The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (48 page)

ISAACS:
Lee Stevens needed a second assistant, and I wanted the job. Another assistant said, “Don’t. It’s a dead end. No one’s ever made anything out of that job. You’ll work for Vivian and you’ll rot.” Vivian Hall was Mr. Stevens’s executive secretary; she’d been Nat Lefkowitz’s secretary before that. She was the most terrifying human being I had ever met—all business, and if it wasn’t done absolutely perfectly, she was all over you.

After passing muster with her I met Mr. Stevens. He asked if I understood the concept of a fiduciary responsibility: “That’s what I expect from people who work with me.” All he really wanted to know was that I’d be efficient and keep my mouth shut. He was a man of very few words. He only said three things to me during the first four months I worked for him: “Good morning,” “Good night,” and “Get me. . . .”

One day Vivian was gone and I was alone with Mr. Stevens after hours. It was nine o’clock and he was reading with the television on. I sat outside, doing paperwork. He walked out of his office, looked at me, and said, “I just want to tell you something: I think you’re doing a sensational job here.” Then he walked back inside. I rode on that for a long time.

I worked for Mr. Stevens until May 1986. May is TV sales season and the time that all the West Coast agents come to New York to romance network executives and do last-minute jockeying to get their clients’ shows on the air. Every night it was parties. Then they announce the new TV schedule.

Everyone from the West Coast Morris office showed up: Jerry Katzman, Hal Ross, Larry Auerbach, Sol Leon. One of my jobs, as Mr. Stevens’s second assistant, was to work for all of them. The phone probably rang as much during that week as it had for Mr. Stevens in seven months. I had to keep track of the calls. It was a blast. The pace was unbelievable. I felt completely alive.

Two days after they left, Mr. Stevens called me into his office and said, “How do you feel about California?”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to move you to California, to be Jerry Katzman’s assistant. He really liked you. I need to know tomorrow morning.”

I said, “That’s amazing, but I can’t tell you tomorrow morning. I’ve got to think about it.”

“What’s to think about?”

I went home and I realized, Yeah, what
is
there to think about? But it was done in typical William Morris fashion: Make a decision
now,
and then it was like pulling teeth. They had to have a board of directors meeting about whether or not they were going to move me out. It was insane.

I told Mr. Stevens, “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll work for Jerry. But there are some things I need to know: Will I get a raise? Who will pay for me to move? Who will move my stuff?” Ed Khouri said my father should pay. I said, “No way.” Plus I wasn’t going to negotiate with my own company when my moving was their idea.

Finally Mr. Stevens said, “Okay, what do you need?” and promised to take care of it.

But nobody did. A few weeks passed, and I was supposed to be at work in Los Angeles the following Monday, but I wasn’t going to pack until they gave me some answers. Wednesday was a normal day. I said good night to Mr. Stevens and he said, “You know you’re going to California this weekend.”

I said, “Am I?”

He said, “Yeah, of course you are.”

“Well, there are a couple of questions I still need answered.”

“Oh, like what?” he said, as if I hadn’t been talking about it for five weeks. I ran down the list. He said, “Of course, we’ll take care of it. Just call Ed Khouri; he’ll handle it.” That was it. I was on my way to Los Angeles. New York was just a memory.

KEVIN HUVANE
is a managing director of CAA.

MIKE MENDELSOHN
is president of Patriot Advisor, an entertainment media merchant bank. He is also chairman of Patriot Pictures and chairman of St. Michael’s Press.

ADAM ISAACS
is a senior talent agent at UTA.

ADAM BERKOWITZ
is head of TV packaging at CAA.

GERRY HARRINGTON
manages Nicolas Cage and others at Brillstein/Grey Entertainment.

STEPHEN SANDS, PSY.D.,
is assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Behavioral Health Program at the Stephen D. Hassenfeld Children’s Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders.

MICHAEL GRUBER
spent many years at William Morris. He was an agent until 2002 at CAA. He knows Cindy Crawford personally.

