The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (54 page)

Wiatt has since told me, “I made a mistake. It would have been good to have you working at the company.” That took a while to happen, and now we’re great friends. He asked, over a lunch, “Do you still harbor resentment?”

I said, “No, I understand what you were trying to do. I was just a kid. A slap on the wrist would have been a little easier, but . . .”

MEDAVOY:
I was Ed Limato’s second guy, in the outer office. Chris Andrews was inner office. I answered the phones, Chris listened in on the calls. I sent out letters, got Ed’s coffee and his lunch, walked Ed to his car, set up booking slips. I hated it. I sucked at it. I didn’t respond well when he yelled at me. I made a lot of mistakes. I dropped calls. I was nervous. I had to file; I hated filing. Sometimes I’d throw files underneath the desk. Chris was a robot. I hated the hours, I hated being the son-of. The pressure built. So I quit.

Jim Wiatt said, “If you leave, I’ll never speak to you again.”

It was tough because even though I was a fuckup, I was actually starting to get liked. I had helped do a report for Jeff Berg—the other ICM cochairman at the time. He’d assembled teams of four people each to do reports: on distribution, production, development. We had a month. Our team was Kevin, Chris Harbert, and Steve Friedman. We won a thousand-dollar check.

But in the end that didn’t matter.

I handled my talk with Wiatt poorly and left.

MISHER:
Jeremy Zimmer and Steve Rabineau tried to get me rehired, but it didn’t happen. On Rosh Hashanah, Rabineau spoke to Bill Block at InterTalent and said, “We just lost a good kid. You should meet him if you need anybody for your mailroom.”

Getting fired by Jim Wiatt was the best thing I could have had on my résumé for Bill Block. Block, who’d been at ICM, had helped form InterTalent six months earlier. They were just promoting their first person out of the mailroom and had only one kid, David Greenblatt’s brother-in-law, left in there. Tom Strickler, who’d come over from CAA, didn’t have an assistant, so he got Greenblatt’s brother-in-law. That left room for me. I met with Tom on Yom Kippur. Tom walked me in to meet Bill, and then I met David Greenblatt and Judy Hofflund. They hired me on the spot. I started the next day.

If ICM was the wild West, the InterTalent experience was like charging the castle. We were Robin Hood and his gang. We were the rebel force trying to take it to Hollywood and do something different.

I was in the InterTalent mailroom for a day. Then Greenblatt’s assistant quit and Block’s assistant quit. I went to work for David and stayed with him a year.

I was probably a horrible assistant. I developed a stress rash that covered part of my face. I never knew what kind of skin condition it was. Some of my friends said that when they met me for the first time they thought I had horrible birthmarks. It only lasted six months, but it was hairy.

After David I moved to Bill Block’s desk as my finishing school. I worked there for six months—then decided I didn’t want to be an agent after all. I wanted to be more involved with the creative process. I had not moved to Los Angeles to make deals and set meetings for other people to be in rooms talking about the creative storytelling and movies and television.

Brian, who had also come to InterTalent, introduced me to his dad, who hired me at TriStar as an executive assistant—though he allowed me to tell the community I was a creative executive. Mike actually said, “You don’t want a creative executive job. You executives go nowhere. What you want to do is be an agent and then jump over.”

I said, “I really don’t want to be an agent anymore. If you give me a desk, a phone, and an expense account, I’ll take care of everything else.”

MEDAVOY:
I interviewed with Judy Hofflund. Judy was very tough to work for. I was at the office from 7 A.M. until 9 or 10 P.M., and I wasn’t used to it. I was a party guy and I couldn’t believe how much time I was spending trying to become an agent. And I was still a terrible assistant. I couldn’t fucking type. She asked me to do coverage every night. I went home, called my friends at the various agencies, got their coverage of the same material, and retyped it. Judy found out about it. She yelled at me, but Bill Block said, “That’s pretty resourceful.” In Judy’s mind it was “He doesn’t want to do the work.” In Bill’s mind it was “Good for him.” But Judy’s clients loved me, so she kept me. Also, I think she liked me as a person.

One day I heard the company was going to bring in David Schiff from CAA, and there was no physical space for me if they did. By then, not counting summers at CAA, I had been in the mailroom for a year and a half, on Ed Limato’s desk for a year, and working for Judy for eight months. I needed to keep moving ahead.

I called my father and said, “Dad, they’re going to bring an agent over from CAA, and there isn’t space for me here if they do that.”

He said, “Who are they bringing over?”

I said, “It doesn’t matter.”

He said, “Give me the initials.”

I said, “Come on, Dad, I work here, remember? Don’t play me for a fool.”

But, my dad being my dad, I ended up telling him that it was David Schiff. The next day my father got on the phone with David Schiff; they were talking about a deal for Cheech Marin. My father said to David, “I hear you’re thinking about leaving Ovitz and going to InterTalent.”

Schiff called Bill Block and said, “How does Mike Medavoy know I’m thinking about coming there?”

Bill Block walked into my office and said, “Did you tell your father?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “You’re fired.” He searched my stuff and walked me to my car.

I got in my car. I cried. I drove to my father’s office at TriStar. I walked in—he was in a meeting with a director—and I said, “Excuse me, I need to speak to my father.” I slammed my hand on his desk and said, “You just got me fired from a job. Do you realize how difficult it is being your son? You have screwed me. Screwed me.” He felt terrible.

My father called up Ovitz’s office and said, “Will you hire Brian?”

Mike said, “Have him call.” I called Ray Kurtzman, and he said, “You can work for Marty Baum.” As much as I loved Marty Baum, I knew I just wasn’t going to learn from him. Besides, they were asking me to become an assistant again, and I said no. Afterward nobody would hire me. I did not have a job. I freaked out.

