The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (24 page)

During my interview, Ron asked how old I was, and I told him twenty-eight. “That’s a little old,” he said, “but if you’re really interested, I’ll try to put it through.”

I think Ron was impressed with my education, as I was quite qualified. Perhaps overqualified. But because of my credentials, my salary was five dollars a week more than the other trainees—and there I was, with two master’s degrees and a teaching credential, with a job in the mailroom, making a fraction of what I made teaching play analysis, acting, and directing, not to mention substitute teaching around the city, including at Beverly Hills High School, where I soon found myself in a night course taking speed writing, which all the William Morris trainees had to do so they could take dictation from their bosses, as well as typing classes. At least I already knew how to type.

The day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon was the day I walked into personnel to start my career. July 20, 1969. I met with Kathy Krugel. I think her hair then was deep red, and she was always overdoing it on the diet pills. We had a funny line about her: only shrews and hummingbirds have a metabolic rate faster than Kathy Krugel. She had these strange mood swings. I once had an accident with one of the messenger cars, and she said, “Oh my God!”, and then she lowered her voice and then she lowered her voice some more and said, “Are you okay?”

The first day of work, the projectionist left on vacation, so for two weeks I operated the projection room. During that time the East Coast television agents came in for their annual strategy meetings about the selling season, and various things had to be in paper bowls within reach of everyone: pretzels, peanuts, and matzo—though I don’t think it had anything to do with the time of year. Keeping the bowls full was my job.

Most of the people in the mailroom with me are now gone. Michael Ovitz also started there in 1969, but he might have gotten out before me. I don’t remember him.

I wasn’t sure at first that I wanted to be an agent, and six months later I still had no idea of what I had gotten into. That changed when an agent asked me to take Steve McQueen’s profit participation check from
Bullitt
to his accountant, ten blocks down Wilshire Boulevard. The envelope wasn’t sealed, so I looked inside. It was well over a million dollars. Suddenly I realized that
the money
was what it was all about. I’d seen McQueen before in the hallway, and it was no big deal, but carrying that check was the most anxious walk of my life

Other incidents reinforced the idea that maybe being an agent was more interesting than I’d imagined. I was told to bring the script of
Myra Breckenridge
to Mae West. Several weeks later I was asked to take something to Warren Beatty, in his penthouse apartment at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I looked inside the bag; it was stuff for sunburn! I rang the doorbell and I heard scurrying feet. Suddenly, there was Warren Beatty, wrapped in just a towel, his skin a little red. He gave me a wink and said, “Thanks, kid!” I figured that he and Julie Christie were sitting there naked and sunburned, waiting for the William Morris kid to come up with the stuff so they could get some relief.

Sometimes I didn’t really feel I fit in because my interests were so specific. When desks would open, all the other guys wanted to work in motion pictures, representing movie stars. That is where the money and the glamour was. I wasn’t interested. I was the only one in my class who wanted to train on a literary agent’s desk. When Ron Mardigian’s desk became available I was the only candidate for it, and I was promoted before a lot of people in my class because they were holding out for the talent agent ladder.

Ron Mardigian was like the older brother I never had. Or a surrogate father. He wanted me to succeed, and he suggested that I cultivate social contacts with studio executives, especially the females, as a way of schmoozing. In this business you create a lot of artificial intimacies and it can become very confusing. But I’m not that good at socializing and schmoozing. My power as an agent has always come from my relationship with clients.

While I was in the training program, I went through a very difficult time. There was a problem developing in terms of my dealing with my own sexuality. In short, I was scared shitless about it. I didn’t know what to do, especially when Ron suggested that I go out and schmooze some girls. This put me in great conflict. To help myself, I entered group therapy, which started around six o’clock on a Tuesday or Thursday. Ron very graciously let me get out early in order to make that appointment.

The session before mine was another group, and they exited by a separate door, so we never saw them. But I was told by the therapist that someone in that group was
also
a trainee at William Morris. That made me even more nervous. I didn’t want to run into him. Fortunately, we never met each other, and I don’t know to this day who that person was!

Eventually, in a roundabout way, this led to a problem at work. Bill Haber decided that he had a lot of issues with the way that the Literary Department was run. He took it upon himself to tell the literary agents that he was going to have his own department meeting with us, and he picked a time that was in conflict with my therapy sessions. It was a dilemma because, first of all, he was encroaching on Ron’s domain. Second, Haber’s meetings were mandatory and as I told Ron, I could not go because I had an appointment with a psychiatrist. He asked me then why I was going. I would not tell him. He seemed to understand it was important to me and he let it go.

When Ron found out from someone else that I was gay, he was really upset with me because I hadn’t shared with him that part of myself. He was very sympathetic.

It was so freaky then if you were gay. It was terrifying because you couldn’t be one of the guys. They would make jokes about gays and I was not comfortable with that. It took several years of therapy to finally come out and acknowledge who I was.

My sexuality is, of course, extremely personal, but I share the story now because many of the same issues apply today if you are “different.” Even in this day and age there are probably guys in mailrooms whose sexuality is very guarded. Here’s the reason: When you’re an agent, being gay is fine. But as a trainee you could feel that it may not be politically wise to declare yourself. Yes, at the time there were others at William Morris, higher-ups in the company, who were deep in the closet. But for a trainee to come out could cause problems. I was very nervous.

