The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (29 page)

BROWN:
Sometime in 1974 I went to Rowland Perkins, because I thought he was a classy guy, and said, “I’d like to work for you.”

He said, “Uh, it’s really busy now, I’m not really looking for anybody.” Blah, blah, blah. I asked again, but Rowland kept putting me off.

The next thing I knew, Perkins, Haber, Ovitz, Meyer, and Rosenfeld were all gone, and I realized Rowland saved my ass because he knew he was leaving. In fact, I was in the mailroom the day it happened. I heard screaming. I walked into the lobby, turned right, and looked down the long hallway to the executive offices. Ray Kurtzman, a big Business Affairs guy who would later also leave for CAA, was about halfway down and to the left. Weisbord was in the corner. The screaming got louder. “You guys are nuts! What, are you crazy?” Then I heard, “Fucking Ovitz!” and thought it was about one person. I had no idea it was about five or six guys.

After the dust settled, some of us in the mailroom thought, Great! Openings for us. Some said, “Hey, let’s go to work over there at CAA.”

I said, “They might not be around tomorrow.”

I stuck around and worked for Herb Karp, then Mike Peretzian, in the Literary Department. I liked Mike enormously. He was a very sharp, classy guy who set the example of integrity in an agent. He wouldn’t take any crap from anyone. As a result, his clients respected him. He didn’t have a lot of turnover. He had clients that lasted.

CRESTANI:
When I worked in Dispatch, I was asked to temp for Sam Weisbord for a few days. He was president of the company and ran the agency day to day. One reason they picked me was because I didn’t smoke; he was a big health nut. Weisbord did most of his business behind closed doors. I sat in the outer office. I did his mail. He’d give me a list of calls and I’d make them. At the end of my first day there he called me into his office. He said, “Most people who work for me are afraid of me.”

I said, “Why would I be afraid of you? I want your job one day.” I didn’t think about it. It just came out of my mouth. But he was right; most people were afraid of him. I was probably too naive to be afraid.

When Sam asked me what I wanted at William Morris, I said, “I want to work for Jerry Katzman in TV.” What I didn’t realize was that Weisbord had been Katzman’s mentor; they had a father-son bond. Weisbord said, “Send me a memo.” That made me nervous because I had already begun to talk to Katzman about interviewing for his desk. I must have stayed until nine that night, trying to perfect the memo.

Weisbord worked out of his house until about ten every morning. He’d do his exercises and make his calls to New York, then he’d come in around ten-thirty. I got the mail ready for him and put my memo in about halfway down the pile.

Weisbord was in his office no more than fifteen minutes, doing his mail, when he buzzed me. “Get me Jerry Katzman.” At first I didn’t think it was about me, because I couldn’t imagine that he’d gotten that far down in the mail stack. Katzman came rushing in with a look of fear in his eyes, like, “Oh, God, what did I do?”

The meeting seemed to last forever. Occasionally I’d buzz Weisbord with a phone call. Forty-five minutes later Katzman came out with my memo in his hand. He said nothing to me, just walked by. All I could think was, It’s over, it’s done, I’m a dead man, I’m toast. Sam Weisbord’s telling him to hire me? “Fuck you.”

The next day Katzman saw me in the hall and said, “Come in here.” He let me twist a little bit, but that’s his way. He said, “I’m going to put you on my desk. But it’s probationary, and your memo had nothing to do with this.”

Jerry soon became head of the Television Department. It was good for me, though I never looked at it as a positioning move. He was just a straight-ahead guy who worked hard and was skyrocketing within the company. I was on his E-ticket ride.

Eventually he offered me a job as a casting agent in the Talent Department. I turned it down. He asked why. “Because I’m not ready to leave. I’m learning too much here.”

He said, “Yeah, but we may not have another opening.”

I said, “You’ll create an opening.”

The opening was a new assignment. One of our agents, Steve Konow, was a real character. Ambitious, Gucci-ed, great salesman. Jerry said, “I’m thinking about having you work for Steve so you can teach him how to do a deal memo.”

