The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (67 page)

MARK O’CONNOR: Starting in junior high, I had an affinity for both television and the business. I subscribed to
Variety
and paid attention to the Nielsen ratings every Wednesday. I idolized Brandon Tartikoff. When I was in the eighth grade I sent him a letter giving him advice on his scheduling. Like, “Maybe if you moved
Night Court
to Wednesday, it would provide a stronger lead-in. . . .” I got a letter from him, saying “Thank you for your comments. They’re very astute for someone your age. Enclosed please find an NBC Peacock towel.”

During spring break in the tenth grade I met a classmate’s father, Hugh Wilson—
WKRP in Cincinnati
—at a party in Vail. We talked about the television business. He said, “You’ve got to come to Los Angeles and visit.”

Perhaps to humor me, my parents took me there in 1987. We stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We saw the very first
Cheers
with Kirstie Alley. We saw
The Tonight Show
with Carson. We visited Hugh on the set of
Frank’s Place
. Hugh set up meetings with Warren Littlefield at NBC and Kim LeMasters at CBS. Brandon was in Israel. I told Littlefield what I thought of the fall schedule.

I went to USC and tried to get a job as an assistant in network programming after graduation but got nowhere. Disappointed, I sent my résumé to CAA, William Morris, and ICM. Only CAA called me. I met with Arlene Newman and told her that I wasn’t interested in the formal training program. I just wanted to work for a television agent. (I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be an agent; I’d always thought of them as used-car salesmen.) I interviewed with Tony Etz, and we hit it off. Six months later I changed my mind. I told Tony I wanted to go into the training program. He was completely receptive, and he didn’t have to be. It’s an unwritten rule that you have to work as a nontrainee assistant for at least a year before they let you in. He said, “You know that means going backward—into the mailroom.”

BLAIR DICKERSON:
My sister is a business affairs executive at CAA and proof that nepotism works. She got me the interview. At the time I was doing advertising sales for a television station in Monterey but wanted something more creative. Monterey is a beautiful town, but not for a single young guy. I was bored out of my mind

Little did I know I’d be going from making eighty grand a year to making minimum wage, working twenty hours a day, delivering packages and carrying mail bins. I had the tendency to believe, being in sales and a generally socially advanced person, that I could get through it in like three months, get on a desk, and after six more months be an agent. I didn’t realize I’d be in the mailroom for almost two years.

DEAN STYNE:
My brother, David Styne, is an agent at CAA. My dad was an agent, and my uncle’s an agent at ICM. I always knew what an agent did. I got offers from both ICM and CAA, where I went through five interviews all at once, in about two and a half hours. A couple days later I came back and they offered me the job. My brother had worked for Ovitz for two years, and I had heard all the horror stories. So I knew. And I still wanted to be an agent.

FISCHER:
The mailroom is a big ladder and you’re counting on each person on the rungs above to progress and let you get to the next level. You don’t want to step on people because the only way the system functions is if you work together. Very competitive people don’t succeed because you learn quickly that if you rat out your friends, you’re not going to have any friends—and that’s all you have to survive. You can’t slack, either, for the same reason. Those who did were asked to leave by the company or they were driven out. If you get the silent treatment sixteen hours a day, you’re in a very lonely place.

KIVOWITZ:
When you’re on the bottom you get the shittiest jobs, the shittiest life, the longest day. You think it’s going to get easier when you move up, but it gets harder with each step.

TOTH:
The first Friday, on the way home, I bought one of those Dr. Scholl’s foot massagers. My feet were killing me. I wondered if the knee surgery I’d had because of high school football might prevent me from becoming an agent. I admit it—it actually crossed my mind.

STYNE:
For some reason I wore wooden-soled shoes the first day and came home feeling like Fred Flintstone.

O’CONNOR: After the first week I was so tired I took a bath. It was the first bath I’d taken since I was eight years old.

FISCHER:
I had to learn to do the shopping starting at five-thirty in the morning. I had to pick out fruit. I knew that if there was a bruise on someone’s apple or pear, I would get reamed. To this day I can’t buy fruit, because I’m still emotionally scarred.

O’CONNOR: Eventually CAA hired a service to deliver the food, so no one had to shop anymore. The next task was collecting the morning mail at the Beverly Hills post office. Bin upon bin. My car would be packed to the gills.

When I had two people beneath me, I went on what was called “bottom conference,” which is setting up glasses, pitchers, orange juice, and fruit plates for the morning meetings. That was the worst. We have seven or eight conference rooms, and we did every meeting that was before 10:30 A.M. I was stuck on bottom conference for fourteen weeks because they didn’t hire anybody new.

“Top conference” is actually
making
fruit plates. It’s very peaceful. You’re in the kitchen instead of in the mailroom. However, there’s nothing inherent in making fruit plates that, as far as I can tell, has anything to do with show business.

FISCHER:
We did any stupid thing to get through, like contests about who could do the most creative napkin folding. Sometimes we alternated what side the fork was on. We got artistic about designing the fruit plates, using two kiwis with a banana coming out of them—that is, until an agent said, “What the fuck is this? Cuba Gooding came in and said the banana looked like a dick.”

STYNE:
One day all the mailroom trainees and permanent employees were called into our boss’s office to talk about farting. We all looked down at the floor. He said, “This farting, passing gas, whatever you want to call it, it has to stop.” I looked up and realized I was the
only
one
looking up.

O’CONNOR: This was after one really bad day when there was more than one gunman, and it literally cleared the room. Since it was mostly male, the mailroom was like a locker room. It got more interesting when we had a couple of females, and we had to rein it in a bit, but not that much. We had to respect any girl who could last there for more than a week.