MARDIGAN: Mike is right. Had he let it be known while he was a
trainee, it might have hurt him. Not only that, but there was a policy—not written down, but stated—that was a
bigger
secret than
which top executive was in the closet. I knew it, and eventually everybody found out about it, but if Mike had come out, he would have
been fired in two seconds. The old guard—some of whom never
declared themselves—was still there and watching out for that stu f.
Only Ed Bondy was so far out that you knew, but that’s who he was.

Ron also taught me that when you leave for the weekend, you don’t talk to clients. You don’t take those calls. He would go out of town to his cabin, and there was no way even I could call him in case of any emergency; he had no phone by design and I had to handle the rare emergency. This taught me that it’s crucial to have a personal life in this business. As much as you may love your clients and their talent, it is
not
all about that. You had to keep your personal and professional lives separate because one day the latter will be over and you’d better have something left.

One Saturday, I got up and realized that something was wrong. I felt dead. I took the phone off the hook, turned off the stereo, and I promised myself that I would not leave my room until I found out. I started taking inventory of my life and asked myself when I last felt alive. When did I feel passion? I realized that I didn’t have any hobbies; I didn’t even collect stamps! It was just William Morris and that was it. The last time I felt passion was during a summer workshop at UCLA. In the morning, we made props for a Brecht play. In the afternoon, we rehearsed yet another Brecht play, and in the evening we performed a third Brecht play—and then we went someplace and drank beer until two o’clock in the morning. Then we went back to the dorm, got up the next day, and did the whole thing all over again! I loved that! I could do that forever.

Some of my old UCLA friends had called a couple of months previously and asked me to direct some plays at Beverly Hills High School. My first reaction was that I was now in the real world as an agent at the William Morris Agency, a grown-up now, not in school anymore, thank you very much. Then I decided to call them and they told me they were doing a production of
Uncle Vanya
. I said, “Why don’t I do a workshop of Chekhov’s
The Seagull
. That could be done in conjunction, on the same set.”

I directed
The Seagull
and then that led to directing
The Shadow Box
and a few other plays, and I was starting to get excited. No one at work knew. I would leave the office around 6:30 at night, grab a bite to eat, go to Beverly Hills High School, start there at 7:15, work until 10:00. I did it for four weeks, Saturdays and Sundays, too. Then the reviews came out in the trades and the
Los Angeles Times
. Thank God, they were all raves!

Larry Auerbach called me into his offices, showed me one of the reviews, and asked me, “Is this you?”

“Yes, it is.”

He asked me why and I told him that it was like playing golf, a hobby. They were worried, I could tell, that I was just looking for an opportunity to bail and become a director, which was ironic because that is what I started out to do in the first place. Then one day, I was asked if I would like to direct some projects at the Mark Taper Forum. I did, and one,
A Life
, was nominated by the Los Angeles Drama Critics as one of the best-directed shows of the year. Now William Morris was impressed. From then on, if anyone came in and wanted to do theater or serious acting, I would be pushed into the room like downstage center.

The whole episode was a great lesson because it reminded me that my life had to contain some passion. Thereafter it was not unusual for me to go to the Mark Taper Forum and see a play written by, say, an English playwright, find out he was interested in American representation, sign him, and eight years later see
The English Patient
pick up nine Academy Awards. Anthony Minghella did not have an American screenplay; he did not have anything to sell except his talent. I had been vindicated by my philosophy of what a talent agency is for: to find talent and nurture it.

MIKE PERETZIAN,
after years at William Morris, became a motion picture literary agent at CAA in February 2000. He still directs plays.

TIES THAT BIND

TIES THAT BIND

William Morris Agency, Los Angeles, 1974–1977

BRUCE BROWN, 1974 • ALAN IEZMAN, 1974 • JACK RAPKE, 1975 •
DENNIS BRODY, 1975 • ALAN SOMERS, 1975 • GARY RANDALL, 1975 •
CHUCK BINDER, 1975 • SHELLEY BAUMSTEN, 1975 • RICHARD MARKS, 1975 •
BOB CRESTANI, 1976 • GARY LUCCHESI, 1977

Randall,
Rapke,
Somers,
Brody,
myself.
The
chemistry
was
undeniable.
We
were
emotionally
connected.
Every one
of us
liked
every
other
one
of us.
Our
mind-set
came
out
of
the
sixties.
For
us
it
was
Woodstock.
It
was
about
embracing
the
good
things
in
the
world,
not
the
bad
things.
We
took
that
peace-and-love
notion
fairly seriously.

—Alan Iezman

ALAN SOMERS:
I was politically active, a surfer, and into the vegetarian communal lifestyle. After graduating from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in psychology, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. I took the year off, an
Endless Summer
sojourn, surfing my brains out, trying to get a handle on my life. I came up with the idea of med school in Costa Rica and then realized I was kidding myself. I tried law school at Southwestern, but it also wasn’t for me. I gave the media a try and did graduate studies at the Annenberg School at USC. But after a big disagreement with my faculty adviser I began to get a little desperate. I’d kicked around too much. I needed to create a career opportunity for myself. The twist is that there had always been an opportunity in my family, but I’d never looked at it that way.

Abe Lastfogel was the great-uncle of my best friend, Robert Elswit. Robert’s a director of photography who did
Magnolia
and
Boogie
Nights
. Mr. Lastfogel’s sister, Sarah Elswit, was Robert’s grandmother. She raised him after his parents died in a plane accident. Robert and I went to Sunday school together. I went with him to the Hillcrest Country Club on special occasions. Over the years Sarah and I also got very close. One Friday I was so despondent, I told her, “I think I want to be an agent.”