The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (39 page)

STRICKLER:
I didn’t find it
that
tough. I thought it was part of the whole picture. It was like graduate school. I take pride in the menial tasks—or at least I did then.

DOUG ROBINSON:
My first day I met Kirk Torres and Todd Margolis. They went, “Oh, look, it’s the new Lew.” They called everyone Lew. Kirk and Todd were the biggest characters in the mailroom, bar none. Nothing was serious and everyone was Lew. I still have no idea who the original Lew was unless they meant Lew Wasserman. Kirk and Toddy did their jobs, but it was obvious they didn’t have the attitude it took to get ahead at CAA.

KLANE:
Todd became a publicist, I think. Kirk had a wonderful sense of humor. One night at a company retreat he picked up a couple of girls, and the next morning there he was, sleeping in the room he shared with Martin Spencer, with his cock hanging out and over. It exposed him as the, uh, Dillinger of our crowd. Martin is English, and the boarding-school principle is to shout it in the hallways, so he took a Polaroid and invited people to come take a look. “Check out Frankie Per-due!” he said. Later we went to one of the early-morning meetings, and every time I looked at Ovitz and Meyer with their heads together, all I could imagine was them talking about Kirk’s dick.

ADAM KRENTZMAN:
Matt Loze took me out for the morning run. It was kind of a no-brainer. We even had extra time to have lunch together. He told me how the agency worked, and I told him I was there because a cousin had suggested I should be an agent—for actresses specifically. What I didn’t say was that all I knew from being an agent was
Broadway
Danny Rose
. You know, white leather shoes, a cigar, and you’re in business.

Matt asked if I thought I could do the afternoon run on my own. I said sure; I’d lived in Los Angeles for years. I left about three-thirty but wasn’t as familiar with the streets as I’d thought. Around eight o’clock it started raining. My car leaked and the windows fogged up. When I rolled down the window to see, more rain came. At eleven o’clock I called the mailroom. I still had a third of the packages left to deliver. I said, “What time exactly is it okay to call it a day?”

The guy said, “When you’re finished,” and hung up the phone.

I got home at one-thirty in the morning, took a shower, and slumped down on the tile floor, knowing that I not only had to be in the office at 7 A.M., but first I’d have to gas up my car and do the shopping for the morning staff meeting. I started crying. I thought, What have I gotten myself into?

STRICKLER:
Joel Roman was the senior trainee and ran the mailroom. He was our commander in chief and torturer. We hated him. He was not the kind of guy who wanted to get in the trenches with the rest of us. If there was a bad job, he would give it to someone else to do. When you run the mailroom and it’s that intense, the best way to build loyalty is sometimes to take the shitty jobs and do them yourself. He took the shitty jobs and gave them away.

CHAVOUS:
Joel was a mess. A nervous wreck. It wasn’t his fault. He used to bite his fingernails down to the nub from the stress. It’s obvious why: the company was just exploding. It seemed like things were moving faster and faster every single day, yet they were very frugal. They didn’t want outside messengers, which increased the pressure even more. Every time Joel
had
to spend on something extra, they’d scream at him. Plus, he wanted to be a music agent, and there wasn’t much movement there in terms of openings, so he was stuck in the mailroom.

ROMAN:
After three months they offered me Rosalie Swedlin’s desk in the Literary Department. I didn’t know I
wasn’t
supposed to turn it down, but I did, which created a big fuss because no one with the typical CAA mind-set and ambitions had done that before. Jack Rapke offered me his desk, and I passed again. I can’t say it often enough, but I just wanted to get into the music business. My saying no to desks allowed the film school guys reviewing screenwriter flash cards to shoot past me. Because of my seniority I ended up running the mailroom.

It’s okay with me if I wasn’t a great boss. I wasn’t cut out to do that. I had no conception of the importance of my responsibilities. I wasn’t prepared for that type of stress. I got mononucleosis but was able to stay out for only a few days.

