The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (55 page)

Block was the last person to interview me. I used a family connection, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as my reference, to slam-dunk it. My father was also a Mr. California. When Arnold first came to this country, he didn’t know anyone and didn’t have much money. My dad helped him out legally, and they became friends.

I was the first person hired under the new regime. It was November 1992. It was a weird time to begin. The holiday season was starting, tons of people had been fired, and the halls were bleak.

PRESS:
I went to CAA first. Walking in, I immediately thought of Space Mountain at Disneyland. Space Mountain is designed to make your heart race and make you scream. The CAA building, a monument to itself, was designed to do the same. It was all about power.

I was shuffled from one office to the next for a series of fifteenminute meetings. The first was with a young guy who was getting his shoes shined while we talked. I thought, How could he be concentrating on me with some guy literally under his desk? That would never happen in D.C., where you couldn’t even have the hint of any kind of subservience. Nonetheless, that first meeting got my adrenaline up. I thought, Okay, we’re dealing with something different here. Washington is so frigging conservative and frumpy, even in a Democratic administration. Here it was Armani suits and Hugo Boss, and slick and very hip. I hadn’t been in a hip environment in a long time.

ICM was the funniest experience of all. The old building, on Beverly Boulevard, was a seventies-looking thing. Really tacky. I thought, Oh, shit. If CAA was Hertz, ICM is Avis, the “We try harder” agency. I met with Alan Berger, who was very normal, not Hollywood. We hit it off. Instead of having to take twenty more meetings, I just met with Bill Robinson, head of the training program and one of the great old-time agents. He never even asked me why I wanted to be an agent, only who I was, where I came from. Then he said, “So, can you start tomorrow?”

JODI GUBER:
I was the firstborn, so I was like the son. My dad, a producer who ran Columbia Pictures and now has his own business again, always said, “One day you’re going to run my company.”

When I was at UCLA, Ray Stark, the famous producer and a family friend, told me, “You really should be an agent.” I moved to New York and worked as a model instead. When I came back he said it again: “You really should be an agent.” I went to work on
Last Action Hero
at Columbia instead. But this time I thought about what he’d said. Based on what I knew of my personality, I decided I’d be suited for the job. I’m very social. People like me. [
Pauses
.] I want to say this in the right way: I have a manner about me that makes people want to help me. I called Ray and said, “You were right.”

I knew a lot of people in the business. I called Bill Block at ICM, John Burnham at William Morris, Jay Moloney and some other guys at CAA. After the interviews, I didn’t want to be at CAA—I can’t remember why. I didn’t like the William Morris offices—too dark. I wanted sunlight. I decided on ICM.

I met with Jim Wiatt, Bill Robinson, and Jeff Berg. Jeff was concerned about hiring me because of my father. Brian Medavoy—with whom I’d grown up; our families are best friends—had been there a few years earlier and had gotten fired. I think Jeff Berg was afraid I was just a little rich girl. Also, he had a very good relationship with my father and didn’t want to jeopardize it. I knew that meant I had to fight harder. I had to get the job not because I was Peter Guber’s daughter but
despite
it. I found out afterward that the perception
was
“Here comes the little princess rich girl,” but that they were very surprised because that’s not what I am at all. Still, I was watched. I had more eyes looking over my shoulder than anybody else.

BESIKOF:
ICM liked names. They loved a connection. Besides Jodi Guber, Scott Gertz was in the mailroom. Sweetest kid in the world, but not the brightest star. He clearly got in because his actress sister, Jami, was Toni Howard’s client. Unfortunately, they abused him horribly. It was a climate of fear. You’d watch these trainee happy faces come in, and after three months—always three months—we’d say, “You have the ICM cancer.” Three months and people were miserable. I couldn’t name a person who was jolly most of the way through.

PRESS:
From day one I had a philosophy: I was going to work my ass off during the day and then party my brains out at night. If I was a little hungover or a little tired the next day, I didn’t give a shit. I was just delivering mail. I knew that
after
the mailroom it was only going to get harder and increasingly more difficult to get free time—so I wanted to have fun.

