The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (38 page)

JOHN UFLAND:
Right out of high school my first job was a production assistant on a low-budget Roger Corman film. Five years later I’d worked on a handful of movies, a couple of which—
Bachelor Party
and
Moving Violations
—my dad and Joe Roth, who now runs Revolution Studios, produced together. One day Joe sat me down and said, “Okay, it’s time to flee the nest.”

I applied to William Morris, where my dad had been in the New York mailroom, and met with Stan Kamen. He said, “What would you like to do?”

I said, “Produce.”

That pretty much ended the meeting.

Kamen sent me to Kathy Krugel, in Personnel. Another short meeting. Once I said I didn’t have a college degree, she said, in that clipped, stilted, vaguely robotic tone of hers, “Oh, we don’t accept people without a college degree.”

I said, “My father didn’t have one, Geffen didn’t, Ron Meyer didn’t.”

“Well, things have changed since then,” she said. “Perhaps we can find something for you in janitorial or custodial.” That blew my mind.

I called my dad. He said, “Why would you tell Kamen you want to produce if you want a job as an agent trainee?” As for Kathy Krugel, he hit the roof and called Kamen, who called me and said, “Look, I’m really sorry. It was totally out of line, but the bottom line is that we’re not taking anyone without a college degree.” He told me to come back later when I’d been an agent for a while, and they’d hire me. I thought, Why would I need you people then?

I called CAA instead.

TED MILLER:
I ended up here almost by accident. I grew up in Los Angeles; I was always around entertainment, but my family wasn’t in show business. My dad didn’t even look at it as legitimate or professional. Understandable. I majored in business in college and I really wanted to go to New York, so I worked on Wall Street for a couple of years in one of the analyst programs, but ultimately, I lost interest in business.

Back home, I got out a studio directory book and wrote letters to anybody who, in my perception, was on the creative side, which was producing. Most of the people who responded either flatly rejected me or said, “Why don’t you go into home video or something like that.” I got a handful of interviews. One guy told me about the trainee program and said he’d be happy to get me an interview at CAA.

BRAD WESTON:
My dad, Stan Weston, created G.I. Joe nearly forty years ago and was one of the pioneers of the licensing and merchandising industry. He handled models like Twiggy, when she was quite the rage; Farrah Fawcett and that big deal she did for Faberge, and the poster phenomenon; Bruce Jenner, when he was in the Olympics. He also got into business with a toy company called LJN and a production company called Telepictures, and they got into the half-hour animated business with some very successful shows called
Thunder Cats
and
Tiger
Sharks
. My dad was also involved with Bernie Brillstein on
Alf
.

I was a marketing major and played lacrosse at the University of Massachusetts. I wanted to get out of school and go into business, and I talked about business all the time with my dad. I also loved the movies. My older brother, Steve, lived in Los Angeles and had gone through the William Morris mailroom. He also gave me the novel
The Boys in the
Mailroom
, and it started me thinking.

In January 1986 I came to Los Angeles to meet Ray Kurtzman. An agent my dad knew, Marty Baum, arranged it. CAA was a much smaller agency at the time. I walked to Ray’s office, past all the assistants, wearing my little interview suit. Everyone looked at me and knew exactly what I was there for. They thought it was funny. I was scared as hell. I spoke to Ray for probably ten minutes. He’s a business affairs executive, not an interviewer by nature. He was pleasant; he couldn’t have been nicer. He said, “Okay, we’ll hire you when a position becomes available.” I got a call in April, telling me to come to work the first week in June. Five days after graduating from college, I was working in the mailroom at CAA.

MICHAEL GOLDMAN:
I was a dumb jock, a 250-pound linebacker at Wesleyan. My older brother had become extraordinarily successful working for Salomon Brothers, and everyone figured I should do that, too. But the college course I enjoyed the most was theatrical writing. At the same time, people had begun talking about Michael Ovitz. I called CAA for an interview. My brother prepped me. “They’re going to give you every reason
not
to take the job.” He said I had to be adamant about my intensity and dedication. I told Ray Kurtzman I was born to be an agent and sold him on my incredible determination.

