The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (49 page)

At Boston University I managed a restaurant and wanted to be in that business. But with a degree in broadcasting and film, and because of family pressure, I figured I might as well go to Los Angeles and meet some people. In 1986, during spring break, I stayed with my brother and his girlfriend for a week. He said he would set me up with a number of interviews. If I liked it, I liked it; if I didn’t, I didn’t.

I met Alan Berger, a TV movie packaging agent at William Morris. He and my brother were friends; Alan covered ABC for the agency. I sat in his office for a couple of hours one afternoon. I listened to him make a deal on the phone. I watched young agents come in and ask questions. Every conversation was different. He was selling, but his product was human, creative ideas, not widgets. And it was very fast-paced, a lot like the restaurant business, where you have to think on your feet constantly to keep people happy.

Berger sent me to meet Kathy Krugel. I got a short, encouraging speech, filled out some papers, and came back the next day for an official interview. They told me the process could take six months. I said, “I’m out here for a week. I graduate in six weeks. I’m going to get a job somewhere. Probably the first offer I get.” I called Alan Berger and he pushed me through the system in a week’s time.

RICK JAFFA:
I grew up in a very small town in Texas, and I loved two things: sports and movies. I would never quarterback for the Cowboys, so I moved to Los Angeles to get into the movies. But first I enrolled at USC for graduate business school. It took two years to get my M.B.A. I hated it. Afterward I tried to get a foot in the show business door but had no luck.

Eventually I went broke. I was literally down to my last five dollars. I took the money, walked to Westwood, and saw
An American Werewolf in
London
. I couldn’t even buy a Coke, popcorn, anything. I was tapped out.

After the movie I walked around Westwood thinking, It’s over. I’ll go back to Texas. That’s when I ran into a guy I knew from home who happened to have some experience in the business. He said, “Have you ever thought about trying to get into the mailroom at one of the agencies?”

I said, “Yeah. But I’d be a terrible agent.” The image in my mind was that they all grew up in New York or went to Beverly Hills High. They had a certain panache. A certain style. And most of them came from show business families, not Texas.

My friend loaned me fifty dollars. He said he’d call someone at CAA and I should call William Morris and ICM if I could think of someone I knew who could help me get in. I came up with a long, long shot. In college I was the softball coach for this girl’s sorority and she’d had a blind date with a guy in the William Morris mailroom. Three years had gone by, but I called her and asked if she could remember his name. I said I was desperate. It took a while, but she came up with it: Sam Haskell.

I called Sam, not knowing if he was still in the mailroom or parking cars, or even at William Morris. His assistant answered. I left a message. After five times he very graciously called back and said, “What on
earth
do you want?”

I said, “Just give me five minutes.”

Sam was from a small town in Mississippi where I actually knew people, which is bizarre because I only knew three people in the state. We hit it off. He’s the greatest guy. I love him. He took me down to see the head of Personnel. We both had southern accents, so the woman must have figured we grew up together—and neither of us told her any different.

Three weeks went by. I did odd jobs to pay the bills. I was a Kelly Girl. I sold cookies at a Mrs. Fields–like store. I had to wear a shirt with a cookie on it that read EAT ME. The kids I worked with smoked dope in the alley on their breaks. Then I got the call from William Morris. I was in.

NICK STEVENS:
My parents are still in the same North Philadelphia house that they built in 1962 and I grew up in. My dad ran Robert Bruce, a domestic menswear company that my grandfather started. Then he was an investor and started a real estate business.

When I was a film student at Boston University I made an absolutely horrible film that went to student festivals. I also booked, for no money, punk rock bands around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. I didn’t wear the punk rock outfit. I was more the Deadhead guy who had gotten tired of that game by the time I was eighteen.

Somehow people at William Morris heard that I had gotten a band to be the opening act for Tom Petty, and I got a call from Janice Merrill in the Los Angeles office, asking if I’d like to interview for their training program. I’m like, “William who?” I had no idea. I hung up.

Around graduation, a very smart professor told me about agenting, and I remembered the call from William Morris. I called Janice Merrill. “Hi, remember me? You called me two years ago.” She said no, but come in anyway.

Janice gave me a typing test, which I failed. She asked me about any relatives in the entertainment business. I had none. I told her about the punk rock thing, because that was pretty much the only story I had. She said, “There are four thousand applicants for every spot. We’ll have you come back eight or nine times. But everybody’s uncle is somebody, and you have no uncles. And you don’t type.” I still remember the look on her face.

This was on a Monday. I said, “Look, I’m going to Philly on Friday. I’ll have a job by Monday. It ain’t happening for me, coming back every month or whatever.” Janice sent my typing test and résumé to David Goldman, who ran the training program. He saw the punk rock thing and called.

A few days later, as I was driving up to William Morris, I saw someone I knew from Boston University walking across the street, carrying a mailbag. He had the Kennedy haircut, the argyle socks, the pink shirt, the striped tie, the khaki pants. It was Chris Harbert. I was on the scooter with long hair and a backpack. I hadn’t even brought a jacket. I thought, These fucking people are not going to hire me. I went around the corner to Neiman Marcus and bought a jacket and a tie, and I got a haircut, then went to see Goldman.

We talked about music. He wanted to revamp the music department and get the company out of booking Dion at the Sands in Vegas and into the real world. I told him he was right. He gave me the “four thousand applicants” story. I gave him the “I’m going to Philly on Friday” story. Goldman took me to meet Jerry Katzman. Katzman didn’t impress me, but I got the job.

BETH SWOFFORD:
I grew up in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina. I worked at a theater the summer before I graduated from high school, taking tickets, selling popcorn, and fell in love with the movies. There was so much press then about George Lucas that I decided to go to film school where he had: USC. I fell into the agency business because I worked for some then-struggling young television producers who told me that if I started in the training program, I wouldn’t be stuck in the secretarial ghetto. It sounded like good advice.