PRESS:
My colleagues on the agent track were Jim Rosen, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer who left his very secure, well-paying job in San Francisco; Daniel Saunders; and a woman named Pam, who accused us all of sexual harassment, ran out screaming, and never came back. I didn’t do anything, but I know for a fact that one of the mailroom guys used to throw condoms on the floor and read
Swank
magazine to try and get a rise out of her. That achieved what at least one of the people in the mailroom wanted, which is less competition.

We also had Cecil Cox. He was unbelievable-looking. He could have been a runway model. He was better-looking than Denzel Washington, whose company he eventually ran. He did not have family money. He made it on his own. He worked with youth leagues on the weekend. People kept telling Cecil he should act, not try to be an agent.

Jason Spitz, now an agent at Endeavor, was also in the mailroom. His father was head of distribution at Sony.

The last guy, Dean Lopata, didn’t want to be an agent. He became one of my best friends.

I netted $180 a week, if that. To be honest, I didn’t depend on that money to make my rent. I had help and will be forever grateful. That kind of pay tends to breed a community of rich kids, and the mailroom becomes a class system that’s perpetuated generation after generation. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s what it is. You’re not talking about your Better Chance program. It’s not Scholarship on Parade. You’re dealing with well-monied kids who, if they’re pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, are pulling Tony Lamas. When some mailroom kid tells you he couldn’t make ends meet, it usually means he was still driving the Mercedes his parents gave him for his twenty-first birthday.

BESIKOF:
Not all of us had money, but even in the mailroom you had to wear amazing clothes. My suits were seven hundred dollars apiece. All the big agencies expect a certain look. When the clients come walking in, they don’t want you to be seen pushing that mail cart in an outfit from Sears; they want Armani.

BESIKOF:
My first day, Mark Conroy, who ran the mailroom, said, “Go bind scripts.” So I put scripts together, thinking, This job stinks. Meanwhile, every male in the agency except Jim Wiatt and Jeff Berg came down to see who the new girl was. They were looking for fresh female blood. It was like a revolving door. The first person to check me out was Warren Zide. He was notorious for hitting on all the girls at ICM. Another one was Ben Press, who was Ed Limato’s assistant. I found out later that Ben had asked Dean about me and that Dean told him, “She’s got a boyfriend, but I think they’re on the outs. I’ll monitor it.”

At the end of the first day, Mark Conroy said, “Do you know who Howard Stern is?”

“Yeah.”

“Your homework tonight is to watch a tape of his
Butt Bongo Fiesta
and report back to me.”

They wanted to see if I could hang with the guys or whether I would say, “How dare you!” I’m the former, and I knew I had to take control of the situation. I watched the tape and the next day made some pretty rude cracks about it. After that, we all kind of made friends.

LOPATA:
I had a reputation for practical jokes. The best thing I ever did to Ben was before I really knew him well. Jeff Berg went out of the country on a Friday afternoon, and he let his assistants go home early. All he needed was somebody to cover the phones and say, “Mr. Berg is out of the country and unreachable until Monday.” Ben volunteered right away.

Everyone was waiting for me in the mailroom. Jim Rosen said, “Ben’s all alone in Berg’s office.
We have to do something
.”

I said, “Okay. Put him on the speakerphone and hit mute. I’m going into another office. Don’t say a word.” I dialed Berg’s office from an outside line so my extension wouldn’t show up on the phone display.

Ben answered, “Jeff Berg’s office.” He was all pumped to go.

In a voice not my own, I said, “Yeah, it’s Brandon. Lemme talk to Jeff.” Brandon Tartikoff. Ben said perkily, “Oh, I’m sorry. Mr. Berg’s out of the office right now. He’s out of the country and won’t be back until Monday.”

I said, “Fine. Lemme talk to Nancy Josephson”—ICM exec VP of TV, and daughter of company founder Marvin Josephson.

Ben said, “I’m sorry, Nancy’s gone for the day also.”