MERYL POSTER
is the longtime copresident of production at Miramax Films in New York.

CAME AND GONE

William Morris Agency, Los Angeles, 1980–1986

BRUCE KAUFMAN, 1980 • RICK JAFFA, 1982 • CARY WOODS, 1982 • BRYAN LOURD,
1982 • MARTY ADELSTEIN, 1983 • STEVE RABINEAU, 1983 • DAVID LONNER, 1984 •
ANDREW COHEN, 1984 • NICK STEVENS, 1986 • MATT TOLMACH, 1986 •
BETH SWOFFORD, 1986 • CHRIS HARBERT, 1986

Why
did
the
company
let
the
fact
that
it’s
old
be
used
against
it?

—Cary Woods

BRYAN LOURD:
I didn’t have much access to the outside world where I grew up, in New Iberia, Louisiana. When I asked my high school guidance counselor about taking the SAT, she said there was no such thing. My mother called our senator as a concerned citizen, to ask him, and I drove to Baton Rouge to take the exam.

I was ambitious, and probably the first to leave town in a hundred years. I came to Los Angeles to go to USC not knowing anybody or anything. Moved to Watts and didn’t know it was
Watts
. Then I went to Cambridge and to George Washington University and came back with a few credits left to complete. Got a job at CBS, first as a page and then part-time in Benefits, where I had to fill out sick-day time cards with a little pencil. I never quite mastered it. When I became a gofer on the executive floor, I arrived every morning at six. There’d be one other car in the parking lot: Bud Grant’s, head of TV. One day I worked up the nerve to say, “Hi, Mr. Grant. I’m really good with people—what should I do with my life?”

He suggested I look into the agency thing.

I went to William Morris after work, faced the receptionist, Becky, a cocky, beautiful black woman who ruled the roost in the atrium. I said, “Hi, can I get an application?” and she flat out rejected me. Totally blew me off and told me to get out.

I went back the next day and flirted and tried to charm the application out of her. She laughed and handed one over. I was so naive. On the references line I listed my hometown sheriff and my high school English teacher, only to find out that everyone there was a son-of.

MARTY ADELSTEIN:
I was about to graduate from UC San Diego and was going out with a girl whose family belonged to Hillcrest Country Club. Her mother asked me, “What do you want to do when you get out of school?”

My father ran a factory that made tablecloths and shower curtains. I said, “I want to go into the mailroom at William Morris.”

She said, “I’m friendly with Norman Brokaw and I can get you an interview. One thing, though,” she said. “Remember to stoop when you go in.”

“Stoop?”

“Don’t stand up straight. Most William Morris agents are very short, and Norman has a thing about his height.”

Sure enough, I sat and Brokaw stood over me the whole time. He sent me to Kathy Krugel, who had crazy eyes and red hair and was covered with makeup. Ageless, sort of. She could have been anywhere from forty to sixty. Lipstick on her teeth, the whole thing. It was like lithium time. She tried to discourage me, but I’d been told she’d try that. I also knew that she’d write down the number of times I called to follow up. Six times a month was supposedly the perfect number.

On a Friday morning William Morris called and said to start work the following Monday. I was excited. That afternoon they called back with a problem: They’d checked my college records. I’d gone through graduation but was still one class short. William Morris wouldn’t let me into the program until I had a degree.

I went to UCLA, browsed the extension catalog, and found a course for premed majors. I told the professor, “Here’s my problem: I’m never going to be a doctor, but I have this job that I want and I have to do this course in two weeks.”

He said, “No one’s ever done that.”

I said, “I will.”

I passed the course in two weeks, with a B-plus. William Morris didn’t believe me, but I brought them the certificate.

CARY WOODS:
The notion that I would work in the movies was to my parents like saying I was going to be an astronaut. They were Polish immigrants. We lived in the Bronx and didn’t have a lot of money. Their attitude was, “Yeah, that’s good—but how are you going to make a living?”

