporate plans.

I’m sure he did it for the pure entertainment value and never thought he’d have to pay up, so he said, “Go ahead.”

I said, “Tell me about the insurance package you have here.” When he did, I realized William Morris didn’t have key-man policies in place for their senior executives.

I said, “Who’s the most successful agent you’ve got here?” He mentioned some guy named Stan Kamen. I said, “So, if Stan Kamen drops dead tomorrow, how much revenue does the agency lose?” It was something like ten million. I said, “Well, do you have a policy on Stan Kamen that will offset the loss of income to the agency?”

They didn’t. Booth was in charge of all the human resources, including the benefits. He called Walt Zifkin while I waited. Afterward he said, “This is a great program. You draw up the contracts.” The policy was a blanket retirement/key-executive/long-term-care benefit package for their senior management.

When I left, I said, “Remember our deal.”

Two days later I had the job.

Here’s the funny thing: I made more money from the premiums on that policy than I did in the three years I was in the training program.

GARY LUCCHESI:
My father drove a bread truck for Kilpatrick Bakeries in San Francisco, and I worked in a grocery store as a kid. I was the first in my family to go to college. At UCLA, in a course called “The Speeches of Abraham Lincoln,” a student told me, “David Geffen is teaching a course on the entertainment business; last week Joni Mitchell was there. Want to go?” Of course.

Geffen also brought industry figures as guest speakers: MCA’s Sid Sheinberg; Steve Ross, who owned Warner Brothers; Ned Tanen, who ran Universal; Bob Shapiro, from Warner Brothers; Mike Medavoy; superagent Sue Mengers. It was the first time I had ever encountered real rich people. Back home the rich people were the ones who owned A. Sabella’s Restaurant. Listening to them, I figured out that some of these people weren’t any smarter than anyone else, and I thought, What do these rich guys have that I don’t have, besides money? The class gave me the opportunity to be a little bit arrogant and to think that maybe I could compete in that world.

One day I raised my hand and asked, “Where do you go if you want to go into the business side of entertainment?”

Geffen said, “It’s very simple. Do what I did: go to the William Morris Agency, start in the mailroom, and work your way up. I did it, Barry Diller did it, Mike Ovitz did it, Irwin Winkler did it.” On my application, in the space for who you knew in the entertainment business, I put “David Geffen.”

When I got the job, I called my folks. My father said, “Jesus Christ. You put yourself through college and you’re working in the mailroom? Are you sure that’s the right thing?”

“Pop,” I said, “there’s a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.”

RAPKE:
Elmer Silver ran the actual mailroom. He was a retired postal worker with a horrible toupee. He smoked a pipe that drove us all out of our minds. Elmer was well known by the secretaries for his shoulder and neck massages. He even gave some girls Valium to help them relax. Watching this seemed to us like a scene out of
Cool Hand Luke
. These women weren’t coming in simply to get their bodies rubbed; they had come to torture us. We’d stand there, grimy and disheveled, while Elmer ran his old hands all over some hot chick’s back as she purred and looked at us like we were behind prison bars.

BRODY:
My first day is indelible. There was a guy in the mailroom who looked like Ron Howard. He worked the Xerox machine. Two FBI special agents stormed in and, without any fanfare or explanation, pushed this guy facedown onto the copier, handcuffed him, and took him away. The kid didn’t say a word. Later we got letters from prison saying he’d been framed for extortion.

After the FBI left, Jimmy Houston, who’d started that same day, decided he would show everybody his bullet-hole scars. I thought, Where am I? I’m a nice Jewish boy from the Valley; what’s going on in this place?

That same day two assistants were made agents—and mailroom guys took their places. Before I went home, I’d already moved up a couple of notches.

CRESTANI:
I showed up at eight-thirty, wearing a suit and tie. When I walked in, the first questions were “Who are you?” and “How long were you on the waiting list?”

“What waiting list?”

“The waiting list to get in.” Their surprise was palpable. Each had been waiting at least six months just to get into the program. I said that I’d waited only two days.

“Two days? Who do you know?”

“I don’t know anyone.” From the way they huddled together and whispered, I could tell they didn’t believe me.

BAUMSTEN:
As the first woman in the training program, I was the source of a lot of curiosity. Everybody just wanted to get a look—including the other women in the company. They wanted me to do well. The guys in my mailroom group weren’t as curious as the rest of the company. To them it was no big deal. We understood we were all in it together. Only Jimmy Houston kept talking about my being the “first chick.” I’m not normally sensitive about what people call me, but that irritated me. I said, “Tell you what. I won’t constantly talk of you as the first darky in the mailroom if you will not refer to me as the first chick in the mailroom. Okay? Is that a deal?” Later Jimmy and all the guys gave me a necklace with a little cracked egg with a chick coming out. It was sweet.

