The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (42 page)

Once, while copying a six-hundred-page book, I had a little competitive banter going with Kirk and Todd and said, “I’ll bury you.”

Someone snitched to Kurtzman that I had said “I’ll bury you.” He called me in and said, “This is the wrong attitude. You can’t say that. These are the people you’ll be working with throughout your career—if you make it here.”

I went, “Whatever,” and he accused me of having a superiority complex, because my reaction was dismissive. “Maybe the person who’s accusing me of that actually has an
inferiority
complex,” I said. “Have you considered that?” Kurtzman didn’t like that too much.

Kurtzman got back at me when I was next in line to become head of the mailroom, by promoting Doug Robinson, who’d come in after me. I’m sure he thought I would quit, so I ran down to his office. I said, “How did you know?”

“How did I know what?”

“How did you know that I’d quit?”

He said, “Well, Jon, I have to do what I have to do.”

But I didn’t appear at all upset, which must have made him wonder. So I clued him in. “No, I’m serious, Ray. You’re amazing.
If you had
made me head of the mailroom, I would have quit. I’m not ready for that
kind of responsibility
. You just amaze me.”

In truth, there was no way I was going to quit, because I’d already invested a year of suffering. So I just totally fucked with him, looked him in the eye, and said, “You’re amazing. I just want to shake your hand. Thank you.”

It was like a chess game. Survival was the overriding object. And he knew it.

ROBINSON:
I had no idea why Ray did it. I had not been a great self-promoter. I just believed in working hard and steady. Klane was a wild guy but also a hard worker.

Afterward I told Matt Loze, “Ray just jumped me and made me head of the mailroom. What do I say to Jon Klane?”

“Tell him to clean the kitchen,” he said.

KRENTZMAN:
There was a lot of sleeping around at the agency. In one another’s offices, on the conference room table, in the mailroom when the offices closed. Trainees with agents, trainees with trainees, agents with agents, trainees with assistants. We all had a pretty active social life—and that was just inside the office.

There were suggestions of it outside as well.

Sharon Stone had an apartment on Camden Drive. Donna Chavous and Ron Meyer represented her. She wasn’t
Sharon
yet, but she was a very attractive woman who had done a number of movies. Doug Robinson, head of the mailroom, said he had a special script that Sharon needed right away, and did anybody want to take it.

I’d delivered to her before, and Sharon and I had a little flirtation going. I volunteered. Doug looked at his watch and said, “She lives four blocks away. It should take you seven minutes.”

I drove over. That took a minute and a half. I looked at my pager, debated a second, turned it off, and put it in the car.

I knocked on Sharon’s door. She answered wearing a bathrobe: “Hey, Adam, how are you?”

“Oh, good.”

“How’s everything going? Want to come in?”

“Sure.”

She made some cappuccino, and we talked while I weighed whether or not I should take the chance. I’d either sacrifice my job by being rejected and her calling Meyer, or I’d have a nice hour with Sharon. I think I probably got the signals but was too nervous to act. I was just a piece of shit in the mailroom.

After forty minutes I said I had to get back.

Robinson went berserk. Veins stood out on his neck, and saliva spit from his mouth. I said, “Hey, it was Sharon, what could I do?” I didn’t say I had just sat there and had coffee. Two or three months later Chavous told me that Sharon had been into it. “You know, you blew your shot.” I’d had an opportunity and missed it.

Later, when I got to know Ron Meyer, I realized that had I scored, he probably would have given me a raise.

BERLINER:
I rang the doorbell of a home in Marina Del Rey, and the voice on the intercom asked, “Who is it?” I said, “CAA. Package.” Then the door opened and there was this famous director—with nothing on. It was kind of staggering. I handed him the package and walked away. That was it. I didn’t take the time to see if he was showing off.