At CAA everything had to be done
right now,
no excuses. Because of the pressure from Ovitz on down I was forced to yell at these people, because someone was always yelling at me. I remember sending out a memo once. It was one line, and I was torn a new asshole because it was
one line on one piece of paper,
and I should have done it on
half
a sheet. I got fired once by Bill Haber because a package was mailed instead of delivered. The question begs to be asked whether it said DELIVERY or MAIL on the package, but Bill broke his phone and told me to get out. I went to Ray Kurtzman’s office to collect my check, and he said, “No, no, don’t worry. We’ll fix this.”

STRICKLER:
Working in the mailroom was famously exhausting. This was because CAA was the new power. William Morris had gotten old and institutional; CAA was the young up-and-comer. A hotbed. Ovitz liked that type of corporate culture: “Okay, here’s the bar; now jump higher than anybody else. Our people work harder, faster.” Ovitz and Meyer ran a tight ship, and it was inspiring. But people in the mailroom would sometimes break down crying because it was tough, tough, tough.

ROBINSON:
By the time I started, Strickler had become head of the mailroom. He tried to make it his fiefdom. Tom and I used to get into it. He was always going on about Harvard this and Harvard that. Finally I said, “Hey. I’m sorting the same mail you are.”

WIMER:
We made absolutely no money. The pay was so low that there was no way of putting pencil to paper and seeing it work out. I decided to go on fumes, and when I finally ran out, I’d be out. At least I wouldn’t starve. I could always eat the chocolates and Martinelli apple juices we had to stock Ovitz’s office with. And there were fruit trees at the guest house where I lived.

WESTON:
I was new to Los Angeles, so I moved into an Oakwood apartments complex in Mar Vista. Doug Robinson used to come over to watch the Giants games. We were two lonely, miserable, twenty-one-year -old guys from New York, making two hundred and fifty dollars a week, becoming friends. To blow off steam we socialized with the other assistants, went to parties, and drank. We got to know the assistants around town—who was cool and who wasn’t. We had a blast.

CHAVOUS:
The paychecks were $429.80 every two weeks. I lived by myself in a one-bedroom apartment on National Boulevard in Culver City, robbing Peter to pay Paul, fighting off student loans.

WIMER:
Often we’d just wait until a night meeting broke, then get the DHL bags—not the FedEx bags, because the DHL bags were lined with plastic—go into the meeting room, and stuff all the leftovers into the pouches. I lived off leftover tortellini for a week and a half. Took it home and fried it up with some barbecue sauce. Mmm, good.

KRENTZMAN:
On my second day Sally Field came for a meeting in the conference room. Hillcrest Country Club provided the food. Afterward the mailroom crew closed the door, pulled the shades, and ate everything. Being the new guy, I said, “Are you nuts? You’re like a bunch of animals! You’re scavengers.”

After one week of rushing around I had lost eleven pounds. When Dolly Parton came up for a meeting, afterward, I got into the conference room as fast as I could, closed the door, shut the shades, and elbowed people out of the way to get to that chopped salad from Hillcrest.

KLANE:
I didn’t have a trust fund or anybody taking care of my shit. I’d come from running my own businesses, a place where I was king. That’s probably why Ray Kurtzman once accused me of having a superiority complex. Maybe he was right. Corporate culture was completely foreign to me. I gather guys like Strickler, who’d gone to Harvard, were as fascinated by me as I was by them. But sometimes it felt to me like the whole place was Ivy League and their every move was planned out from birth: jobs, clubs, schools, associations. How I got in without a college degree is still a mystery to me.

WIMER:
I was so overqualified that Ovitz didn’t expect me to hang in. He got all the trainees together, and we went around the room, telling our backgrounds. Everyone else was local, most soft Beverly Hills kids. When I said “Harvard” and “Stanford” and “investment banking,” no one seemed to mind, but after that I rarely brought it up. My education didn’t seem relevant, unless I wanted to be thought of as a creep. I just stuck with being short and funny instead.