A USC law school friend was close to Ray Kurtzman’s son, Rick. We met for lunch and he set up a meeting at CAA with his dad, who told me, “You’re never gonna be an agent. Even if you become an agent, you won’t stay.”

Another school friend knew Elaine Goldsmith, then an assistant at William Morris, who later became Julia Roberts’s agent. She got me an interview with Kathy Krugel, an extremely serious, formal, buttoned-down type. I also met Mike Simpson, an understated former filmmaker from Texas who had become an agent. I said I liked film and wanted to be involved, but I wasn’t sure if an agency was the right move. He said it was okay not to be sure.

BRUCE KAUFMAN:
I grew up in Westchester County, New Rochelle. I made home movies, three-reelers, when I was eleven and twelve. My bar mitzvah present was a sound camera. I used my friends as a repertory company of actors, and I showed the movies at local theaters. My father started to bring home
Variety
from the corner cigar store, and I read about the movie studios and the life in California. On a family trip west, when I was about sixteen, we went to Universal Studios. That was the beginning for me.

In college I promoted rock ’n’ roll shows and put parties together. I was the guy who got your five-dollar entrance fee. A friend from Barnard was dating a guy from NYU whose parents were in show business and whose brother was at ICM. He was in town one weekend and told me, “You’re a natural agent.”

I had meetings in New York at William Morris and ICM, but I realized that unless someone keeled over in their sleep, there would be little movement up the ladder. I went to California. ICM had just stopped their training program. CAA was too small and filled up. I got an interview at William Morris.

ANDREW COHEN:
My dad was a literary agent and a TV packager at Ashley-Famous—he packaged
Get Smart,
represented Garry Marshall—and then formed his own company with a partner. But I always hated the “love ya baby” show business thing, just like my father hated people who were always hitting him up for a job. Like we’d be on vacation and someone would find out he was an agent. Next thing they’d show up with their little daughter and say, “Dance for the man, sweet-heart.”

I staffed for the California Democratic Party. I worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign as an advance man. I worked at a PR firm. They represented tobacco companies, oil companies, toxic dumpers, all kinds of special interests—not exactly Democratic. At twenty-five I was at a crossroads. I concluded that since Hollywood was in my backyard, it was like having a tennis court behind the house: You should learn how to play tennis.

My dad hooked me up with the Morris office, and I got an interview with Jerry Katzman. While waiting in the lobby an elevator opened and out came an agent, Marty Beck. He had long, hippieish gray hair, a wide-open shirt, a big gold medallion. To the receptionist he said, “Becky, baby, I need you to call Adriano’s. Tell them I’m running about fifteen minutes late, and make sure they hold on to my table. It’s table number two, the first table in the place, so everybody who comes in the place sees me.”

My first thought was, Gotta go. I stood up. Becky, the receptionist, read my mind. “He’s in the Music Department, honey. Go ahead and sit down.”

Jerry Katzman and I had a great chat. He said I needed to meet Walt Zifkin. Walt had an oak-paneled office with no lights on except for a green table lamp. To my surprise, when I arrived, some of the board of directors were there. My résumé
was
sort of impressive, but still . . . They said, “We called you in here to talk to you about something serious. We’re thinking of taking legal action against your father’s company.”

The contemplated action wasn’t actually against my dad and his partner as much as the production company that wanted to acquire them. Someone said, “What would you do if you were in the mailroom and saw the legal documents?”

I said, “I’ve been keeping stuff from my father for twenty-five years. Why would I start telling him stuff now?”

They looked at each other and said, “Hire this guy!”

CHRIS HARBERT:
My father was a press agent at MGM in the 1940s and 1950s. He worked with glamorous people like Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant. But my parents didn’t want to raise their family near Hollywood, so they moved to New York and then Connecticut. I’m the youngest of six. My brother is Ted Harbert, who came to Los Angeles in 1982 with ABC television and eventually ran it. My father worked at the
New York Times,
in the magazine division.