JEANNE WILLIAMS:
Movies had always interested me. I watched them with my mother when she was in graduate school; I’d keep her company while she typed papers late at night.
Citizen Kane, Night of the
Hunter, Imitation of Life
. I also went to movies all the time when I was in college, but I still hadn’t made the connection that there was a way to make a career out of it. My parents were always academically inclined, pretty traditional. They didn’t know anybody who worked in the movie industry. It never seemed a very practical business for someone from a middle-class black family.

Instead, I went to Harvard Law School. But during my first month I was already disenchanted. I thought the law was about being more political and making the world a better place; instead, the whole thing seemed designed as a feeder system for the major New York firms. Still, I got my degree, passed the bar in New York and D.C., moved to New York, and worked in mergers and acquisitions. My first year I had one day off: Christmas.

I left New York and went to D.C., and got into tax law. But again I thought, I hate this and have to get out. I was in my late twenties and it was either try the movie business or let go of the dream.

I worked on a few independent movies and productions in the D.C. area on nights and weekends, and got a good look behind the scenes. I also read William Goldman’s book,
Adventures in the Screen Trade
. Then I read an article in the
New York Times Magazine
about CAA and Mike Ovitz. I didn’t really know what agents did, but in the article Ovitz mentioned that he hired a lot of MBAs and JDs.

I sent my résumé to William Morris in New York, and they offered me a job as a trainee in the mailroom. I also sent one to CAA. Ray Kurtzman called me. He sounded surprised. “You want to work here?”

I said, “Yeah, I think so.” Two days later, I jumped on a plane.

Ray tried to discourage me but I was already used to tough environments. Besides, it’s what I wanted to do. I’d already made a lot of money, but it hadn’t made me happy. I knew that the only way I could have a new life was to start at the bottom. My parents lived in Orange County, and they said I could live with them and commute. The drive was brutal, but I had faith that I would figure it out.

MARC WAX:
My dad started in the William Morris mailroom and was an agent in New York and Los Angeles for a long time, ultimately rising to vice president of their TV Department. Ovitz, Haber, and Perkins worked with him or for him. When I was seventeen, he called up Mike Ovitz and got me into the CAA mailroom as a “summer camper.” I came back in 1984, after college, as an official trainee.

MARTIN SPENCER:
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after college, so I went to see Bernie Brillstein. Bernie is my godfather, my Dutch uncle, the guy I go to for advice. He said, “You’re gonna go work in a mailroom.” I said, “What’s that?” He called Ray Kurtzman, and I found out.

DONNA CHAVOUS:
I think of myself as the typical Hollywood story. I grew up in Los Angeles, went to USC. My dad was a cop, my mother a teacher. They divorced when I was five. My dream was to be an entertainment lawyer, and my mom supported that. She also insisted I always have an after-school job, so from high school through college I worked at a law firm at 1888 Century Park East, in Century City. We were on the same floor as CAA. That meant nothing to me except that I thought their employees were weird because every time they went to the bathroom, they moved as fast as Speedy Gonzales!

Robbie, one of the legal assistants I worked for, began dating a guy from CAA named Todd Smith. They met because during the writers’ strike that year he finally had time to stop and talk to her in the elevator. They eventually got married.

I was ready to go to law school, only I’d flunked the LSAT because I had no capacity for aptitude tests. I could have retaken it and started the following semester, but I was impatient. I was so stressed trying to figure out what to do with my life that Robbie said, “Why don’t I have Todd get you an interview at CAA?” At that point anything sounded good. “Okay,” I said. “Whatever.”

MIKE ROSENFELD JR.:
My father, one of the CAA founders, always told me, “I think you’d be a good agent.” I guess it was my ability to talk to people and make them feel comfortable. We also had creative discussions at the house, and I think he felt I had a knack for the business. But whenever he suggested I work in the CAA mailroom, like my older brother, Max, had done temporarily when the company started, I resisted the idea. I wanted to be a musician.

