The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (61 page)

The mailroom wasn’t a test. You just had to strip yourself of any dignity, especially when you were driving to the Laundromat with a week’s worth of a partner’s smelly clothes, or when you went to Toys R Us to pick up Play-Doh for a partner’s daughter. And God forbid you screw up. One kid in the mailroom house-sat for Jeremy. He went to work and left the back door open, and the dog went outside and got sprayed by a skunk. He had to go home during lunch and buy eight gallons of tomato juice to wash the dog and get the smell out.

KIM:
We didn’t yet have e-mail, just little Amtel terminals. If you typed in Shift + + and hit Send, your message would go to the entire company, on every Amtel.

I was in the copy room; Mike Patterson worked on Jeremy’s desk. We were sending Amtels back and forth, just kind of joking around. I realized I hadn’t heard from him for a while, so I typed, “What up, little bitch?” I hit Send, and suddenly I heard all the Amtels going. I had sent it to the entire office instead of just to him.

The blood rushed out of my head. I stood there, turning white, and stared at the thing. I tried to convince myself that no one would notice, and went back to copying scripts.

Then the Amtel started going crazy with people responding: “Are you insane?”

From Jeremy Zimmer: “Who sent this?”

I ignored it. Jeremy sent another: “Who sent this?”

I didn’t respond.

Ten minutes later, Jeremy appeared at the door, smiling. I said, “I’m sorry. It was supposed to go to one person. I don’t know how that happened.” He kept looking at me with that crazy Jeremy stare and just let me grovel, then he walked away.

KRAMER:
One girl in the mailroom had huge breasts. Her name was Evie. Jeremy Zimmer’s daughter, who was only two years old at the time, is also named Evie. One day some guy filled in for Evie, and his friend in the mailroom sent a message to him saying, “Hey, Evie: nice tits!” Accidentally he hit the wrong button and sent the message out to the entire agency. This just happened to be a day that the two-year-old Evie was running around the office. Jeremy Zimmer got the message— and man, was it uncomfortable.

KLIONER:
A new kid was on her first desk, working for Jim Berkus. I called her and said, “Hi, I have Orson Welles calling for Jim.” She said, “Hold on,” then went running down the foyer: “Jim, Orson Welles for you on line two!” In front of everybody. It was unbelievable. Welles was
dead
. We were under our desks. Of course, that could have happened to any of us. One out of a hundred knows anything about film history before they come into the mailroom—
and they don’t learn there
. Within a few years we can be at the highest level of the business, representing significant talent, talking to studio heads, and still not have seen
Citizen
Kane
. And worse, it doesn’t matter, because in the movie business knowing about the movies has nothing to do with anything.

IWANYK:
If you wanted to send a fan letter to one of our clients, it would be in care of UTA. There were mountains of letters, and when we got bored we answered them. People would ask for a head shot. We’d send a head shot and say, “Dear Sue: Get a life. Love,” whoever. It was total stupidity, but when you were in the mailroom you just got punchy.

SHEINWOLD:
I was the proverbial shit stirrer. I’ve always tried to push people and maximize their aberrant behavior. One girl got sent home for dressing not overtly sexual, but inappropriately. She wore a blouse that amazed us all: a white button-down Oxford shirt with a big open square across her considerable chest. I’m sure I said, “Oh, what a pretty shirt. Why don’t you go drop this off at Jeremy’s office.” Just for fun.

CONWAY:
We had a guy who was so dumb that people called him Beavis. He walked like a big hulking thing and talked southern. I resented the fact that the only reason he was at UTA was because he was related to one of the agents.

I’d say, “Beavis, you’re a walking turnip.”

He’d say, “Conwaaay, you gotta lot to lurn.”

One day a manager called. He’d signed a new client that we corepresented. He said, “I’m going out with him to the top ten casting directors in Los Angeles. I need ten demo reels. They’ve got to be done quick and letter perfect, okay?”

Beavis was working the video-duping booth that day. I explained the task, and Beavis said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” He made ten tapes, labeled them, and sent them to the mailroom, which sent them to the manager, and the manager sent them out.

About two hours later, the manager called up the agent, screaming, “What are you trying to do? What did I ever do to you? Are you trying to fuck me over? I just sent out ten tapes of people fucking in a hot tub! Someone just called to ask which one in the hot tub was my client!”

The agent and the assistant couldn’t stop laughing. There’s a little switch on the machine that lets you watch one tape while you’re duping something else, and clearly Beavis had flipped it the wrong way. The manager screamed, “Go ahead and laugh! Everybody else in town is, too!”

The moral of the story is (a) don’t have Beavis do your tapes, and (b) check your tapes before you send them out.

STOLPER:
One guy in the mailroom with me told me that he’d been talking to River Phoenix the night before he OD’d, and it was a real bummer because he’d known River very well and he’d felt 100 percent sure that, given a week or two, he would have been able to bring him into the agency as a client. A few of us were pretty certain that we caught that same guy trying to sexually molest the copy machine.

KRAMER:
When I started they assigned a girl from the mailroom to show me how the system worked. She was a very odd bird who wore a pink dress that I soon discovered she wore almost every day. The dress was always very dirty. It was hard to talk to her, and you never knew how she’d respond. She was incredibly emotional. I thought that if everyone in the place was like that, I’d be in big trouble.

I went to lunch with a friend who had started two days before me. I told him that I had been trained all morning by the girl in the pink dress. I tried to be politic about it, but he started laughing hysterically. Apparently everyone felt that way.

She actually gave us a lot of joy because every day there was a crazy story about her. Once she heard that we had ordered pizza. When she saw there was no pizza for her, she threw a hissy fit and started crying. As time went on, she got darker and darker. Then her clothes and hair got different. I think the head of the mailroom finally said something to her.

