The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (52 page)

Read The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up Online

Authors: David Rensin

I was Larry’s secretary when he put
The Cosby Show
together. Just the idea that Larry could call up Bill Cosby and say, “I have this idea, whaddaya think?” amazed me. He introduced Cosby to the producers, Carsey and Werner, two days later, and made a show happen that not only affected business but became part of the national conversation. Norman Brokaw takes credit for it, but Norman was the second call. I don’t want to start a war between them, but that’s what I saw happen.

Larry also taught me about lox and bagels. I was the classic, non-Jew kid from Louisiana who didn’t know what
putz
or
schmuck
or
bagel
or anything was, and he was the quintessential William Morris years-at-the-company Jewish kid from New York. We were certainly the odd couple. One morning, Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner, and Cosby came in for an early breakfast. Larry said I had to get food for everybody. I went to Winchell’s and bought all the doughnuts I could, then laid them out really pretty in his office.

“What’s this?” Larry barked.

“Breakfast.”

“No one eats this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Where are the bagels and lox?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He screamed, and I found out not only about lox, but what
putz
and
schmuck
meant, too.

RABINEAU:
I was on Ron Mardigian’s desk, a guy I thought the world of. One of the real gentlemen. He had this elaborate buzzer system in his office. A circuit went from his desk to my desk, and there was a code: one, two, and three buzzes. One meant “licorice.” Two meant “Sanka.” Three meant “butter toffee peanuts.” I’d be sitting at my desk talking with someone, and I’d hear
annnnnnnhhh—annh annh—annh
annh annh
and have to jump up. Whomever I was talking with would say, “What the fuck are you doing?” It was all pretty humiliating. A subtext of daily belittlement. And yet it could have been worse. My friends worked for people who screamed, threw shit at them. They were physically and emotionally battered. I got off relatively easy.

SWOFFORD:
I worked for Judy Scott-Fox, who’d never had a trainee before. But we just hit it off; she was like another mother to me. Judy told me stories about the old days, about working for Peter Cook and Dudley Moore when they first came out of school, about dating Sean Connery. She was a class act, principled, worked hard—and included me.

Three months after I started with Judy, she discovered she had cancer. She worked from home, did chemotherapy, and fought for her life. Because of her illness, I stepped into semiagent mode pretty quickly. I knew everything going on with everyone and I spent a lot of time with her, so I became a clearinghouse. I made sure business was handled. We were scared because we were all worried about Judy—and she didn’t want any balls to be dropped. It didn’t work then at William Morris the way it works now at CAA, where everyone works in teams. Judy was always one-on-one with all her clients. The only one.

I really changed because of Judy’s cancer. I learned that life is short. She went into remission, came back to the office, but got sick again quickly. I think the job stress brought it on. I learned to value my time, to spend it on people who rewarded me back.

CAME AND GONE

LONNER:
Alan Berger, a hot television packaging agent, was a really nice guy. I wanted to work for him. A bunch of us campaigned for the desk. I asked Tanya Lopez, a young agent very close to Alan, for her advice. She said Alan ate breakfast alone every morning at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I thought, Do I want to barge in on breakfast? Was it too aggressive? I did it anyway. He was at breakfast, reading the trades. I said, “Alan, can I talk to you?”

He said, “Have a seat.”

He called me about five o’clock that evening. He said, “You want to work for me?” That was a great moment.

HARBERT:
I bonded with David Lonner and made a point of being his guy in the mailroom to help him with Alan Berger. Then Berger left for ICM, along with Lonner and Tanya Lopez. It was a big thing, security guards in the lobby. Slowly but surely, I got the message: “Alan’s gone. You don’t really have a foothold here anymore.” Because I was Alan’s guy, people thought, “Maybe he
knew
Alan was leaving.” Of course, I had no clue.

I managed to hold on until I got another big surprise.

During the summer someone in Personnel called all the trainees’ colleges to make sure they graduated. Boston University told them I didn’t graduate, that I was a credit shy. David Goldman brought me into his office and accused me of lying.

I thought I
had
graduated, and I was stunned. “What are you talking about? I didn’t go to graduation, I didn’t get drunk with my friends, I didn’t go backpacking around Europe—all because I wanted to come and push your mail cart around.”

I called the school and found out that Goldman was technically, legally, correct. I’d received an incomplete I hadn’t known about. I had no problem with that. But I
did
have a problem with the way he’d dealt with it. I thought, You guys don’t get it. You’re old, you’re soft, you’re babies.
You
don’t work hard. What I actually said . . . I don’t remember. I probably was respectful and polite, because that’s the way I was raised.

Goldman gave me a week to resolve the issue. I flew to Boston, wrote a paper, and took a test. I came back with a letter, signed by the registrar’s office, with the official BU stamp. But I told David Goldman I didn’t think I wanted to be at the agency any longer, that I was sorry things hadn’t worked out. He said, “Okay, fine.”

I called Alan Berger at ICM and he said, “Come in tomorrow.”

STEVENS:
I lived in the Music Department, where they were thinking of putting me anyway. It was easy. The music guys were loose. Dead-beats. It was the path of least resistance. I got Kevin Scott’s desk. He was booking one-nighters, getting a run of dates for Yngwie Malmsteen. He had his own tiny plane and was on the road a lot. I could sit in his office and listen to records. I became a little mogul within my circuit. To the Meat Puppets I was a guy on the inside. I tried to convince William Morris to consider the Meat Puppets and Hüsker Dü, but they were, like, “Fuck you.”