I worked for Konow for six weeks, then he told me to go see Jerry. He tried to act nonchalant, but he had a smile on his face. I knew something was up.

Jerry said, “You’re being promoted.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Where?”

“We’re putting you into the Variety Department”—this was specials, game shows, everything.

I went from never working a day in any of those businesses to booking
The Tonight Show
, among others, myself. I didn’t even have a secretary. I had gone from the pinnacle of packaging to the lowest level, with no contacts. But I didn’t care. I finally had my shot, and I was going to take it.

IEZMAN:
Let me be blunt: I was desperate. Like everybody else, I wanted to go into motion pictures, but there were no openings. TV talent would have been my second choice. Nothing there either. A new theater agent named Jack Grossbart had just come out from New York, and I took his desk. Then I got lucky. Very quickly we moved from theater to motion pictures and television. I stayed on his desk for fifteen months. Then APA, an agency down the street, started sniffing around about me. I told William Morris, “If you don’t promote me, I’m going to leave.” They still wanted to make sure I was appropriate agent material. What’s appropriate? Aggressive. Articulate. A good salesman. People have to like you. You have to be able to get in a door through a small opening. I guess I passed the test.

LUCCHESI:
When Dennis Brody was promoted, I wanted to take his place on Stan Kamen’s desk. Working for Stan was like clerking for the chief justice of the Supreme Court. I was a wreck. I’d sleep only two nights a week—Friday and Saturday. I had such anxiety about whether I would be able to cut it. I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin. I was afraid of screwing up; I was afraid he was going to yell. After about four months I had such a stomachache that I called my mother and said, “I don’t know if I can put up with this anymore. I think I’m getting an ulcer.”

She said, “Gary, you’re anticipating the worst. You think the sky is going to fall in. Maybe it won’t.”

My mother was right: You’re paralyzed if you constantly anticipate the worst. My philosophy became to
attack
the work. I used to say: Pretend you’re in a red Ferrari, the top is down, you’ve got blinders on, and you’re going straight ahead just as fast as you can. From that point on I relaxed.

The most important thing Stan passed on was to mind your reputation. I remember him arguing with someone on the phone and saying, “I’ll put my reputation up against yours any day.” I’ve used it a couple of times myself. If you actually have a good reputation, it’s a real winner. Stan was a role model and a gentleman. To this day I keep his obituary in my desk drawer.

RANDALL:
I really wanted to be in TV. The William Morris Agency had created TV packaging. It wasn’t as glamorous as motion pictures, but it was the mainstay of their business. There were still only three networks and this little thing called HBO starting to percolate. There was also great opportunity in TV at William Morris because the CAA people had left. They were replaced with a bunch of guys from New York, headed by Larry Auerbach.

Auerbach’s son Bruce was a few years younger than me. He’d worked at the agency part-time in the summer. We hit it off, and he told me that he wanted to go to the University of Arizona, like I had, but he didn’t have the grades. I had been an executive officer of the student government, and I knew the university president and the admissions people. So I picked up the phone and called the president, and I pulled whatever strings I had at the time. I guess they were sufficient enough to get Bruce admitted to the University of Arizona.

After Dispatch, I became Auerbach’s trainee. He terrified me until I was invited to his house one day to hang out with his sons. Then I realized that his job was to be my father. His job was to kick my ass until I got it right.

I was still on Auerbach’s desk when Rapke, Iezman, Somers, and Brody got promoted, so I told him, “This is bullshit. All the guys in my mailroom class have gotten promoted. Where’s my promotion? I’m ready to go.”

Auerbach said, “Look: It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to book an actor on an episode of
Laverne and Shirley
. Your friend Iezman, while he’s been made an agent, is going to have to make his bones doing guest-star bookings for a while. Your friend Rapke, all he’s got to do is take a fucking script and send it out to some asshole at a studio to see if they’ll finance it. That doesn’t take a rocket scientist, either. The lifeblood of the agency is TV packaging. It’s more complicated than just booking. Be patient. I’m going to make you a TV packager and you will own the fucking world.”

