The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (37 page)

I still managed to learn a lot. Ovitz worked hard. He was prepared. He was aggressive. Diligent. Organized. Detailed. Ovitz saw a big picture and was a bigger thinker than I had ever thought an agent would be. He worked on a whole different level; to him, your career was your life. And yet that very intensity was the problem between us. The important things to him were just not important to me. Unfortunately it wasn’t like a marriage, where you could work out issues. My job was indentured servitude. Ovitz could be intensely abusive. He could make you feel really stupid. He was very cold, manipulative, impenetrable. And he would scream. I’d stand up to him when I thought I was right, but it wasn’t worth screaming right back at him.

I did some boneheaded things [
laughs
].

Anthony Edwards, from
ER
, is a friend. He invited me to the premiere of his movie
Gotcha!
costarring Linda Fiorentino. When you’re an assistant, it is extremely difficult to find your way to premieres, but I knew the star, I had the parking pass, the assigned seat. I really wanted to go.

I never ever left the office
before
Ovitz. In fact, I usually stayed until he was at his destination, like a dinner, just in case he needed anything. The premiere was at eight o’clock in Westwood. Bert Fields, the lawyer, came in for a meeting about seven o’clock. By seven-thirty they were still inside. Seven-forty. Seven forty-five. I knew that sometimes Ovitz would just go straight home and I’d never even see him, so I said to Donna Chavous, who was working late in the secretarial pod, “Cover me. Say I’m down in the library. Say you can’t find me. You know I’m in the building, but you don’t know where I am.” And I left.

After the premiere I went to the party—it was a Thursday night— and was out until one or two in the morning. I got kind of drunk. When I came home, my answering machine rewound forever. Then it played back Donna saying, “David, are you there? Pick up. Pick up. Are you there?”
Click.
“David? It’s really important. You have to pick up the phone, it’s really important. Where are you?”
Click.
“Are you there? Pick up, it’s really important. Do you have Michael’s car keys?”
Click.

I reached into my jacket pocket. I’d gassed his car earlier and kept the keys.

I woke up early Friday morning, slightly hungover, and called Ovitz just to get it over with. He wouldn’t take my call. I dropped the keys by his house on the way to work. Then I waited with his secretaries for him to arrive. Ovitz walked in about nine-thirty. He looked at Donna and Susan and said, “Can you excuse us?” Their look said it all: “Oh, God, we’re sorry.”

Ovitz berated me for being an idiot: “This is the reason why you’re not going to be an agent. You’re not attending to details. This is important.” All at the top of his lungs, veins bulging. He finished with, “Get the
fuck
out of my office, I don’t want to see you.” He was really abusive, but I had made a stupid mistake.

When Ovitz saw a StairMaster for the first time, he fell in love. In those days it was the old type; rather than the two footpads, stairs actually went around in a circle. He had me track down a unit to have installed in his home gym—and, of course, for Ovitz, you could never buy it retail. I got ahold of the manufacturer and convinced him that Ovitz was a big shot in the entertainment business, that they should sell him a StairMaster at cost and have it delivered, because then he’d give them as gifts to the most important people in the industry, and the StairMaster company would get more business. I unwound the whole spiel, and the guy bought it.

Jay Moloney and I waited in our shirts and ties at Ovitz’s house for the delivery truck. The driver said, “I’m dropping it at the curb.” We protested. These were huge machines. “Hey, it’s my contract,” he complained. “I’m not an installer. I’m just a delivery guy.” But it was a hundred yards from the curb to the house, then up some stairs to the gym. I fished in my pockets. I said, “Jay, how much cash do you have?” We gave this guy whatever we had and begged him to help us.

He backed up the truck as close as possible to the door and off-loaded the machine. But it was too heavy to pick up and move, so we had to take it apart just to get it in the door, not to mention up the stairs. It was oily and disgusting to boot.

Ovitz had just installed an incredibly expensive marble foyer floor. Luckily we made it over that without a scratch. Then we started up the staircase. But the StairMaster wouldn’t fit between the banister and the wall, or make the turn in the corner, so we had to lift the machine over the railing and almost push it up past the million-dollar works of art on the walls.

I lifted and pushed and was sinking under the weight, with a very sharp corner of the StairMaster in my palm. The back of my hand was up against the front edge of a canvas: a Jim Dine or a Rauschenberg. With every step up I felt the metal corner dig deeper into my hand, but I was ready to let it go completely through before I would ever let it touch that canvas.

It took a year to figure out, but I finally realized that my job was about having one client: Michael Ovitz. I took care of him from the beginning of the day to the end. I was his front man, and it was about greasing everyone to make him feel like a big deal, an important person in the world. If he went out of town and needed restaurant reservations, I’d call the maître d’, say, “You’ve got to take care of him. He’s an important guy,” and send him cash. I began to excel at my job. I’d learned that Ovitz was all about style over content. Appearances were everything. The concept was totally alien to me personally, and Ovitz knew it. He would give me shit that it was the difference between Jews and gentiles. He would say, “You’re the fucking
goyim
and you don’t get it.” He would make a lot of our cultural differences on a daily basis.

I accompanied Ovitz on a trip east for the first time, and in New York he said, “I’m going to make you an agent. What kind of agent do you want to be?” I said Movie Lit. He said, “Okay, and I’m gonna kick your ass all over town before I let you fail.” That was his way of being supportive. Then he said, “But you’ve got to find your replacement. I’m not going to let you be an agent until I’m comfortable with your replacement. Who should replace you?”

I said Jay Moloney.

