The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (64 page)

That night, sure enough, we did body shots.

The third year Jeremy did a whole body shot thing where he’d call people out—two women and everything—and everyone did them.

The last year, before Judy left to start her own management company, she was very pregnant. We were about to do the body shot and she said, “Do you want to do it off my stomach?”

I said, “No fucking way, Judy. That’s where I’m drawing the line. There’s no way I’m licking your pregnant stomach.”

JOEL:
What you discover in the training program is that there are many personalities out there, and you have to learn how to handle
all
of them. Everyone I represent is different. When you’re pushing the mail cart, each assistant you meet is someone new. If you’re an automaton, you don’t make it.

You also learn that a lot of the Hollywood myths
are
myths. The power lunches are bullshit. You’re a reflection of your clients, and that’s how you get hot. It’s as simple as that. You also see what to do and what not to do. A lot of
Jerry Maguire
was true. There are two ways to go: There’s the Bob Sugar way, to sleaze out, or there’s the Jerry Maguire way. You can watch assistants and tell if they’re going to become Bob Sugars or Jerry Maguires.

Even though the myths created in Hollywood are just bullshit, lots of people believe what they read in
People
magazine. Last year I went to Duke University and spoke to about three hundred kids. I said, “You want the reality or you want the bullshit?” The reality is, it’s $285 a week, it sucks, you have no free time, but it’s a means to an end. If you don’t want to see the movies, don’t want to watch the TV shows, don’t want to go to the comedy clubs, don’t even apply, because there are thousands of people who want to.

But if you want to, here’s the payback: I was driving along Santa Monica Boulevard not long ago and there were two billboards, on opposite ends of the street, for TV shows about to premiere—and my clients were the leads in both of them.

DAS:
I was a motion picture lit agent for a little under three years. I made deals for writers and directors. Sometimes I thought, God, I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this! Here I am, at a screening, on a Friday afternoon, watching a great movie. Or I’m at Sundance, and it’s
my job
.

But I gave it up. The partners in my company began to look old. It’s a hard world. You have very little social life. Everything revolves around your work. You’re in your office and on the phone 75 percent of the time. It gets pretty repetitive.

If you’re really into the whole glamour of the movie industry, maybe you won’t mind. You’re at the top of the mountain, looking down. It’s very exclusive. And the rewards are okay. You’re a salaried guy, you get a nice bonus, and you have a four-year contract. Nice car, nice house, a decent life. The other side is that you’re stuck in Los Angeles with a very expensive house, expensive cars, and two kids to put through private schools. Plus you’re always
servicing
people: your clients, others’ clients, covering studios. I wasn’t convinced this was the way for an entrepreneur to go. It’s ironic, because people have the impression that agents
are
entrepreneurs. They’re not, really. Agents are secure. They have something to sell that has a built-in sell. Agents are not really risk takers. If you don’t sell one client, you have another client to sell. You’re a company guy and you’re working for the man, and that’s it. You’re not going to be a millionaire unless you slug it out for the long haul and become an Ed Limato or Jack Rapke.

Agents figure that out pretty quickly. I know a lot of unhappy agents.

I had begun to do fairly well. I sold
The Sixth Sense
to Disney with Peter Benedek for $2.5 million. No one had any idea that the movie would be as successful as it was. M. Night Shyamalan was the client I loved working with the most. But deep down it had become meaningless to me. Making money was never my motivation; working with filmmakers was. I was no longer psyched up enough to go to work every morning.

I put my stuff in storage, bought three plane tickets, and went to South America, Africa, and the Mediterranean. I hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. I trekked in Patagonia. I climbed the highest mountain in Morocco. I asked myself: Is the rat race for me? Is Hollywood? I was thirty-one and had had two careers. I was pretty confident that I had enough contacts at my level in the industry that I could take six months off and come back—be an agent at another agency if I wanted. I was also 99 percent sure I wouldn’t want that.

I didn’t even come home for the premiere of
The Sixth Sense
. Night was cool with it. Finally, after a year and a trip around the world, I was almost ready to return, but my girlfriend suggested that maybe I should go to Kosovo. I had wanted to do some volunteer work. Give something back to society. I was in Italy, not too far away.

I went to Kosovo cold. I ended up transferring my skills as an agent to the relief effort. I went to this war-torn country—flattened, nothing, no prison, no bank, no mail, no legal system, no nothing—with the biggest UN mission ever. I knocked on doors and I met a guy who ran the United Nations Development Programme. With luck, timing, and salesmanship I managed to get hired to run this $2 million, $3 million program. I had a local staff of three and a Land Rover, and I ran the office in the most important city in Kosovo, identifying, implementing, and monitoring rehabilitation programs.

My plan was to do that for a month. They offered me a contract to do it for nine months. I took it. The job was great. It involved me doing something, the results of which I could see immediately: creating jobs, reforestation, repairing roads, cleaning rivers, making parks. I personally made a difference.

After nine months they offered me another year, but by then I was ready to come home. And here I am. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but that’s okay with me.

KLIONER:
Jeremy Zimmer sent me out to get some tulips for his office. I didn’t know the first thing about flowers, but I found a shop and I bought tulips. By the time I got them back to the office, they were drooping. Jeremy said, “I’m not having anybody work for me who pays twenty dollars for wilted tulips and gets ripped off. It’s embarrassing.” I expected that, even to get yelled at, but not what he did next. We got in his car and drove to the flower shop. He took the flowers in and right in front of me told the salesman, “These are not acceptable.” He was almost like a father standing up for his son, showing him how to do it right.

SUE NAEGLE
is partner and cohead of the Television Department at UTA.