In 1984, after two years of college, majoring in music, a lightbulb went off in my head. I realized that I didn’t want to wind up as a thirtyfive-year-old struggling songwriter. I called my father, who had retired from the company two years earlier, and said, “I’m willing to try and work in the mailroom. Can you help me get a job there?” I felt like Richard Gere in
An Officer and a Gentleman:
I had nowhere else to go.

Even though he knew me, Ray Kurtzman put me through the interview grind. He was relentless and skeptical. Finally he squinted at me and said, “I guess I
have
to give you a job. Let’s see if you can cut it.”

MICHAEL WIMER:
I went to Harvard undergraduate, to Spain on a scholarship, into investment banking at First Boston. But eventually it bored me. I quit and went to Stanford Business School. The summer between my two years there I came to Los Angeles, interned at Disney, and got the show business bug. I interviewed around town, and more than a few people said I should think about being an agent. I took that as a huge insult. I’d heard agents were hucksters, untrustworthy, slippery, unctuous. But I knew if I didn’t like it, I could go back to Wall Street. I had nothing to lose.

I showed up to meet Ray Kurtzman wearing white bucks and a yellow tie, and I’m sure he thought I’d be eaten by the business. “You look like a nice kid,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

TOM STRICKLER:
When I was at Harvard, we gave Sean Connery the Hasty Pudding Man of the Year award. He came to the ceremony accompanied by Stuart Griffen, who happened to be Mike Ovitz’s assistant. We spent the day together, talked about what he did. I told him I was coming to Los Angeles after I graduated. He told me to call him.

I drove into town on July 4. The sky was pink and orange, and Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” was on the radio. I got settled and called Stuart, but there were no jobs. He said he’d keep trying to get me in, and gave me two pieces of advice for my eventual interview with Ray Kurtzman: “Ray is a huge golf fan, so talk about golf. And no matter what, tell him you’ve always wanted to be an agent.”

I said, “Why? What does that mean?”

He said, “They always try to trick people. They’re afraid people will come to the training program and then go off and get another job.”

I finally got a call from CAA asking if I could come in
that
day. I said sure. Once with Ray, I immediately started using a bunch of golf metaphors, just put them on the ends of my comments, like “It was a hole in one.” Ray finally asked me if I played golf, and I said yes. In truth, I had played once or twice, when I was twelve. But in our conversation I
loved
the sport.

Then he said, “You don’t want to be an agent, do you?” I could tell he was a little worried about my white-shoe background. Earlier he’d said, “You went to Harvard. Do you know what you’re going to be doing here?”

I said, “I’ve always wanted to be an agent. I’ve always dreamed of being an agent. I grew up wanting to be an agent. When I was
six,
I wanted to be an agent.”

He smiled, because whether he believed it or not, that was the answer he wanted to hear.

Then he asked a very funny question: “What religion are you?”

I said, “I’m Christian.”

He said, “Well, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got five Jews in the mailroom, and tomorrow’s Yom Kippur. If you can start tomorrow morning, you’ve got the job.”

I said yes, and that was it. I made it in because they needed a
goy!

STRICKLER:
My first giant mistake was a direct result of not being Jewish. They told me to set up a conference room with food for a morning meeting. Part of that was cutting the bagels. I’d never cut a bagel. I’d probably never eaten a bagel. Rather than cut them lengthwise, I cut them in half and put them out on a plate. After the meeting someone said, “You’re a fucking idiot!” I’m sure everyone thought, Who is the moron who did
this?
He’ll never go anywhere.

CHAVOUS:
Tom Strickler was clueless when he came to work. There he was, six foot two, blond, blue eyes, Mr. Intellectual. On his first day I looked at him and said, “Hey, man, after you clean up the conference room, you’ve got to clean up the kitchen. Load the dishwasher, wipe the counters. And it’s got to be done
right now
.” He looked at me like I had ten heads: What the fuck? This black chick is telling me to go fucking clean some shit up? He hated that part of the job. It was priceless.