The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (43 page)

JACK RAPKE: Okay, here’s the real story. It was 1982. Mike and I
were talking one day and the subject got around to the sixties, the music, smoking pot. I might have been lamenting the sixties, about how
great they were. It was one of those moments where you’re in a reverie.
The next thing I know, Michael came to my house and gave me some
brownies. I said, “Thank you, Michael. This is really sweet of you.
You didn’t have to do that.” I did think it was really nice, and not in
a million years did I suspect a thing.

I didn’t eat them that night. The next morning, I was in our little
breakfast room at our house. My daughter was at the table, as was my
wife, Laurie, and my son was in a high chair: Laurie said to my
daughter, “Do you want a brownie?”

She said yes and took a bite. Then we gave a tiny bite to my son.
He chewed for a second and then spit it out. It didn’t make sense.
Right away I grabbed the brownie from my son, looked at it closely,
and said, “Laurie, there’s grass in these brownies!”—as in “Get it
away from my daughter!”

We called the pediatrician. He said, “How much did she eat?”

I said, “One little bite.” He started to laugh and said, “It’ll be
okay.”

Stories get exaggerated, but there was no trip to the hospital, no
stomach pumping. There was, however, betrayal. If Mike had said he
had made grass brownies, I would have said, “Take them back!” I
didn’t know what to do. I thought about it for two days. Would I give
this guy a second chance? No, it was beyond that. I’m benevolent but I
just couldn’t live with that. I decided to fire him. If he was that stupid, I had to fire him.

WILLIAMS:
Ari Emanuel, who had started in the mailroom a few years before me and become an agent—he now runs Endeavor—took me aside. He had incredible energy and he interested me. He’d always been really nice to me and would always answer any questions I had. Plus, he was from Chicago, too. One day he said, “Keep your eyes open around here.” He asked me a few questions about myself and then said to watch everything, so I did.

Then Ari left for InterTalent. Tom Strickler ended up there, too, after he was fired, and later partnered with Ari in Endeavor. Ari had been gone two weeks when he called me out of the blue, at home. He said, “I need to talk to you. You’re smart, and they’re wasting you in the mailroom. You’re going to come to work over here. Bill Bloch needs an assistant, and I think he’d really like you. Would you talk to Bill on the phone?”

I spoke to Bill and he said, “Meet me.” One night I left CAA early, at eight o’clock, to meet Bill at Love’s Barbeque, on Pico. He picked the place, insisting nobody we knew would be there. He was right. After a fifteen-minute conversation about the business, and my experience, and what I wanted to do, he said, “I want you to be my assistant. Go in tomorrow and quit.”

The next day I told Ray Kurtzman I was leaving.

“What! What?” Ray flipped out on me. “Where are you going! What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m going to InterTalent.”

“What!? Get out of the building! Now!”

STRICKLER:
I was in the mailroom for a year and learned that the hot desks were Ron Meyer, Mike Ovitz, Bill Haber—the guys who ran the business. Also, the most powerful agents—Jack Rapke, Fred Specktor, and Rosalie Swedlin, though her desk wasn’t perceived as
that
good because she was so tough.

I wanted to be in the Literary Department and got Rapke’s desk.

Jack had great people skills and was a decent guy. He returned everybody’s phone call. He was always gracious irrespective of whether they were powerful people or not. He also made me do a tremendous amount of reading, which was a good thing.

Rapke kept a running list, on a yellow pad, of everything I had to do: pick up the laundry, send this script out, do this coverage, retype the phone sheet. He’d add and subtract items, and every day I’d rewrite that list. Sometimes there’d be twenty-five tasks, sometimes twelve, occasionally only four or five. Toward the end of my tenure with him, all I wanted was to get the list down to nothing. It wasn’t easy, but I kept my goal in mind; I called it “reaching ground zero.”

The day I finally made it I had nothing to do for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then Jack came out and started adding tasks. I’ll never forget laughing and thinking, That was it, never to return again.