I interviewed at CAA and William Morris. CAA was full up, so I talked to Kathy Krugel at William Morris and got a job in five or six weeks.

DAVID LONNER:
I was a mediocre student at Tulane University, changing majors all the time. It was the Reagan years. Everybody was going into the Salomon or Goldman Sachs training program. My junior year I went to Israel and Tel Aviv University, to study things that were meaningful to me, like the Arab-Israeli conflict.

My uncle came to visit. We had a cup of coffee at the Tel Aviv Hilton and he said, “So, what are you going to do with your life?” He started gouging me a little, saying, “You’d better start thinking about it.”

I wanted to do something I was passionate about, and that was Israel. One idea was opening a fast-food-baked-potato restaurant because that was all the rage. I even looked at a little restaurant real estate on Wiesengof Street. Instead, I went back to New Orleans for my senior year, I got into the jazz and pop scene, went to movies. I read
Weekly
Variety
and
Indecent Exposure,
David McClintick’s bestseller, which described how the William Morris mailroom is where a bunch of the people I had read about had started. It seemed like the essence of the American dream.

I moved to Los Angeles in August 1984. I sold my parents by portraying the mailroom as graduate school. There was never an argument.

MATT TOLMACH:
It’s either a bit of a mistake or a matter of convenience that I got to William Morris. I went to Beloit, a tiny liberal-arts college in Wisconsin, as an English major. A week before I graduated, my mother, who grew up in Los Angeles, called and said, “Matthew, what are your plans?”

I said, “I’m going back to D.C.”—where I’d grown up—“and I’m going to paint houses and write.”

“Over my dead body,” she said. She called my grandfather, Sam Jaffe, who had retired from Hollywood in the sixties, and said, “You’ve got to take Matthew under your wing. He’s threatening to be a writer.”

My grandfather was a great, gruff character. Larger than life. A legend. He produced
Born Free
. I revered him. He said, “What’s this shit I hear about being a writer?”

“Well, Poppy, I love to write.”

“Ah, that’s crap. Come on out to the coast. You like writing? You can be a literary agent.”

It was my first taste of how valuable connections can be in Hollywood. I agreed to check it out. In truth, my best friends in school were a year behind me and we had an elaborate plan to crew on a ship when they graduated. I had a year to kill, so I went to California to wait for the guys.

I met with Hal Ross at William Morris. He was sweet. I wore a khaki suit with rips in it and loafers with electrical tape holding them together. In my mind I was some cheap version of Tom Wolfe: nattily dressed, but clearly just off the college campus. I was a very idealistic, irreverent, liberal-arts kid. I didn’t know what I stood for, but I was convinced it was something
else
. Hal talked about my grandfather and then said he would send me upstairs to meet David Goldman. Goldman said, “So, why do you want to be an agent?”

“Well, I don’t, really,” I said. “The truth is, my grandfather really wanted me to do this.”

“Well, what do you
want
to do?”

I said I wanted to be a writer.

“The idea of our agents competing with our clients is troubling,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I can understand that.”

We just looked at each other. He asked a couple more questions and then said, “Okay, thanks a lot for your time.” I walked out thinking I had absolutely tanked the interview. I went to Hal Ross’s office, ready to apologize and exit. He met me with open arms. He said, “David loved you!”

STEVE RABINEAU:
My uncle was at MCA in the 1950s, but I had no interest in what he did. I grew up in Brentwood, California; my parents were in the schmatta business, my brother was an attorney, and I was a student at UCLA headed for law school because my parents wanted me to do it. I decided not to go, which left me floundering. Dan Enright, co-owner of Barry and Enright Productions, a game show company, is my second cousin; he was nice enough to give me an entry-level, cockamamie job. I worked as a contestant coordinator for
Tic-Tac-Dough,
hosted by Wink Martindale.

Meanwhile, my mother told me that some third cousin from Long Island was assistant to Martin Caan, a big literary agent at William Morris. She introduced me, and I somehow schmickled my way into his office. I sat on his couch and told him I was directionless. He said, “Have you thought about being in the mailroom?” He described it as the epicenter of the movie business and a great stepping-stone. Marty jammed me in, and I started doing interviews. Eight months later they said, “Okay, you’re in.” I was thrilled, but not my family. From their point of view my life had gone completely off track.

STEVENS:
I remember two things about the first day. First, Richard Feinsilber ran the mailroom; Richard didn’t like me, I didn’t like him. The second was Beth Swofford.

SWOFFORD:
Well, I was the only woman in the mailroom. Nick stood out, too. His personality was so . . . big.

TOLMACH:
Feinsilber sat at the desk right in front of the mailroom and presided over all things. He’d say, “You—across the street.” “You—for Stein.” He was exactly like Danny DeVito in Taxi.

STEVENS:
Matt Tolmach came in a little after me. I showed him around.

TOLMACH:
What he means is that within the first hour Nick walked up, literally grabbed me, took me into the hallway, and said, “Look, I’ve been here a week. I’ve got this whole place wired. Watch me. Follow me. You’ll get it.”

I thought, Who the fuck is this guy? But I said okay. There were little cliques; everybody looked for an angle. There were the good students, and the kids who smoked weed in the back of the room and got by. We were
those
guys. Operators. Nick and I thought we were cool. We became best friends. Nick was controversial. He had long hair. We went to see punk bands at Club Lingerie three, four, five nights a week. Nick had an Alfa Romeo sports car with license plates that said COWPUNK, and then I bought one. We were a terrible twosome. We weren’t terribly deferential, he much less than I, who was sort of in his shadow. We weren’t disrespectful either, just determined to do it on our terms.