The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (41 page)

“Can’t your dad help you out or something?”

“He was done helping me out when he gave me your phone number.”

BERLINER:
The first time I did a wife pickup, I was terrified she would say, “Never send that girl again; that car is a piece of crap.” Instead the wives loved my ’66 Beetle because they all remembered the boys they had necked with in the car when it was first out.

ROMAN:
Whenever I had to pick up the wives, I always struggled with who I’d pick up first, because the other one would have to sit in the backseat, and I didn’t have a four-door. Once, I said, “Hey, I’d be happy to sit in the backseat if one of you would like to drive,” and there was deathly silence.

STRICKLER:
My first Christmas at CAA I had to deliver Ovitz’s gifts. It took six or seven days, and the gifts were quite elaborate. I delivered a brand-new Sony television to Wolfgang Puck, an expensive stereo to Ovitz’s litigator, an Exercycle to Bernie Brillstein’s office. Neil Diamond got a pinball machine with all his songs on it. Typically you would go, “This is from Mike Ovitz,” and they’d say, “Oh, great—put it over there.”

Very late one evening I got a gift basket and an address with someone’s name I didn’t recognize, an address far out in North Hollywood. I found the place in a very modest neighborhood. On a concrete pad in front of the house were two perfect Lincoln Town Cars. I realized this was Ovitz’s driver.

I said, “Hi, I’ve got a delivery from Mike Ovitz,” and I handed him the gift basket.

“Oh, that’s great,” he said. “Wow, that’s so nice. Tell Mike thanks.” Then he said, “Hold on a minute,” and came back with a ten-dollar bill.

I said, “I can’t do that. Mr. Ovitz wouldn’t want me to take a tip.” He insisted, but I wouldn’t take it. On the drive back to the office I realized that I’d delivered to two hundred people, most of whom were multimillionaries, and nobody—
nobody
—offered to give me a tip except the
one
guy
who probably couldn’t afford to do it.

I was very moved. It was an O. Henry Christmas moment.

STRICKLER:
When CAA signed Michael Jackson, he was the biggest music star in the world. The company wanted to celebrate, so they arranged to get four hundred tickets to his stadium tour. A check for thousands and thousands of dollars was written to Avalon Attractions, the promoter of his Los Angeles show.

We handed the check to this new kid on the Valley run and told him to pick up the tickets. We stressed it was important. He’d been in the mailroom about a week, and already we could see him fraying at the edges. Plus, he was a weeper. If something went wrong, he’d say, “I can’t believe this is happening! This is not right!” More than once we had to talk him down: “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.” We tried camaraderie, but you could tell the guy was walking a real thin plank. The odds were against him.

The Valley run was a nightmare because it covered a huge amount of turf, from Westlake Village all the way along the Valley corridor to the then-Columbia Pictures lot in Burbank. Adding to the pressure, our New York pouch left from Columbia at 5:30 P.M.

The kid’s morning run began at ten-thirty. He came back late, hyper-ventilating, spritzing a little bit. I gave him a few minutes to compose himself, then gave him a big stack of packages and a check for $47,000. “Pick up the tickets,” I said. “Bring them back. Be careful. Lock your car.”

About six-thirty that night we got a call. The kid was on a pay phone on Ventura Boulevard. Crying. Screaming. He shouted, “I can’t take it anymore! I’m not doing this. This is fucking crazy. I’m not doing this!”

I soothed him enough to ask the question uppermost in my mind: “Do you have the tickets?”

“Yes, I have the tickets.”

“Well, why don’t you come back to the office, drop off the tickets, and we’ll have a conversation?” He refused.

I ran the mailroom, and I knew my head was on the line. The concert was the
next night,
and we still had to
send
out the tickets to all the important clients and buyers. Tom Cruise, for God’s sake. Jon Klane said, “Keep him on the phone, and I’ll go to him right now.”