RAPKE:
When I started, it was Christmas and the gifts that arrived for the agents were unreal. They kept on saying, “Jack, go out to the curb, there’s more gifts.” I was outside picking up packages and Clint Eastwood walked in. I think I turned to the nearest agent and said, “Hey, Clint Eastwood’s here!” The guy said, “So what? If you’re going to be in the agency business, you can’t be like, ‘Hey, that’s Clint Eastwood.’ He’s just another actor.” I couldn’t feel that way.

BINDER:
The program required college grads, but they didn’t actually care if you became an agent or not. The whole thing was just a way of getting cheap but qualified help. Getting ahead was all up to you. Nobody would guide you through. Nobody said, “I’m going to take an interest in Chuck Binder and turn him into the next big agent.” Faced with that, I realized, This isn’t for me.

BRODY:
What we did was not hard. Yeah, sure, maybe on the Valley dispatch run, because you had twenty-five stops to make in two and a half hours and you’d get stuck behind a cement mixer going through Coldwater Canyon. But please, was that digging ditches? No. It wasn’t abusive. It wasn’t like the marines. The worst thing was that we got paid too little. If we had known how much we would actually benefit down the line from the experience, we probably wouldn’t have complained that much.

RAPKE:
The system wasn’t designed to be a psychological crucible—it was designed for someone to do the menial tasks. It was “Hey, you want to learn the business? You learn it from the absolute bottom up.” Abe Lastfogel started as William Morris Sr.’s mailroom boy on Tin Pan Alley, because even then they needed someone to do the shit work. Some people can’t take it, can’t stand the ego reduction. Those people are weeded out. But the big secret is that if your ego is out of it, then you can represent people.

RAPKE:
My first job was running the A. B. Dick machine, an industrial offset printer with open inkwells. It always broke down. Elmer told me the guy from A. B. Dick would stop by to show me how to work everything. He also told me that six months earlier a guy from the mailroom had lost his finger in the printer.

BROWN:
You always had to wear a white shirt and a tie to work because in the afternoon you might have to cover an agent’s desk. If an obvious brownnoser was in charge of printing that day, we’d fuck up his ink rolls and make sure ink spilled on his shirt. Or brush by him while wearing an inky apron.

CRESTANI:
When agents were fired or quit, they still got mail for a while. We didn’t care about most of it, but when the Academy screening invitations came in, the guys would fight over them. These were free passes. When Bob Shapiro left for Warner Brothers, right before
Star
Wars
came out, I watched for his pass and grabbed it the minute it came in. But it was such a hot ticket that I also decided to do something nice for my pals in the mailroom.

The A. B. Dick machine printed on card stock. The guy from the paper company came in every week, and we’d order card stock for making people’s note cards. I showed him a piece of the
Star Wars
invite and asked him if he had any paper like that. He did, so I made ten bootleg
Star Wars
tickets, which meant twenty more people could see the movie early. They looked perfect. We all got into the big theater on the Fox lot. Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty came in but couldn’t find seats. Beatty and Jack decided to sit on the floor. The next day there was a big story in the trades that, somehow, somebody had bootlegged the Fox tickets and left the stars without seats.

RAPKE:
The best A. B. Dick story involves Chuck Binder. He had a very cavalier attitude toward work and loved getting Elmer’s goat. One day Chuck snapped.

BINDER:
The moment I got into the mailroom, I tried to figure a way to get out. You’ve got to understand: I was like a king in Beverly Hills, teaching tennis to stars, and at William Morris I felt like I’d been demoted. Clients would drop by the mailroom and say, “What are you doing here?” To me, being in the mailroom was like being a janitor. I had on my apron and my tie. I was trapped in a room ten feet by twenty feet. It was awful. I hated every minute of it.

One day I had to run over to Dino De Laurentis’s office on Cañon Drive, get a stack of checks, and get back within twenty minutes. At his office I saw a
King Kong
poster and said, “Oh, you guys produced that? Can I get a poster for the mailroom?”

Later that night I put up the poster. I’d been working the A. B. Dick and had ink all over myself. Suddenly something took ahold of me and I put my inky handprints across the carpeted, soundproof wall, leading up to the poster.