WIMER:
I probably got out of the mailroom because Ovitz liked that I’d gone to Harvard and Stanford. I was a potential weapon for him. He always asked about my business school contacts, and could I get him information on Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. He wanted a Rasputin to work side by side with him. But I decided early on that I wanted to be in the Literary Department. At that time, Jack Rapke was the best literary agent in the company. I got his attention by reading scripts for him. I made it my job to make sure there were never any scripts on his desk. I was diligent and my coverage was good, but he never said, “This is great.” He followed the Ovitz model: It’s not a friendly hug and “You’re doing great work!” It’s “I’m letting you into the power room,” with the subtext being to take that as acknowledgment enough. All I knew is that it felt like a step in the right direction.

Tom Strickler got promoted, and Jack took me on. I think he appreciated that Ovitz liked the fact that I was a Harvard guy, and Jack felt he would rise a little bit above by getting a Harvard guy on his desk. I loved Jack because he always aspired to be as clinical as Ovitz, as ruthless, as cold, as powerful, as fearsome. Yet he would never, ever be that person. Ovitz was heartless. Jack’s a really sweet guy. It was funny, like seeing a guy in a suit that’s one size too big. You can tell he really wants it to fit, that he really wants to look like Richard Gere, but it doesn’t and he’s not.

There was something likable about that.

MILLER:
I had made friends with Mike Ovitz’s assistant, Dan Adler, one night when I stayed late to help him with a mailing of maybe five hundred envelopes. Everyone else in the mailroom took a step backward when Dan asked for help. It made all the difference for me, because after only six months in the mailroom he got me onto Michael’s desk as the next trainee.

Michael had been built up as an intimidating figure. My first meeting with him was scary. You don’t know what to say, so you wait for him to talk. I had a quick in-the-hall meeting, not even a formal sit-down; he just didn’t have time. I think Dan made the decision to pick me; I don’t think Michael had anything to do with it. And nothing I did or said to him got me the job.

What I think Dan liked about me is that I was very meticulous about double-checking. He thought it was a good skill set for working with Michael. Dan is very careful himself. He told me I had to work around the clock, had to be on a beeper, would be at Michael’s mercy. “Whatever you do, just fucking do it right.”

Michael dealt with me fairly, but he was very demanding. The word “no” didn’t exist. The word “excuse” didn’t either. And if there’s a problem, he wants a good explanation. I was scared shitless when the phone rang and it was him calling. He’d just say [briskly]: “What’s going on? Who’s called? Tell me everyone who’s called.” You couldn’t chit-chat. There was no opportunity to ask him a question. He isn’t a guy who wants to share. He’d just say, “Give me this person . . .”

Every Saturday I’d take the mail to the house and spend a fair amount of time there. His wife, Judy, was great; she’d always offer something and talk to you. Michael was very businesslike and matter-of-fact. Wanted to get through it.

I got very involved in Michael’s personal life. I had to help plan his son Christopher’s eighth or ninth birthday party, which was going to be at Medieval Times, a jousting place in Anaheim. Thirty or so people were going, and Michael wanted to get a custom bus. My job was to track down a company that had one and would go to his house to pick up the people. I found a company, and Michael said, “I want to see them. Give me pictures.” I had the buses come to the office and I took Polaroids. He said fine. It was all set for a couple of Sundays later.

Carrying one of those massive, first-generation cellular phones, I got to Mike’s house about fifteen minutes before the buses, to supervise. I was afraid something would go wrong, but the buses showed up. It was a balmy afternoon. I got on a bus and thought it seemed hot. I told the driver, “It’s hot on this bus. Can we have some air-conditioning?” He said the air-conditioning wasn’t working. I panicked. “What? What do you mean, the air-conditioning isn’t working? The air-conditioning has to work. I can’t tell my boss that the air-conditioning isn’t working.”

I thought my life was over. I thought, Fuck! Of all things to go wrong, this is it. I asked if there were drinks on the bus and he said yes, absolutely, to look in the fridge. I did and found one sad Tab with sweat pouring off it. All I could think was, Fuck!