“Okay,” I said, “but if you’ve ever driven fast in your life, this is the time.” Meanwhile, on the phone, the kid began to get hostile: “Fuck you people! Fuck these people! I’ve never been treated so badly!”

I kept talking while Klane drove the fastest trip anyone’s ever made to the Valley in rush-hour traffic. He picked up the packages and the tickets and saved the day.

No one else at CAA knew what had happened. We were too busy to tell the story. All I knew was that I had tickets by seven o’clock and I still had another six hundred packages to get out. At least it felt like that. I took a breath, and then it was, “Next.”

To tell you the truth, the only thing we cared about were the frigging tickets. The kid never came back, just disappeared, but that wasn’t unusual. He was just another guy down.

WIMER:
He was also a knucklehead. He wore a big, thick knot in a really short tie, and he was the only guy who wore short-sleeved shirts. I once answered phones with him, and he had a seizure and swallowed his tongue. I had to pull it out of his throat. Another time, early in the morning, Kate Capshaw called in. You were supposed to just pass the call along, but he said, “Who’s this? No! This is
Kate Capshaw?
I can’t believe it!” He went on and on. “I can’t believe it’s you!” I knew this guy was going to blow up.

UFLAND:
One night a package had to get to the post office. It closed at five, and it was nearly that. I raced to my car, in the parking garage, but my pass card kept coming up as not valid. The attendant was new and didn’t speak much English, and when I asked for his help, he just said, “This card is no good,” and snapped it in half. I didn’t have time to debate him. I thought, You break my card, I’m going to break your gate. So I drove my car right through the wooden gate arm. When I got back, people in the mailroom were smiling and laughing, except for Tom Strickler. He said, “Ray wants to see you.”

By the time of our company retreat a few weeks later everyone had heard the story. People kept coming up to me and saying, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to do that.”

ROBINSON:
Tom Strickler was the only guy in Hollywood who ever made me cry. I’d been at CAA two months. I had friends, in from New York, coming to visit after work. Tom said, “You have to do a night run and deliver a gift.”

I explained why I couldn’t.

He said, “No. You’re doing it.” He was head of the mailroom, and he put the hammer down. I was so upset and angry that I cried.

The gift was an inflatable raft: an island with a palm tree in the middle. I had to blow it up and bring it to Mark Canton’s house. Todd Margolis went with me. We stopped at the Chevron station on Sunset, near Nichols Canyon, and filled it with air. But then it wouldn’t fit into the car because it was about nine feet in diameter. To get it to Canton’s, we put it on the roof and I sat on the car window, my body outside, leaning over the roof to hold it. By the time we knocked on Canton’s door, it was nine-thirty. Inside was a full-blown Hollywood party with all the usual suspects. We walked in like two morons, sweaty, disgusting, in our traditional mailroom outfits of tie, ratty slacks, and bad shoes, carrying a nine-foot island with a palm tree. Afterward there were more deliveries, and I never saw my friends.

STRICKLER:
Wanting attention is good. Wanting it too much is not. Joey Plager, a guy behind me in the mailroom, was desperate.

David “Doc” O’Connor was Mike Ovitz’s assistant. One day James Clavell’s new novel came in. It was gigantic, about fifteen hundred pages. Clavell was a big author for CAA and an Ovitz client. Doc approached Joey and said, “I want you to do the coverage on the new Clavell book.” Joey was good at writing coverage, and it was an incredible opportunity because Ovitz would be reading it, which was his way of pretending to have read the book without actually reading it. That’s the system with scripts, books, everything.

Joey said, “How many days do I have?”

It was a Monday. “You’ve got to get it done fast,” Doc said.

Joey stayed home Tuesday and read. He worked on it Wednesday, all day long. He stayed up Wednesday night, typing and editing. After two nights without sleep he got it done. The book was so large that the coverage itself was fourteen pages. Basically, you wrote a page for every hundred pages.

