The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (58 page)

It was great at first, and I became friendly with a lot of the agents, but I quickly figured out it wasn’t for me. Promises were broken. I didn’t get brought in on meetings. Brian was hard on me and not only in front of me. I knew I would stay at William Morris only until I figured out what I wanted to do.

BESIKOF:
I ended up working for Steve Small, who’s now at UTA, and it was the time of my life. Great guy. He literally let me do everything. Then Toni Howard became my mentor. After Steve’s desk she wanted to put me on the promotion track, so I worked for Alan Berger, out of whose mouth an abusive word never came.

One day Toni said they would promote me to departmental coordinator—a junior agent—and then I could become an agent. I said, “No. You’re promoting me to agent or forget it.”

She said, “Paula, everybody takes this step.”

But everybody doesn’t. The women take the step, the men don’t. I told her I was turning it down and that I would leave. She said, “Take two weeks. Don’t say no. You’ve spent all this time here.” I took two weeks to think about it, and I decided there wasn’t one person at ICM whose life I wanted mine to be like. Even Ben’s life was horrific. I decided to leave.

I wrote Toni a letter and said I appreciated everything, but I had to find my own path. Until then, my whole life had been wrapped up in the building. I didn’t have a free second. For three years of my life, all I knew was ICM.

LOPATA:
I had floated from job to job and almost accidentally become an assistant in Jeff Berg’s office. But I really wanted to work for a production company, on a film. At a lunch with Ben and Mike Pitt—who’d been AD-ing a lot—Ben said, “Oh, you know who’s looking for an assistant, Mike? Mel Gibson.” My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. I knew Mel was leaning more toward directing—exactly where I wanted to be. I kicked Ben under the table and, luckily for me, Mike said, “Yeah, I don’t know if I really want to go be the assistant right now.”

As soon we got back in the car, Ben said, “Why’d you kick me?”

I said, “You know I’ve been trying to get into a production company, and you know I’ve been trying to work with either a director or a producer on set.”

He said, “I’ll call them today and tell them you want it.”

I faxed over my résumé. Went through five weeks of interviewing. On the first interview I didn’t say anything to Jeff Berg’s office, where I’d been assisting temporarily, because what’s the point? But they called back and asked me to meet with Mel’s partner next, so I had to tell. I went to Elizabeth and said, “Listen, I really wasn’t looking for a job, but this thing has come up and I really would like to do it. I figured I’d better let you know.”

She said, “That’s great. Let me know how it goes and if you need us to do anything.”

I said, “If I make it past this next interview, then I think it would be time to tell Jeff.”

Sure enough, I made it to the final three and a face-to-face with Mel. He was in the middle of post on
Man Without a Face
and learning his stuff for
Maverick
. Meanwhile, Elizabeth told Jeff, “Dean’s been interviewing to be Mel Gibson’s assistant.”

Jeff said, “Is this a good thing? Do we want this to happen?”

She said, “Yeah, I think he really wants it, and I think this is a good thing for everyone.”

Jeff was great about it. My meeting with Mel lasted over an hour, and it went really well. We joked and laughed. Afterward I called Elizabeth from the car, and Jeff also picked up the phone. I said they’d let me know in a couple of days. Jeff hung up and called Mel directly and said, “If you like this guy, don’t feel like you’re taking somebody out of my office. We’d be happy, considering we represent you, to provide you with somebody that you’re happy with.”

Things worked out pretty well for me. But they don’t work out for everybody—like the guy who had been my roommate for a while. His name was John Sepler. He was at ICM in those days too.
Inside Hollywood
followed him around the mailroom for a segment.

John had become a TV agent. He was always upbeat, smiling, happy. The assistants liked him. I was out of town a lot with Mel. Probably the last time I saw him was at Ben and Paula’s engagement party.

One day I got a call from Ben’s assistant. I was in New York, working on
Ransom,
and I could tell by her voice that something was up. My fear was that something had happened to Paula. Ben got on the phone and said, “You’ll hear today at some point, and I figured you’d better hear it from me.”

A few minutes later Mel got called onto the stage. I walked into the dressing room and told him, “Hey, they’re ready for you.”

He said, “Oh,” then looked at my face and asked, “What’s wrong?”

The words caught in my throat. “My old roommate . . . killed himself last night.”

DEAN LOPATA
is a writer/director.

BEN PRESS
is cohead of the Motion Picture Talent Department at the Paradigm Agency.

PAULA BESIKOF PRESS
is an independent producer and co–executive producer of the HBO original comedy series
Baseball Wives.

JODI GUBER
eventually started the public relations company Beyond PR with a partner. She then segued into her current vocation as a personal life counselor and yoga instructor.