KLANE:
I brought a girl I’d met at the Red Onion in Beverly Hills up to the office. She’d said, “What do you do?” and I’d said, “Right now I’m making coffee, but pretty soon I’m going to be at the top, running Hollywood.” I had no status, but I had the key to the office. We drove to Century City and rode up to the fourteenth floor. I fucked her on the Italian-marble conference table in the conference room. I had her ass right where Ovitz sat. The next morning, bleary eyed, as I’m refilling water glasses, there’s Mike with his elbows on whatever we’d left behind. I thought, Life’s good! From that point on, every staff meeting I ever set up or cleaned up after, or attended, had a special meaning for me.

KLANE:
One of the most sacred responsibilities was doing Ovitz’s water. I got it after going off the runs. The routine was to get in very early and go into Ovitz’s office. His was the corner suite with the shower. You washed his water decanter—no soap, just hot water—and filled it with Evian water, but only from the full liter bottle, not the half liter. I still don’t know the fucking difference, but the ritual was very specific. Monastic. I’m sure there was a Gregorian chant going on in my head: “The most sacred of jobs in the woooorld . . . MSOoooo . . . H2Oooooo.”

The water guy also had to refill Ovitz’s candy dishes and stock his bar. If he was low on Glenfiddich, you’d make a note and have some ass-wipe in the mailroom pick it up on the run, as I did many times. Also Heineken, raw cashews, and Hershey’s Kisses. You also checked the flowers. If petals had dropped, you’d want to pick them up and carry them out. You’d wipe down the bathroom counter and make sure there were no droplets. And, as it was passed on to me, when you were done you wanted to look at everything—take in the big picture—then walk out backward, stop, go back . . . and sit behind his desk and read everything. In Ovitz’s office you felt like you were in the center of the universe.

Ovitz’s desk was fascinating. He wrote notes on buck slips, with different-colored, very fine, razor-point felt-tip pens. You could read whom he was talking to, what deals were going down. Once I spilled water on the desk and all these things bled. I grabbed the Sharper Image air ionizer and went
bzzzzzzzzz,
trying to dry off the paper. I could hear the clock ticking. I knew he would walk in any minute. I was convinced my career was over.

Later, I confessed to Ovitz’s assistant, Doc O’Connor, and pleaded, “Please don’t snitch on me.” Then we had a good laugh. I asked him later if Ovitz had said anything. Yeah. “Who’s the idiot who spilled water all over my desk?”

Doc had said, “I’ll find out,” and that was the last of it.

ROSENFELD:
The attention to detail was the most important thing, and it made the biggest impression on me. The absurdity of putting raw cashews in the jar in Ovitz’s office helps you prepare for the absurdity that you later encounter every day as an agent. It prepares you for the unbalance. It prepares you for anything that’s crazy. In the mailroom you’d go, “Oh, my
God
. I have to go out to Malibu
again
today and deliver a
chocolate bunny
to Sam Elliott?” You just think that’s crazy. But it prepares you for when some actor says, “I’m not taking this two-million-dollar deal unless my makeup person is taken care of.”

People wonder if Ovitz intentionally set it up that way. I think as you grow older you naturally get more particular and more detail-oriented about your life. But I also think he liked the intimidation factor when a mailroom guy had to get everything right.

KLANE:
For a while it seemed like I spent my weekends shopping for shit for the office. It was awful. Always on the list was toilet paper— Charmin—for Ovitz’s bathroom. The first time I came back with the goods it wasn’t long before Joel Roman came at me with a roll of toilet paper and said, “
What the fuck is this?
”

“It’s toilet paper. It’s Charmin. It’s what you asked for.”

“It’s
yellow
. Yellow! You’re supposed to buy
white
Charmin!”

I couldn’t believe it. I’m sure Ovitz’s asshole didn’t care what color the toilet paper was, and he probably never would have complained. It’s not like the door at the end of the hall where Ovitz always came out would fly open and Ovitz would slide out on the wood floor, with his pants around his ankles, holding a roll of yellow Charmin, screaming, “
Yelloooooow!???
” like a wounded animal.