STYNE:
I started seeing a girl, let’s call her Tiffany, when we were in the mailroom. She continually fucked up. She would go out to her car at lunchtime and pass out because she was on Xanax and whatever else she could get her hands on. One time we had to knock on her BMW window at four-thirty in the afternoon. No one knew where she’d been for three hours.

When Tiffany was up for a desk, she came to my house the night before and we celebrated—and overslept. She had to rush home and got to work ten minutes late. Josh Berman, who ran the mailroom, went to Arlene Newman in Human Resources and narked on her. She didn’t get the desk. Last I heard she was a waitress.

DICKERSON:
Another girl said she was from Tulane and had been on the golf team. She’d told stories about thinking of going pro, but the rigor of the tour and working through the qualifiers was too much. I played golf growing up, so I said, “Oh, I’d love to play golf with you sometimes.” She avoided it. Finally I pinned her down.

O’CONNOR: I’m a shitty golfer, but even I kicked her ass.

DICKERSON:
On the first tee she shanked the ball. She hit about a twelve on the first hole. I said, “You didn’t play golf for Tulane.”

She said, “Uh, no, I didn’t. But I
went
to Tulane.”

O’CONNOR: She also said she was in the CIA training program before she was in the CAA training program.

DICKERSON: And that she went out with Leo DiCaprio.

STYNE:
I was seeing her. It was tough. We got in fights. It was totally secret.

DICKERSON:
Not that secret. I knew. But Dean would never have gone out with her if he’d had a normal job and met normal people. When you’re in the mailroom twenty hours a day, anything that comes in that’s halfway decent, you’re like “All right!” Why? Otherwise you’d get no action whatsoever. You work too much, and when you go out on weekends, what are you going to say to a girl? “I’m in the mailroom”? You have no game.

FISCHER:
I was racing to get home from a late delivery to Malibu, and I got pulled over by the cops for speeding. It was eleven-thirty; my eyes were bloodshot, and I was the picture of pure exhaustion. I was driving my piece-of-shit Chevy Blazer that had gotten stolen in Philadelphia, so when the cop looked for the vehicle identification number he couldn’t find it because they’d had to replace the windshield. I had some old paperwork that you couldn’t even read anymore. He threw me in the back of his police car, handcuffed and everything. The only thing I could think of to say was, “Can I call my office and let them know that my packages will be delayed or that I can’t deliver them tonight?”

“No. Shut up and sit tight.”

A half hour later he found the VIN on the engine. He said, “I’m sorry, I know this was a pain in the ass. I’m not going to give you a ticket, but why are your eyes so bloodshot?”

“I’ve been up for eighteen hours delivering packages,” I said. “It’s not fun, but it’s my life.”

KIVOWITZ:
I wrecked five cars; I totaled one. I had four other solid accidents, just from being on the road so much. I’d be driving, the pager would go off, it made me crazy. One time it went off and I hit the car in front of me, just because I couldn’t deal with the idea of going back to Fox after I’d already been there.

O’CONNOR: Remember Dave, one of the permanent mailroom employees who delivered things during the day? A good-looking guy, like a surfer dude?

STYNE:
Yeah. He was delivering something in Westwood when a woman pulled up in the car next to him. A blonde, about twenty-five, in a brand-new silver convertible BMW. He came back to the office forty-five minutes, an hour late. Everyone was like, “Dave, where were you?” He was honest about it.

“I’m sorry. I met this chick and I just couldn’t pass it up. She blew me.” Everyone was, like, “Yeah, but dude, you can’t do that. Someone’s waiting for that package.”

He said, “But her body was
slammin
’.”

I got lucky, too. I delivered something to Uma Thurman and saw her butt-naked. She lived up Cherokee, off Coldwater. I walked up her brick stairs, by the bedroom, to the front door. The long, thin shutters were open, and I saw her. I wanted to backtrack, just to catch another glimpse, but I figured maybe someone was watching
me
. The front door was open and her mean chows were growling. I left the package and walked back, but she was gone. Whew!

KIVOWITZ:
I didn’t get any actors answering the door in towels, but I did get Brad Pitt with his shirt off, and that was a major highlight. Thank God I had sunglasses, because my eyes were popping out of my head.

STYNE:
I had a delivery for a Melissa Sears. I thought, Who the hell is Melissa Sears? I went to the door and this young, kind of heavyset woman answered. I looked past her and saw Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin. Ellen came to the front door and said, “So, are you part of that mailroom thing?”

I said, “Yeah. I am.”

“Were you the one who said I was a crazy bitch?”

“I, uh, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“All I know is my agent, Kevin Huvane, told me that I was a crazy bitch. And now I’m supposed to invite you in for a fucking drink or something.”

I looked at her and said, “Miss Barkin, here’s your package. Have a great night. Bye-bye.” I left feeling hugely paranoid. I had walked away not only from a client but from one of Kevin Huvane and Bryan Lourd’s best friends.

The next day, as I passed Huvane’s office, his assistant said, “Dean, come in. Kevin wants to hear the story.”

I hadn’t even met Kevin yet. He was on the phone and motioned me to sit down. “What happened?” he said.

“Well, Mr. Huvane—”

“Kevin.”

“Kevin. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

He said, “Hold on a second.” He got Ellen on the phone and goes, “Bubbles?”

I could only imagine what she was saying.

He said, “You know my boy who delivered the package last night? Well, what the hell did you do to him?”

She said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “Well, first, he quit. Second, he has a nervous twitch in his neck. And third, he’s now the houseboy for Warren and Annette. The reason I’m calling you is, Warren and Annette are having a barbecue for the mailroom staff, and the mailroom wants to know if you’ll be their date.”