The only person who gave me a shot was Dolores Robinson, who had a small management firm. I worked for her for four months, then quit. But in the elevator there I met Erwin More. We talked, and he hired me at Larry Thompson’s company as a manager. It was tough, but I did well.

A year later Norman Brokaw asked if I wanted to be an agent at William Morris. I turned it down out of loyalty to Erwin. But a month later I changed my mind. I told Erwin, “I’m leaving to become an agent.” Then I found out that William Morris had nixed me. So there I was, quitting a job thinking I had
another
job, and William Morris wouldn’t hire me. Why? I heard that Alan Iezman, who ran the Talent Department, vetoed it because I had gone after one of his clients while I was at InterTalent—which is not true.

Erwin said, “Brian, why don’t we start our own company!” I told my father and grandparents, and nobody thought I should do it; they said I couldn’t stick with anything. But Erwin recognized things in me that maybe I didn’t see myself. I figured, What do I have to lose?

Since my father had gotten me fired from my job, I asked him to loan me the $150,000 we needed. He said no. Flat-out no, before I even had a chance to finish.

Erwin owned a condo on Wilshire and Spalding worth $275,000. The bank took it as collateral and loaned us $75,000. We had two clients. Within six months, we created a television series,
Sweet Justice
, with clients Cicely Tyson and Melissa Gilbert. Erwin and I were together twelve years and he was a brother, a best friend, a partner. We were extremely successful, and I could never ever have it without him.

BRIAN MEDAVOY
has moved on and is now a partner and president of talent management at Immortal Entertainment.

KEVIN MISHER
was copresident of production at Universal Pictures. In July 2001 he opened Misher Films, a production company with a deal at Universal. Their first movie was
The Scorpion King,
a spin-off of 1999’s
The Mummy
.

AS THE MAILROOM TURNS

International Creative Management, Los Angeles,
1989–1993

DEAN LOPATA, 1989 • BEN PRESS, 1991 • PAULA BESIKOF, 1992 • JODI GUBER, 1993

Here’s
the
thing
about
ICM:
Every
rule
they
made
was
made
to
be
broken.

—Ben Press

DEAN LOPATA:
My college roommate at the University of Miami wanted to be an agent and got into the ICM training program. I wanted to write and be in production, and was a PA on a movie of the week. But I hated it because I was just driving all over Los Angeles, dropping off stuff. One day he told me that the dispatcher in the ICM mailroom just quit. He said it was a regular gig, nine-thirty to six-thirty, you don’t work overtime, you get to read the trades every day for free, you have a computer, and if you make friends with the copy room, you can probably get your scripts copied for free—and you get paid. I’d moved to Los Angeles with seven hundred dollars and had been doing standup comedy and improv. The job sounded great, especially considering the access and the learning potential. What more could I ask for?

BEN PRESS:
My parents are in the clothing business: J. Press. Clothing is so boring. Fortunately, it was very laissez-faire around the house: You do what you do, whatever you love. For instance, my father had gone to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. As a hobby, he produced Broadway plays. I grew up in the wings watching rehearsals.

I went to Middlebury College, in central Vermont, and steered toward politics. It was my dream to one day run for office—there’s a lot of theatrics in that, too. I worked summers for Vice President George Bush. My mentor was Lee Atwater. After graduation I went to the Republican National Committee, where Lee was chairman. I was his assistant and then, tragically, at age thirty-eight, he developed a brain tumor and within nine months of diagnosis passed away.

My whole life went into a tailspin.

My best friend from high school was Bobby Jaffe. His dad, Stanley Jaffe, has been president of Paramount and is now a very well known producer. Bobby and I went to boarding school together. After college he went to work for TriStar and then Columbia, as a creative executive under Dawn Steel. Stanley was producing
Fatal Attraction
. I was at loose ends. They both said, “You should be an agent.”

I said, “Are you crazy? You mean a fat guy with a cigar who sits in a back room?”

“No, no, it’s not like that. That’s a stereotype. It’s executive, it’s corporate, it’s very sleek.” They were referring to Ovitz and how he had legitimized the agency business. I figured I could use my political training, and I did have a rudimentary background with theater and actors.

I flew to Los Angeles and stayed at Bobby’s place. Stanley set up a couple of appointments. Both had prepped me: The mailroom was an anteroom to a larger world—but you had to walk through that room first. It was how you learned who’s where, who’s important, who’s not, who you want to be, who you don’t. Some people call it Dante’s eighth ring of hell.

PAULA BESIKOF:
I was at USC planning on law school. But after studying in Spain my junior year I started thinking that law school didn’t really sound all that great. I’d be going into it solely to follow after my dad, also a lawyer.

I asked a friend interning at
Entertainment Tonight
if I could get a meeting there. To my surprise, the guy hiring was someone who’d hated me in college. But he gave me the job and we ended up great friends.

After that I interned at NBC in their talent department.

My senior year I grabbed a friend and said, “Let’s go to the movies.” I had enrolled in a producing and directing class, and as we waited for the next show I was telling my girlfriend how to produce. That’s when the gentleman sitting next to me leaned over and said, “I’m sorry, but that’s not correct.”

His name was Robert Littman. He was an old-timer who had pretty much lost his career, but we talked for almost two hours and he said, “Why don’t you come work for me?” I thought, Okay, another job for free, but who cares?

Littman had a schlocky office where I did literally everything and nothing. But I was aggressive and learned quickly, so he said, “You’d be a great agent.” At first I was offended because when you think of agents you think “asshole.” But I started to read up on the agencies and thought ICM sounded like a great place. I went in for my first of six or eight meetings during the Los Angeles riots. Then they put me on hold for four months. I thought, Oh, God, I’m not gonna get this, and resigned myself to taking a class to study for the LSAT. Then ICM merged with InterTalent and brought in Bill Block, and I was called back.