I was brash and young, and I didn’t want to be patient.

I called my cousin Mike Marcus, who was then at Kohner-Levy, and said, “Mike, I’ve been here three years. I want a shot at being an agent, and these guys aren’t going to give it to me right now.” Marcus brought me over to meet with Levy, and they offered me a job in the Literary Department. I came back to William Morris, typed out a letter of resignation, and sent it to all the big muckety-mucks on the first floor. Pretty quickly I was called into a summit meeting with the senior members of the agency and Auerbach, who was furious.

They said, “Okay, fine. You want to be an agent? We’ll make you an agent. Right after the holidays, you’re an agent. Congratulations. That’s what you want, that’s what you got. But,” they said, “you’re got to pick up the phone, call your friend Mike Marcus, and tell him that you’re turning down the job.”

They made me do it right there. Mike got pretty pissed off at me, but I got what I wanted, or so I thought. I was dealing with professional negotiators. They made me an agent, all right: I came back from Christmas break and I was suddenly a
variety booker
. My job was to book talent on
The Tonight Show
and Alan Hamel’s show out of Vancouver. It was basically “Fuck you, kid. You want to be an agent? Go be a grunt.”

I finally said, “Fuck you guys,” and left.

RAPKE:
I thought I could get greater and quicker visibility if I handled written material instead of talent. That way I could talk to studio presidents and to all the producers. If I handled the talent, I’d be talking only to casting directors. The only agent who knew me prior to my arrival was Ron Mardigian; Ron was in Literary and open to a relationship with me.

When he took me on, I was nervous because I wanted to be perfect. Ron approached my training almost like a fraternity hazing. I think he found it funny to take an aggressive, bright, goal-oriented person who wanted success, and put him into a subservient situation. Ron always made sure that I knew he was the boss. His attitude was, “Okay, kid,
I
went through it, so now
you’re
gonna go through it.”

When they wanted to promote me to a TV variety agent, I said no. That caused a whole stir. I didn’t want to book acts. That’s not why I had gone to film school or come to Hollywood. Ultimately they acquiesced because my godfather, my mentor, Ron Mardigian, fought for me. If he hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have continued at William Morris, and I don’t know what my destiny would have been.

RANDALL:
I was still in the mailroom when William Morris celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary. Everyone was invited to Hillcrest Country Club for a party honoring the agency and Abe Lastfogel.

Jack Rapke, his then-girlfriend Laurie Perlman, Alan Iezman, and I went together. I borrowed a friend’s Caddy and drove. We were still pretty fresh and still believers that William Morris was where the action was. It was hard to resist. Back at the office Sam Weisbord used to address us like we were a fucking military battalion.

Lastfogel was on his last legs. He stood and, in the middle of some speech about the Danny Thomas era, completely lost his train of thought and suddenly sat down. Everybody was, like, “Is that it?” My friends and I looked at one another and realized we were surrounded by a bunch of senior citizens who were completely out of touch and rapidly approaching
ancient
.

The place was not unlike the Politburo: The only way to really succeed was to sign a lifetime contract, and when you were sixty or seventy years old, if you were lucky enough to still be around, you would be paid for your long-term career. We didn’t want to wait until we were as old as our grandfathers to be successful. We realized that we’d been sold a bill of goods and the only way to really score was to go off and do our own thing. The industry was changing, the world was changing. William Morris knew it had to keep up. But the thought of change when you’re seventy? Who needs change? The board members had their stock, the company owned all this real estate. They made a fortune. The company style had worked for so long that their attitude was “The industry will come back to us. We’re not changing our ways.”

SOMERS:
Almost all of our group wanted to be producers. Anything but agents. The longer I was at William Morris, the longer I knew that I didn’t want to be there. I saw a lot of unhappy people, taking drugs, living lives that I wouldn’t want. Nobody talked about their family. Nobody talked about their sports, their avocations, their interests. It was all about the business, always, and that was way, way too consuming.