UFLAND:
I immediately got all sorts of crap about my wardrobe. I didn’t even own a tie. But when people complained, I said, “On nine hundred a month? You show me the money, and I’ll buy the clothes.” When I realized the salaries some of the MBAs and lawyers had given up to work there, I almost choked.

WILLIAMS:
It’s really hard for most people to understand what’s so compelling about this business that someone like me would give up the law. It’s a good question. I still ask it of myself every day, because there are days when I hate this business. I guess I just hated being a lawyer more. Yet there are also those moments when I’ve worked really hard for someone I believe is incredibly talented, and I see them achieve great things. Or the times when I sit in a theater, the lights go down, I see magic on the screen, and realize the power and the beauty of this medium and my part in making it happen. That’s exciting.

SPENCER:
I used to think they were crazy, giving up jobs in which they made four hundred thousand a year, for one that paid twenty-three thousand. But were they?
They just wanted to be in the movie business
. Going into the mailroom is like the romance of going off to war. It’s only when you find yourself in battle every day that you realize that the romance is for shit. There’s no such thing as romance when you’re under heavy fire. You’re just asking yourself, “What the hell am I doing here?”

JEANNE WILLIAMS:
The person at the bottom of the mailroom had to do the grocery shopping. We’d go to the Ralph’s grocery store in the West-side Pavillion early in the morning, and buy everything we needed for all the meetings that day. Because I lived in Orange County I’d have to get up at five, be on the road at five-thirty, get to Beverly Hills by six-thirty, do the shopping, and get to the office by seven. That was bad. Even worse, after I started there was a hiring freeze, and I was stuck. I was on the bottom of the mailroom for four months.

CHAVOUS:
I had to go to I-’n-Joy Bagels and to the deli on Pico and Westwood to get the lox and cream cheese. Then to the market for fresh-squeezed orange juice and all the different kinds of milk. On Fridays I’d add doughnuts. And there were special requests: Ron Meyer liked green apples.

GOLDMAN:
I’m not the most domestic guy, but I thought I set a pretty nice conference room table on my first try. The head of the mailroom didn’t agree. He said, “What’s wrong with this sugar bowl?”

I looked at the bowl. “Nothing. It’s clean.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing.”

“Wrong,” he said. “The sugar has to be shaped like a nipple. Like a pyramid. That’s the way they want it.”

That’s the mentality. You do things one way and one way only. Their way.

STRICKLER:
Ron Meyer once said this to us, and I still say it to the trainees at my company: There are two kinds of guys in the mailroom. Here’s how you tell the difference. I’ll say, “Go get me a glass of water.” One guy goes out and gets a glass of water. One guy goes out and puts exactly the right number of cubes in it, fills the water up to exactly the right level, cleans the spot off, gets a napkin, and makes sure he serves you the best glass of water you’ve ever had. That’s the difference, and either you get that or you don’t.

CHAVOUS:
We hazed one another all the time. Rosenfeld was always farting and waving the air at us. Ufland we called the Tasmanian Devil because he was so serious and intense about everything. Marc Wax was more laid back. We never thought he’d make it, because he was always so calm, whistling “Dixie” in his own world. I was the only black person in the mailroom, and I was very serious because I knew that all eyes were watching me.

UFLAND:
Jon Klane was the laziest person I had ever met in my entire life. Now we have a great relationship, but in those days he drove me absolutely insane. His attitude was “Doody-doody-doo.” The day a stack of scripts needed to be copied, Jon sat there stuffing his face with bagels, reading the trades. I said, “Are you going to do anything today?” We got into an argument, and I threw the scripts at him.

Strickler tormented me as well. Some nights I’d go home absolutely miserable because Tom was so incredibly intolerable. His whole existence was about how much grief he could throw at me and Klane. He used to razz us about our dads’ movies; the high point of Tom’s day was to say their movies were shit. Okay, so they wouldn’t show them at Harvard.