IN YOUR FACE! . . . WITH LOVE

JEREMY’S KIDS

United Talent Agency, Los Angeles, 1991–1994

SUE NAEGLE, 1991 • MARTY BOWEN, 1991 • BRANDT JOEL, 1991 • MICHAEL CONWAY,
1991 (ADMINISTRATOR) • SEAN FAY, 1992 • ROB KIM, 1992 • JASON HEYMAN, 1992 •
SHARON SHEINWOLD, 1992 • TONI WELLS-ROTH, 1992 • DAVID KRAMER, 1992 •
JIMMY DARMODY, 1993 • KEVIN STOLPER, 1993 • GLEB KLIONER, 1993 •
SHERWIN DAS, 1993 • BASIL IWANYK, 1993 • PETER SAFRAN, 1993 •
CHARLES FERRARO, 1994

There’s
nobody
more
intuitive
than
Jeremy Zimmer.
He’s
like
Hannibal
Lecter in
the
sense
that
he
looks
at you
and
he
instantly
knows
all
the
demons
and
the
stories.
He
gets
deep
fast.
His
whole
thing
is
the
meek
shall
inherit
the
earth,
because
when
he
was
in
high
school
and
college
he
was
a
total
slacker.
He
dropped
out
and
had
no
idea
what
he
wanted
to
do.
The
agency
business
changed
him.
He
very
much
believes
that
people
change,
and
he
believes
that
he
can
change
people.
As
long
as
you
have
something
on
the
inside
that
he
likes,
he
feels
he
can
change
everything
on
the
outside.

—Gleb Klioner

SHERWIN DAS:
Indian immigrants’ children are usually doctors or engineers. I’ve always been the family wild card. I was born in Bombay and came to America when I was six. I went to Catholic schools, then Berkeley, studied economics and history. I got a job as a media planner, then applied to film school.

My parents knew nothing about Hollywood, but I had read voraciously about Michael Ovitz and the articles about how he and Geffen and others had started in the mailroom. Through friends, I managed to talk to a couple of assistants at William Morris. They filled in the details. But without any real connections, I knew I had to do something special to get in.

With the help of an art director, I took a
Hollywood Reporter
cover, scanned it into Photoshop, and fictionalized an article about myself. I sent it cold to people at CAA, UTA, ICM, and William Morris. What they got was a letter and mock
Reporter
cover story about me and the person I’d sent it to. For instance, I’d read in
Entertainment Weekly
about Gavin Polone, then a twenty-eight-year-old hotshot agent at UTA. I headlined my article/letter to him “Polone Works with Das: UTA Hires Hot Young New Dude.” It was either brilliant or cheesy. It would either make somebody go, “This guy is an idiot” or “This guy is brilliant.”

MARTY BOWEN:
I was into investment banking, like all my roommates at Harvard. But when it came time to meet the company recruiters, something felt wrong, and I had to force myself to feel interested. Fortunately, I was fascinated by the entertainment business. I decided to go to Los Angeles and check it out, or regret it for the rest of my life. I bought
Premiere
magazine. I learned about Mike Ovitz and how Hollywood was going to be the next Wall Street. I knew there was money to be made. I took general meetings with four or five people and learned about talent agencies. It could take four years to make agent at William Morris and CAA; at ICM, maybe three years. But at a new company, United Talent, a real hustler might squeak through a little faster.

BRANDT JOEL:
I’m one of those guys who always wanted to be an agent. I loved movies, music, television, and theater. At Duke University, where I went on a naval scholarship, I dealt with agents and planned all the concerts. Then I went into the navy and was aboard the USS
Frederick
as a navigator. We were in the Gulf War. Afterward I was stationed in San Diego. A guy I’d known at Duke had gone into the agency training program. On a day off I drove up to Los Angeles and saw him for lunch. He told me what it was like: no money, long hours, hard work.

BASIL IWANYK:
I played basketball in high school and was supposed to go to West Point like my uncle. But they wouldn’t let you wear contact lenses, so I failed the physical. After studying philosophy and political science I went to USC film school and convinced two of my best friends to move to Los Angeles with me.

I did the usual fucking around as a PA, and, like the Don Henley line from “Heart of the Matter”—“The more I know, the less I understand”—it was miserable. On a Whitesnake video shoot downtown, I had to go down an alleyway in a hard hat and lock the set; that meant guard the perimeter. The hard hat didn’t fit and I was humiliated, so I didn’t wear it. I stood around for four hours and suddenly somebody in a tenement apartment window above dumped a bucket of shit and piss all over my head. The line producer told me to go home and get showered. He also said he wasn’t going to pay me for the hour I was gone. I knew I had to quit. Welcome to showbiz.

A week later I got a PA job at a company that shot direct-to-video horror and slasher movies in Romania. The overseas production coordinator told me he’d once been an assistant at UTA. “You’d be perfect there,” he said. “Let me call Jeremy Zimmer.”

JIMMY DARMODY:
My best friend, Basil Iwanyk, was in Los Angeles working at UTA. I was going to Rutgers. I came to visit, spent a couple days, and thought, Screw it; I’m gonna move out. The move to California was less about being in show business than it was about getting out of New Jersey.

I arrived in January 1994, two weeks after the big earthquake. The entire town was in disarray. Basil, Charlie Ferraro, and three other guys lived in a house that, while it hadn’t been condemned, was still a shambles. There were cracks up the wall, the floors were warped. I walked in, dropped my bags, and thought, What have I done?

JASON HEYMAN:
At the University of Pennsylvania I helped put together something called the Penn Film Foundation, and got equipment and funding from people in Hollywood like Marc Platt and Kevin Misher. I came to Los Angeles to work on a movie in the summer of 1987, but there was a writers’ strike and I ended up as a temp at the
Los Angeles Times
. I did my junior year at the USC film school before graduating from Penn. Then I packed my Honda Accord and moved to Los Angeles. I didn’t want to be a writer or actor or director; I wanted to be on the deal-making side of the business.