Michael was really pissed off at the bus company. We ended up caravanning down. I went with Judy and Jane Eisner in Judy’s car. I was sure I’d had it. I’d blown it in front of Ron Meyer, in front of Michael. I had to sweat it out through the car ride down, through two hours of jousting and bad baked potatoes at Medieval Times, and the ride back. But Michael never said another word about it.

KLANE:
In the “humble beginning” days, the founders were essentially TV agents and they had no Motion Picture Department. Wisely, they approached Marty Baum. This was the mid-seventies, and he had a nice little seventies-era group: Sydney Pollack, Peckinpah, Sidney Poitier, Blake Edwards, Peter Sellers, the Dereks.

But by the time I got there ten years later, Marty was a guy they just put up with. Sometimes he would fall asleep at meetings. But so what? He wasn’t a team player in the way that Ovitz reinvented it with the whole Oriental philosophy thing. He was an entrepreneur. He’d run a studio. He’d made
Cabaret
and
Straw Dogs
and
They Shoot Horses, Don’t
They?

Marty had a reputation for killing assistants. There was a famous story—apocryphal, but still great—about an assistant who jumped out of a second-story window and broke his leg when Marty worked at ABC. Marty went to the window and said, “You putz. You can’t even do
that
right!” Working for Marty was almost too hard, but some pretty well known people survived it: When Marty worked at GAC, Mike Medavoy and Sue Mengers both had his desk.

When I was in the mailroom, the guy working for Marty clearly wasn’t going to last very long. He wore his pants way up above his waist, like an old man. We called him the Neck. He was somebody’s kid and too old for the job. When the Neck took some personal time, Marty came into the mailroom and said gruffly, “Who wants to cover my desk? This putz just left me alone.” Everybody got really busy . . . except me. I went, “Hey!” My attitude was, Anything to get out of here. The deal was to cover the desk for one week.

My week with Marty was hell.

When my time was up I walked into his office and stood at attention. He was sitting in a stupid-ass chair that massages you; it was some client’s blow-job gift. I said, “Marty, I just want you to know that this has been the greatest week of my life. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this.” In other words, I did with him what I’d done with everyone: blow smoke up their ass. He looked up, laughed, and said, “Thank you very much. What was your name again?” I wrote it down and gave it to him.

I knew the Neck wouldn’t last long, and sure enough, two weeks later, the guy jumped out a window—figuratively. Marty told Ray Kurtzman, “Get me . . . get me . . . oh, God, get me the kid with the . . . uh . . .”

Ray Kurtzman gave me the news as if telling me that my family had just been killed by wild dogs. “Jon, um, I’m putting you on Marty Baum’s desk. I think it’s the thing to do.” I don’t think he knew I’d tried to engineer it.

I learned more don’ts than dos from Marty. He always got a lot of things done and performed no small number of miracles because he didn’t know it was impossible to do those things. He was completely naive in that way and different from most everybody at the company. They were mostly buttoned-up, corporate, and personality-free. Marty was bombastic. Out there. In your face. Marty’s reputation as a screaming, infantile personality was real. But I loved it for the same reason: It was real.

Even though he was a little bit nuts, Marty had my respect immediately. He was a legend. He was the keynote speaker at every retreat. He was the guy who would deliver the color, and I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason they kept him around. He was the éminence grise. He was so much larger than life that just by surviving his tirades, which were usually public, I’d gain stature. I was on that desk for a record three and a half years, and it was great.

I never did make it to agent at CAA, though. A year into working for Marty it was pretty obvious that my choice was either to work
for
him or inform on him. I could have used my perch there to trade information and power. Since my entrepreneurial spark had been reignited into a flame upon contact with Marty, there was never a question of choosing. Marty was an outsider. He was like an agency with an agency. Marty did fight for my promotion. He said, “This guy is great.” But in hindsight that was the worst thing he could have done. I don’t think it was ever in the cards for me to make it at CAA.