CONWAY:
Oh, God. She was sweet and she meant well, but she was a lost cause, bless her soul. She was not going to make it. She wore her pink flannel dress with the flowers on it day after day. She was dirty. Her glasses were always gunked up with crap. “Grimy” was her nickname. She talked about her . . . diseases. She was kind of gross, but I think it was her way of trying to fit in with the guys. She wanted to be part of the group, and she tried desperately.

KIM:
No one knows what happened to her. She was on
Love Connection
at one point, and then we never heard from her again. She lasted pretty long, considering.

DARMODY:
One girl wore white gloves because she didn’t want to get paper cuts. We would always goof on her: “What’s with the gloves?” She’d always say: “My hands are very soft.” You could tell she was insanely wealthy. She drove a brand-new Beemer and was hot-looking. It was good for the place to have her out on the runs instead of delivering mail, making temperatures rise in the office.

CONWAY:
I thought the gloves were the most princess thing that I had ever seen. She was amazingly beautiful, from New York, a debutante type who had seen it all and done it all. Nothing impressed her. I liked her immediately. She was a straight shooter, and there was something really engaging about that.

All the partners thought this girl was amazing, too—particularly Marty Bauer. When Sharon Sheinwold worked for Marty, he wanted this girl on his desk while Sharon was on vacation. Marty was so
ferklempt
when she showed up—and he wanted to wow her so badly— that he went to his partners asking if they could maneuver to have Jeffrey Katzenberg or some big executive call his office so this new girl would be impressed.

SHEINWOLD:
Marty’s office was next to Jim Berkus’s. Bauer would get his nails manicured each week. When she floated on Berkus’s desk he said, “Would
you
like to have a manicure?” It was always so funny to watch these tough guys felled, particularly by a five-foot-tall girl in white gloves.

CONWAY:
We had one trainee who clearly wanted a rich husband. Why she was hired, I have no idea. One day she wore these maroon spandex pants with a matching bodysuit top, cut low. I said, “You know, that’s really not appropriate. You need to put on a jacket or something—at least.” Then I’d get calls. She was loitering in an agent’s doorway—I think it was David Schiff—with her breasts jutting out seductively, saying, “Hi, David, how are you?”

One day she showed up in a see-through Victoria’s Secret kind of blouse thing. She wanted to run the cart that day so she could schmooze, but I was on to that. I said, “No, today’s not your day—especially not with this blouse.” The next day she said, “It’s my day to run. Can I deliver the mail?” She was wearing a jacket, so I said yes. She took off, and suddenly my Amtel’s going
ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!
They’re all saying, “Have you seen what she’s wearing today?!”

She had taken off the jacket.

As if the provocative clothes weren’t enough of a problem, she stalked Rob Kim, Marty Bowen, and some other guys. She’d find out where they were having dinner—they were all assistants and went out together— and she’d show up unexpectedly, “Oh, hi! How are you?” and join their group. She was always out late at night, partying, and always late to work, and tired—except when it came time to push the mail cart.

One day Mark Conroy, who ran the mailroom for me, called and said she was complaining of fatigue. I said, “Tell her to lie down if she’s not feeling well. And when she’s asleep, call me.”

He called: “She’s asleep, and she’s snoring.”

“Great. I’ll be there in just a second.”

She lay on an old piece of furniture behind the shelves in the back, hidden from everybody. I kicked the sofa and screamed,
“What are you
doing? Get up!”

I terminated her.

She decided to go back to Baltimore and become a model. I don’t know if that worked out. A couple of years ago someone saw her at the Sundance Film Festival, hitting the trail.

KLIONER:
The girls who flirted with the agents always got out of the mailroom first. I don’t want to harp on that because it’s true of every business. It’s one of the early advantages that women have. However, later in the business, men have the advantage. It’s almost karmic.

Girls like that self-destructed in the long run, because any agent is smart enough to know she’s not going to be a great colleague if she’s not also doing the work. My buddies and I would take bets on which girl would self-destruct first. But sometimes we’d be forced to go, “I can’t believe this shit is working on people. There’s no way people aren’t seeing through that bullshit rap, but let’s go another six months.” Those were long-running wagers.

Some of those women slept with the agents, but they deny it and the agent denies it. Everybody denies, and yet everybody kind of knows. In Hollywood, it’s like almost all rumor and innuendo: It’s usually true.

ANONYMOUS:
I had sex with two people when I was in the mailroom— though not at the same time. I was sleeping with the receptionist when Marty Bauer, who was going through a divorce, asked her out. He came to my office, put a hundred-dollar bill down, and said, “I know you’re telling people that you’re sleeping with Kathy [not her real name]. I think you’re fucking lying. I bet you a hundred bucks that you didn’t sleep with Kathy.” I knew at that point I had to separate myself from her.

I had sex in every one of the fourth-floor offices before they were finished building them, but the video room was my favorite place. It was so dark and it was fun to do by the red lights of the video machines.

Then there’s my favorite sex-as-an-assistant experience of all time.

We were selling
Afterlife,
a spec script by Joss Whedon. This was back when spec sales were the big swinging-dick thing to do. A lot of egos and big numbers were involved. Everybody was on a different phone, cell phones and regular phones. I couldn’t stand the tension any longer. I looked over at a girl in the office that I fooled around with, we walked outside onto the balcony, she gave me head, and I came back in to help close the deal. It was the most exciting thing ever. But you have to understand: I had no money. I’d just gotten out of college. I spent twelve, fourteen hours a day in the office. Who else are you going to fool around with?