Then William Morris made a big deal with Triad and brought over their Music Department, headed by John Marks, a guy with a vest. He was supposed to be the savior and Kevin Scott was going to report to him. I went to Marks and said, “I saw this band called Guns n’ Roses last night at the Whiskey. They’re playing one more night. They have no record deal. I think they’re awesome.”

He said, “I’m not going. We already represent all these hard acts.” Then the Meat Puppets made a major deal, but William Morris said no to booking them; Hüsker Dü made a major deal with Warner, but William Morris said no. I thought, Okay, I’m outta here. They didn’t even want me to do what they wanted me to do—use my assets to get them to the next level.

I went to see Walt Zifkin. I said, “Walt, I want to learn the actor business.”

He said, “We don’t do that at William Morris.”

I said, “What do you mean—that I selected a major and I can’t change it?”

“Right.”

I left.

TOLMACH:
Bob Crestani had said to me, “I’m going out on a limb for you. If you quit, you make me look bad.” Unfortunately, I’d realized I wasn’t agent material, so one day I showed up at Crestani’s door and said, “Bob, could we have a moment?”

“Yeah, come on in.”

I closed the door. I hemmed and hawed: “You’ve been nothing but kind. . . .” My voice was shaking. “You’ve been so good to me and took the shot, and I just don’t feel that I can—”

He said, “You’re leaving. And you’re leaving before bonus time. Not a smart move.” Again I thought, I’m not cut out for this.

Crestani was kind. He said, “I want you to stay in touch because maybe I’ll represent you someday.” And he did.

RABINEAU:
I was completely ambitious and driven, yet still clueless about the internecine workings of William Morris and how to behave with certain people. It took until my boss fired me to really get the game and realize the whole thing was a fucking sham.

I was about eighteen months to two years in when an agent in our department left to work at a studio. My assumption was that I’d be the next guy promoted. I campaigned very hard for it, and Ron Mardigian said, “Come in tomorrow at seven-thirty, we’ll talk.”

The next morning he said, “I’m going to let you go.”

“Huh?”

He repeated himself, then added, “I don’t think you’ve really got what it takes. I don’t know that you have the constitution that you need to be an agent here. I’m going to give you two weeks to get your shit together. I’ll help you find a job.”

I didn’t understand. I had worked for this guy for a long time, trusted and admired him. He was my first and only desk. I read a script a night and had come in on Saturdays. We got along great. It came as a complete shock, and it hurt because Ron Mardigian was my rabbi at the Morris office.

In retrospect, I’ve gotten philosophical about it and thanked Ron. If I was ever in any danger of becoming a lifer there, he saved me by throwing me out of the nest. And it got me really fired up. I was determined to prove him wrong. I got a job at another agency and built up a pretty good little business. Then I went to ICM for twelve years and was head of the Literary Department. During that time Mardigian called me and said, “Won’t you come back and work for me?”

I said, “How about this—why don’t you come work for me?” We both laughed. It’s our ugly little secret. Nowadays we have lunch once a year, but then it was a terrible blow. I felt completely betrayed. My first kick in the nuts as an adult.

ADELSTEIN:
At William Morris I was the wayward kid. I wasn’t mature enough to get the bigger picture. I had to do it on my own and learn it on my own. Now I see that most of the people in the mailroom are afraid of me. It’s ironic. Now
I’ve
become the adult. Sometimes it’s hard for me to accept that position. I still feel like I’m one of them.

WOODS:
I used to compare William Morris to the Yankees. It was an old company, and people would always put it down because it was so ancient and out of step, especially after Stan Kamen died. The fact is, if you’re this old, you should be one of the most esteemed things in the world. When I was there, I said they should hire some documentarians to produce the last hundred years of entertainment as seen through the eyes of the William Morris Agency. I wanted to get the Burns brothers to do it. Who’s not going to see that movie? You’d get permission from everybody. There are five thousand and some-odd members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Every single one of them has, at some point in his or her career, been represented by the William Morris Agency. That’s when it hit me. I was producing a concept for a movie. I figured I should get the fuck out of there and go produce movies if that’s what I wanted. And it was.

LOURD:
Each mailroom generation has its own particular ambience and ethos. I feel like my class missed the drugging of the seventies, and the clubs and the scamming, and consequently the communal bonding. My friends were friends from school. I worked all hours of the day and night. I was afraid if I didn’t, I wasn’t going to make it.

The training program made me more confident. I appreciate now the tradition and the sharing of stories. I’ve heard Diller and Geffen and guys like that, whom I admire so much, talk about their experiences. They have lots else to talk about, but that those old days always come up is significant. Usually all it takes is more than three agents or former agents in a room. Diller told me the story about gluing someone’s shoes to the floor. He was laughing the whole time.

BRUCE KAUFMAN
heads the motion picture department at the Broder, Kurland, Webb, Uffner Agency in Los Angeles.

RICK JAFFA
is a screenwriter/producer.

CARY WOODS
is an independent film producer.

BRYAN LOURD
is a partner at CAA.

MARTY ADELSTEIN
is a manager, producer, and partner at Original.

STEVE RABINEAU
is a partner at Endeavor representing directors, writers, and actors.

DAVID LONNER
is a partner at Endeavor.

ANDREW COHEN
is a talent agent at ICM.

NICK STEVENS
is a managing partner at UTA.

MATT TOLMACH
is executive vice president of production, Columbia Pictures.

BETH SWOFFORD
is a motion picture agent and partner at CAA.

CHRIS HARBERT
is partner and cohead of the Television Department at UTA.