At first he said no, then fired Jay for a day. And brought him back. And fired him again for a day. And brought him back. Like he’d done with me, it was all a game. Ovitz just wanted to break him down.

STUART GRIFFEN
is an entrepreneur living in New York.

DAVID “DOC” O’CONNOR, one of CAA’s Young Turks, is now a managing director and a partner at CAA.

PRESSURE, PRESSURE, PRESSURE

Creative Artists Agency, Los Angeles, 1984–1990

MIKE ROSENFELD JR., 1984 • JOEL ROMAN, 1984 • TOM STRICKLER, 1984 •
DONNA CHAVOUS, 1984 • MARC WAX, 1984 • JANE BERLINER, 1985 • JON KLANE, 1985 •
JOHN UFLAND, 1985 • MARTIN SPENCER, 1985 • DOUG ROBINSON, 1985 •
MICHAEL WIMER, 1986 • ADAM KRENTZMAN, 1986 • BRAD WESTON, 1986 •
TED MILLER, 1988 • MICHAEL GOLDMAN, 1989 • JEANNE WILLIAMS, 1990

Hollywood
mailrooms
are
by
nature
Darwinian;
mine
was
also
Dickensian.
We
were
there
from
seven
A.M.—lots
of
times
earlier—until
eleven
at
night,
and
lots
of
times
later.
We
worked
Saturdays.
But
there
were
no
questions
asked.
It
was
pressure,
pressure,
pressure,
and so
intense
that
probably
two
out
of
three
people
showed
up
for
their first
day
and
within
twenty-four
to
forty-eight
hours
were
gone.
My
mailroom
was
the
last gasp
of
the
original
CAA
work
ethic,
yet
even
in
the
midst
of the
madness
my group
could
laugh.
It
was
almost
always
gallows
humor;
it
was
bizarre
and
insane,
but
we
were
on
this
merry
ride,
and
boy,
was
it
fun.

—Tom Strickler

JON KLANE:
CAA was my father’s agency. He wrote the novel
Where’s
Poppa?
and we moved to Los Angeles when it was made into a movie. I was ten. But it was the seventies, the Me Decade, when people paid therapists good money to give them permission to do what felt good. My parents got divorced when I was eleven or twelve. Just as the faces in my father’s world began to get familiar, the door slammed shut. That was a life-changing experience. Out of necessity I began to define myself as a self-reliant person. I became a salesman, a huckster. I got into pocket calculators, vacuum cleaners, dope, catering. When I was twenty-one, I felt I’d finally achieved a level of parity with my old man. I had lots of bread put away. Lots of toys. But I wanted more; I wanted to kick open the door that had been closed ten years before. I reached out to my dad.

He said, “But what is it that you do, exactly?”

“Promotion. Marketing. Something.”

“Okay. Call Ron Meyer at my agency,” he said. “They’re the best. They aren’t number one yet, but they’re like number three with a bullet.”

I called. Ron said, “Come in and meet Ray Kurtzman.”

I drove to CAA for my interview on a brand-new motorcycle that I’d paid for in cash, one of those red Kawasaki Road Rockets. There was no helmet law, so my hair was blown way back. I wore sweats. I was pretty relaxed, the king of my domain, and walked into a place where I would soon learn I was actually quite insignificant. I had no idea what I was in for.

Ray was like my grandfather, and he gave me the speech that I gathered he gave to just about everyone: “Are you out of your fucking mind? Do you know what this job is? This is really hard.” I paraphrase, but it was a very discouraging monologue. Then he asked me, “Why do you want to be an agent?” I had no idea what an agent really was, so I said, “I don’t know that I do, but I’m willing to work in the mailroom for whatever awful wage and in the conditions you just described to find out if that’s what I’m interested in.”

It was an honest answer. Ray said, “All right. Whatever,” and I got the job.

JANE BERLINER:
My father is the photographer who for years has been the guy hired by every studio to shoot at movie premieres. When I graduated from UCLA, I asked his advice on getting into the business, and he told me I could do publicity, work with a producer, or be an agent. When I said agent, he said, “I will let you interview only at CAA. It’s the best place and it’s on the rise.”

I was so nervous before my interview with Ray Kurtzman that my stepfather, a psychiatrist, gave me a posthypnotic suggestion the morning before my meeting so that no matter what, everything I said would be golden. I just didn’t want to blow it.

After my interview I went home and my mom said, “Ray Kurtzman’s office called and asked for a photo.” I thought, What the fuck does he want a photo of me for? He knows what I look like, I was in the chair right in front of him. Turned out he wanted to bring the photo home to his wife, Lynette. I sent the photo and soon got a call: “Of course you have the job. You car-pooled with my son Ricky.” In fact, I hadn’t. My sister Jill had. I remember because Rick Kurtzman and my sister used to feed my dog crayons to watch the color come out the other end. I wanted the job on the merit of my incredible interview, but I had to admire Ray’s poker face while my name rang bells in his head. He never let on.

JOEL ROMAN:
I worked as an electrical assistant, schlepping instruments for a cartage service, when a friend mentioned that her former boyfriend’s father, Mike Rosenfeld, had started a talent agency called Creative Artists. They’d just opened a music division and represented Madonna. I wanted to be in the music business. Luckily I called on a day they needed a body. I took out my earring and wore my only suit and tie. I got the job. My roommate and best friend, Howard Sanders, was totally surprised. He was in the mailroom at William Morris. He’d gone to film school and was a huge film buff. He had also interviewed at CAA, and he couldn’t believe I got in.