On Thursday Joey gave the coverage to Doc, who said, “Great. Fabulous.” He brought it to Ovitz later that day. Ovitz took it home, and the next morning talked to Doc. “David,” he said. “The coverage is too long. Do coverage of the coverage.”

Doc read the fourteen pages and distilled it down. Joey was crushed.

GOLDMAN:
What’s weird is that your life is such shit in the mailroom, but you still feel it’s an honor to lock up the front door at 3 A.M. You should be thinking, It’s fucking 3 A.M. and it’s a Tuesday and I’ve got to be up in four hours to buy groceries for the company meetings tomorrow. Instead you feel it’s amazing that these guys trust you with the keys. You’re thrilled to be a fucking slave. Your reality and perception are extraordinarily narrow. It’s almost like: God forbid you were not to have this piece-of-shit job, then your life would be worthless. It’s like the red script covers are more valuable than any individual member of the company. Leaving CAA, whatever your position, was considered by them to be the end of your career, that you had failed.

STRICKLER:
At our corporate retreat I discovered on the first night that there was no
New York Times
at the hotel. It drove me nuts. I’d always been a big
Times
reader. Ovitz was, too, and the situation seemed to present an opportunity for me. I called distribution at the paper and asked where I could get it in Palm Springs. They said the airport at 6:30 A.M. The next day I got the paper, sat in the hotel courtyard, ordered breakfast, and started reading.

Just like magic, Mike Ovitz showed up. He nodded, sat down, and ordered breakfast. Eventually he glanced over again and saw what I was reading. “Is that the
New York Times
?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Oh, at the airport this morning.”

He came to my table and sat down. “Uh, can I, uh, read some of it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Absolutely.” He picked up the business section. We had what I’d call light conversation while he read, and had breakfast together.

The story would be great even if it just ended there. But there was a final beat. When I told Jack Rapke, he decided he had to let Ovitz know that it had been a setup, because Ovitz would really appreciate the fact that it had not been an accident. A week later Jack told me Ovitz loved it because
he
had been agented. Of course, Ovitz never mentioned it to me, ever.

KRENTZMAN:
Every Saturday for about four months six of us would meet at my house and test one another with flash cards on CAA’s clients. We had that kind of dedication because what we did was not a job, it was a way of life. Of course, you don’t realize it’s a way of life until you’re in the middle of it. And once you’re in the middle of it, you don’t remember what it was like to have a life. A tornado is twisting around you, and you’re in the eye of the storm.

WILLIAMS:
They tell you to be prepared for a year in the mailroom. There weren’t many exceptions, so there was no plan to get ahead. You just put in your time and hoped you didn’t have to put in much more than that. I didn’t see it as a game; I just realized what kind of girl I needed to be to survive. I observed the people the bosses liked and didn’t like. Women fell into two camps: women they were interested in trying to date, and women who were buddies. They were more honest with and gave more information to the latter. That camaraderie gave me some insight into how the system worked. But I had to tolerate things that would have offended me before.

When you’re black and have been in the environments I’ve been in, you become a chameleon. That’s another whole discussion, about being black and being in these agency training programs. Very few have come through. One reason is financial. Another is connections. Sometimes that has a racial face, but it’s really about class. The mailroom is a great place to be if your parents can afford it. Many were rich, privileged kids who had nicer cars than some of the agents.

The racial part of it is complicated. It’s tough because so much about being a middle-class black person, or from any ethnic group, is getting to a place where you don’t have to push anybody’s cart, where you don’t have to be subservient, where you don’t have to deliver packages. The whole reason you went to college and graduate school is to avoid that.

KLANE:
In the beginning I didn’t get the sense that it was competitive. But it was. There were two giant copy machines, as big as Buicks. If you were lucky enough to be in the office and not running around delivering packages, you copied scripts. Strickler and I would see who could copy the most without the machine jamming. We kept a Post-it inside with whoever had the record. You had to have a witness. I had the record.