“All right. Let me talk to Carol.”

“I’m sorry, Carol’s also gone.”

I said, “Who the fuck is running that place? Do you have any idea what’s going on? If I don’t have this fucking thing signed today, this whole thing is gonna fall apart.”

Ben began stuttering.

I said, “Who are you? This is gonna fall apart because of you!”

He was, “I—I—”

“You gotta be kidding me,” I screamed. “Jeff Berg left you in charge of his office? Who are you? What are you, a trainee or something?”

“Well, yeah, I, uh . . . I—I—I—I—”

“If this thing falls apart, I promise that you will never work in this city again.” I could see through the window into the mailroom, and everyone was crying with laughter. This went on for about five minutes, until my accent broke.

Ben went, “Excuse me. Excuse me. I, um, I could be throwing my career in the toilet here, and God help me . . . is this Dean?”

I started laughing. A few minutes later he came down to the mailroom, his face red. He’d been in a panic, but he got the joke. It sealed our friendship.

BESIKOF:
Jodi Guber came in about a month after me. I kept hearing “Jodi Guber is coming!” I was afraid she’d pass me in the race to get out of the mailroom. Who was I compared to her? Then I met her. Jodi was funny and quirky. Hilarious. On the phone all the time, ordering from J. Crew catalogs. Her first day, I got a call that Ed Limato needed his dirty dishes cleaned. I looked at Jodi, smiled, and said, “Jodi, come with me. I’m gonna show you around.”

GUBER:
I was, like, Oh, my God, this is gonna be a treat. Little did I know.

BESIKOF:
The dishes were disgusting; they must have been crusted with days-old oatmeal. Jodi said, “Is this what it’s going to be like every day?” I said, “Close.” We both laughed. That was the beginning of our friendship in the Hollywood equivalent of boot camp.

GUBER:
I expected to set up coffee, deliver mail, do errands. I didn’t know that I was also going to be a maid, but that was fine. I wanted to prove that I wasn’t the liability they were afraid I might be. I did what I had to do.

BESIKOF:
Really. When we moved to the new ICM building on Wilshire Boulevard, Jodi and I were the only two trainees in the mailroom. No men. We had to do all the work. We were there until midnight. It was awful. There was a huge sign that needed moving. Next thing I know I saw Jodi walking past me with this big thing on her back.

PRESS:
In the early nineties, Bob Evans was known for having great parties. Even Heidi Fleiss was sometimes there. Before one party Bob wanted some scripts delivered to his house. I figured that was my chance. I would deliver the scripts. I’d also dress to the nines and stay. I didn’t know him, but I had met him in passing because he used to work with Stanley Jaffe, so there was a little bit of a recognition factor.

Walking into Evans’s house is like walking into Dracula’s castle. It is otherworldly. As I strolled in with the scripts I heard, “Hey, how are you?”

I said, “Bob! Ben Press.”

“Hey, Ben, how are you? Why don’t you stay?”

Thank God. Immediately all these people started showing up. It was a classic Hollywood party: Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Heidi’s girls. I was a young guy—this was before I met my wife—thinking this would make for great stories.

Later that night Bob said, “Hey, Ben, come on over here.”

“What is it, Bob?”

He took me into his library room. He pressed a button and a whole wall moved away, revealing a bubbling hot tub. He said, “Cindy, come over here,” to one of the girls. He sat her down next to me, and I was in heaven. It was a fun night. Oh, yeah.

LOPATA:
Let me sum up a trainee’s mentality: An agent would call the mailroom, very angry about something. The trainees would jump up and volunteer to take care of it, even if it was as simple as cleaning up a ring from a cup left on a glass table. That’s okay, but they’d
also
go into a panic about
who
should do it. “I should because I want to be in Lit!” It was all blown out of proportion. “If I don’t get that package up to the desk as soon as it comes in, I’m going be fired.” The pressure was self-imposed. Then at lunch people would pound on the table and say, “I’m not going to take it anymore. This is not why I went to college.”