MARTY BOWEN
is “humbly” an agent at UTA.

BRANDT JOEL
is an agent at CAA.

MICHAEL CONWAY
is executive administrator at UTA, currently overseeing the management of UTA’s daily administrative operations, including recruitment and hiring for the agent training program/mailroom.

SEAN FAY is a personal manager who worked his way up from assistant to partner at Imperato-Fay Management.

ROB KIM is an agent in the Television Literary and Television Packaging departments at UTA.

JASON HEYMAN
is a motion picture talent agent at UTA.

SHARON SHEINWOLD
is a talent agent at UTA.

TONI WELLS-ROTH
is available for “a great job or a great adventure, preferably both.”

DAVID KRAMER
is a motion picture literary agent at UTA.

JIMMY DARMODY
is an agent at CAA.

KEVIN STOLPER
is a talent agent working in both feature film and television at UTA.

GLEB KLIONER became a talent agent at UTA in 1997. He is now a business entrepreneur and a manager at Schacter Entertainment.

SHERWIN DAS was last seen back in Kosovo as a civil affairs officer with the United Nations.

BASIL IWAYNK is president of production at InterMedia Films.

PETER SAFRAN
is a manager at Brillstein/Grey Entertainment.

CHARLES FERRARO
is an agent at UTA.

IN YOUR FACE! . . . WITH LOVE

Endeavor, Los Angeles, 1995

ADRIANA ALBERGHETTI

My aunt is Anna Maria Alberghetti. My father is an entertainment attorney in business affairs at the studios. But that’s not what brought me to the business. I’ve just always been obsessed with the movies.

After graduating from Berkeley in 1992, I wanted to come home and pursue my dream of somehow working in film, but I had also fallen in love with San Francisco and didn’t want to forfeit a couple of years there by jumping right into Hollywood. I was only twenty-one. I thought it would be a good idea to have some kind of life experience outside of show business because I knew once I was in it, I’d never leave. At first I thought I could compromise by working at Coppola’s company in northern California, but they told me, “Listen, we don’t really
do
anything. We’re not
in
the business. Don’t be an idiot. Go down to Los Angeles.”

Instead I found a job at Smith Barney, in the marketing department. I lived in San Francisco and had lots of friends. I enjoyed the idea of dressing up in a suit, wearing pearls and stockings, and working downtown. I had my Coach briefcase with, of course, nothing in it, but at least I had it.

After three and a half years I was the youngest cohead of a department, with thirty-five people. But I couldn’t shake the old feeling that I wasn’t in the right business.

I decided to talk to the CEO, who only came in once a week. I put a piece of Bazooka gum in my mouth and read the fortune on the comic: “So, what are you waiting for?”

I thought, This is it, and I walked in and quit. I still have that gum wrapper.

I came to L.A. on July 3 and moved in with my parents. I interviewed at ICM and found out I had to meet with ten agents in a month. It seemed to me that they did that just to see how many outfits you could get together.

I also went to see Rick Rosen at Endeavor. The agency was brand-new. Rosen and my father had worked together at Columbia in the early 1980s. He said, “We don’t have anybody in our mailroom. Do you want to do it? I think you’d be great.”

I told him about the ICM routine and asked, “Who else do I have to sit down with here?”

“Nobody,” he said. “I’ll hire you. You have twenty-four hours to decide.”

A day? “You can’t leverage me,” I said. “I’ve known you since I was seven.”

He said, “I can and I will.”

“What about my exposure? It’s going to be so much greater at ICM or CAA, with so many different departments and people.” I was attracted to the idea of a place with hundreds of employees, where I would have the camaraderie of twenty people in the mailroom alone. Instead Rick offered me a job, by myself, in a back room in rinky-dink offices on top of Islands, a restaurant in Beverly Hills, where you could always smell the hamburgers cooking. Computers sat on cardboard boxes. Nothing was in its place. It was horrifying. Plus the company was all guys except for the temp who answered phones.

Rick must have read it in my eyes. “We’re all taking a risk,” he said, “but I guarantee your exposure will actually be much greater here, in less time, because we all need each other. There will be no layers. The mailroom won’t be separate from what we’re doing. We’re all in this together, I promise you.”

The pay was minimum: $21,000 a year, a huge comedown from Smith Barney.

Endeavor at the beginning was the four partners—Rick Rosen, David Greenblatt, Tom Strickler, and Ari Emanuel—their four assistants, and Phil Raskind. All the partners had to remortgage their houses. The furniture was brought from home. Rick Rosen used Strickler’s kitchen table; Strickler had his architectural drafting table. The mailroom was a third the size of my current office, with one copy machine. Michael Johnson, a guy Strickler knew from Harvard, copied and collated scripts, but he was moving to Ari Emanuel’s desk, which left the mailroom to me.

I brought in my ghetto blaster, put up my van Gogh poster, and tried to make it a homey little place in which I could spend twelve hours a day. It was exhausting. There was too much work and too few people. I managed to find time for a bit of a social life, but not of the boyfriend variety.

My stay in the mailroom was shorter than expected. After two weeks, Michael Johnson quit Ari’s desk because Ari was too intense.

They chose me to take his place.

I was supposed to start on Ari’s desk on Monday morning. The Friday afternoon before, I trained with Michael. I also walked into Ari’s office and said, “Listen, here’s the thing: As long as you and I can keep an open line of communication, I think we’re going to be just fine.” I came at it like, “We’re starting this partnership. We can make it work.” He stopped what he was writing, looked at me, and said, “
Get the fuck out
of my office
.” That was his take on the open line of communication. There was no partnership.