Eventually I passed on the job of caring for Ovitz’s office to Kirk Torres. I told him that the last thing he had to do was take the
white
Charmin and wipe everything before he left. I walked him through the ritual, taking it very seriously. Then I said, “Now you want to check for flower petals, look around, walk out backward. You think you got it?”

He said, “Yeah, I think I do.”

I said, “Good, let’s go.” We backed out and he threw the wadded-up Charmin on the carpet. I laughed so hard, my knees gave out and I hit the deck.

STRICKLER:
One day Ovitz complained that his Hershey’s Kisses had turned white, that we must have been buying the
wrong
Kisses. We hadn’t. We just put them in the big jar and two days later he’d scream, “The chocolates are white!”

I thought it was too weird and I was sick of getting screamed at, so I called up Hershey’s, in Pennsylvania, and said, “Listen, what’s going on here?”

I got transferred to five people and eventually talked with someone in the product development group who said, “Tell me the environment they’re in.”

I said they were in a glass jar.

He said, “What’s the lighting?”

“Incandescent spotlights.”

“Oh, you have the greenhouse effect.” He explained that because it was a glass jar and the chocolates had heated up by two or three degrees, the cocoa butter had come to the surface. He said if I opened the top of the glass jar, the problem would go away.

I wrote a memo to Doc O’Connor, explaining, then added: “Don’t blame me for the chocolates turning white, it’s your problem.”

KLANE:
Mike Ovitz was a superb leader. And smart. He knew the secret that great leadership is predicated on great followership. He knew how to pick people who needed that. It doesn’t make them weak people or bad people, just people who can in some crucial way surrender themselves. They loved him. That’s what love is: You surrender your identity and you rediscover yourself as part of a unit.

Ovitz made everybody feel special and just a little bit insecure at the same time. Ovitz’s whole thing was “You are the chosen people and I am your magnanimous leader. You’re all on a train. You don’t know where that train is going, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that you’re on the train for a reason, because you’ve been selected, because you’re the very best.”

To me that implied, “Don’t make waves. Don’t fuck around. You could find yourself let off at the train’s next stop.”

ANONYMOUS:
The guy who had Jack Rapke’s desk before Strickler made one of the great mistakes of all time.

One day he told me, “I gave Jack a present that he’s really going to like.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “What’s that?”

He said, “I made him some special brownies.”

Brownies? “Oh, that’s nice.”

“Yeah. I put a little marijuana in them.”

“
What?
You’re working for Jack Rapke, a fantastic desk, your relationship is very, very important—and you’ve just given him marijuana brownies?”

“We’ve talked about marijuana,” he whined. “He’s gonna love it. He’ll love it!”

A couple days went by. Then he called me and said, “I need your help.” Big surprise. “Jack called and I’m really scared. He said, ‘Hey, uh, what was in those brownies, Mike?’ I said, ‘Well, Jack, in the note I gave you I kind of alluded to the fact that I put marijuana in them.’

“ ‘You put marijuana in them? My kids
ate
those brownies this morning!’ ”

KRENTZMAN:
The grandmother had eaten them, too. Laurie Perlman, to whom Jack was married at the time, called Jack at the office and said his mom and the kids weren’t feeling very well, that they’d thrown up and were a little dizzy. Jack left work and took them to the hospital, and it was tracked back to the brownies. I’ve never heard anybody scream and yell at a trainee like Jack did that afternoon.

ANONYMOUS:
The kids had to get their stomachs pumped. Mike got moved to Mike Menchel’s desk for about three months, then he was out of the agency. I don’t know why they didn’t fire him right away.

WIMER:
He was such a knucklehead. Jack told me the story, but not with the moral being “So don’t ever make marijuana brownies.” It was more like “This is how stupid some people can be.” Jack wasn’t even angry as he told me. The truth is that Jack was trying to be groovy: “Hey, Mike, you’re always having these parties. Next time you have one, invite me.” That’s pretty groovy. A little too groovy. I think it was Jack saying that kind of thing that got Mike to make him some brownies.