The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (53 page)

—Barry Mendel

KEVIN MISHER:
I always had the show business bug, but in the eighties a well-intentioned student went to business school. I got into Wharton, but I also took a small filmmaking class and subscribed to the
Hollywood Reporter
.

Every good graduate of Wharton went to Wall Street, and I did the normal interview process. But I also sent letters to the CEOs of big entertainment companies, asking for a break. The text was earnest and breathless, like “I’ve got to have this or I’m going to die.” I wrote PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL on the envelopes. I sent one to Michael Fuchs, who then ran HBO. I later learned that he got the letter only because he had a temp the day it arrived. He responded by sending it to Jeff Bewkes, then their CFO. I met with Bewkes and got a job working on their annual budget.

I was still restless. Bob Conti, a writer who still works at HBO, hired me as a reader after I gave a good recommendation to a script called
Rain Man
. I did finance during the day and read at night. When I asked him how I could pursue the creative side, he said, “Get to California.”

In one week I got rid of my apartment, broke up with my girlfriend, and moved. My grandmother said, “We’re never going to see you again!” My mother started crying: “Oh, my God, you’re going to be a waiter!” My father came with me for a week. We set up my apartment, got a car. I had a little money saved, but my parents also threw me some shekels.

I sent letters again, and just to give a sense of how green I was, I looked for offices where I could literally ring doorbells, meet people, and drop off some résumés. In the yellow pages, Paramount Pictures was at 5555 Melrose. I’m such a New Yorker, I drove around looking for the largest skyscraper I’d ever seen. I literally drove by the studio five times.

I met Marty Caan, a cousin of Jimmy Caan, at Kings Road Entertainment. He came from Queens. He’d gone to my high school. Marty said, “Let me see if I can help a kid from the neighborhood. You should be an agent.” He said it was the time-honored way to get into the business—and it had worked for him.

Marty called four agencies. ICM moved really quickly. I talked to Steve Rabineau. He walked me over to Jeremy Zimmer. The interview with Zimmer was completely bizarre. All the shades were half flipped, and his face was like Kurtz’s in
Apocalypse Now
. He was on the phone, wandering around and spinning its unbelievably long cord. His desk was dark marble, more opulent than anything I’d seen in an office. Zimmer’s assistant, Barry Mendel, stayed in the room. I sat there in my one suit, a gray button-down banker’s uniform. I was petrified. But it must have gone well because they offered me a job.

Within five years it became de rigueur to graduate from an Ivy League school, pass on Wall Street, and get into the media business. As for me, as the director Mike Newell has said: “I never knew my itinerant life choice would become a good career move.”

BRIAN MEDAVOY:
It was difficult growing up as the son of a Hollywood executive. It would have been a lot easier to be like Kevin Misher, the son of a dentist, who came from Bayside and was completely under the radar.

I had a dysfunctional upbringing. My father was at the pinnacle, building Orion and United Artists Pictures, making movies like
Rocky
and
Annie Hall,
but he was not around much. I’ve been through eight family marriages, four by my mother and four by my father. I’ve been in seven different schools.

At first I didn’t understand why, but my father also never gave me a penny. Unlike a lot of the other executives’ kids, I didn’t drive around in a Porsche. My dad got me a Scirocco, and I had to pay him back. I drove that car for thirteen years. For a while I was really bitter about it, until I understood it was just the hand I was dealt.

Since my father didn’t give me money, I had to work every summer. I took jobs on an experimental basis, to see what I liked. My first was delivering pizza through Bel Air. I was a bag boy at Drager’s. I worked as a waiter. One summer I worked as a PA on a movie that my father did called
Under Fire
. I didn’t like it. The next summer I worked for Rogers and Cowan, in PR. Didn’t like that either. All the jobs were my idea. My father never forced Hollywood on me. He didn’t believe in nepotism. He said, “Make it on your own.” But the truth is that from the tenth grade on I wanted to be an agent. I never told my dad, though. I’d just be in class thinking, What the fuck am I doing in this class when I’m going to be an agent?

I wanted it for many reasons. One, it was in my blood. Two, life is competitive, and, nepotism or not, I had an in I’d have been a fool not to use. Three, today we’re in the information age. Back then, the agency world
was
the information age. You were in the middle, between the buyers and the sellers. You had access to an incredible amount of knowledge, and I thought that was important because I understood Hollywood just through osmosis. Being around my father’s group—Michael Ovitz, Michael Eisner, Peter Guber, Jeffrey Katzenberg—I learned what made them successful. I could tell who was real and who wasn’t. My father also brought together an eclectic group of people at the house, everyone from Jerry Brown to Pat Benatar to Connie Chung.

In 1984, when I was at UCLA, I was a summer camper at CAA, a temporary job that connected kids got. I worked from three to eight, after school. I distributed, I copied, I floated on desks. But I was not well accepted by my peers in the mailroom. If you’re a son-of, you’re always under the microscope, and people often feel things have just been handed to you. The show business world breeds insecurity and fear. The attitude of those who didn’t get to know me was “Of course they’re going to give Brian Medavoy a job here.
We
had to go to Wharton. This punk comes in, this rich kid . . .”

I certainly wasn’t perfect. I took it a little easier. I showed up late. I goofed off. I could be arrogant and cocky and flamboyant. I wasn’t going to try to win everybody over; I just wanted to figure out who I wanted to be.

However, most of the
agents
at CAA took me in. I spent most of my time sitting in Rick Kurtzman’s office, where I watched everything, read everything, schmoozed. I made the most of it.

I also got to watch a brilliant man—Mike Ovitz—build his business. I remember seeing Ovitz’s list of client hobbies, and I learned why he didn’t just buy clients champagne and flowers. He gifted them in a way that made each of them feel that they were the only client he represented.

After college I applied for a job at ICM. I didn’t go back to CAA because I hated Dispatch. After a Friday night run out to Sam Elliott’s house in Zuma, I was drained.

I went through six or seven training panel interviews at ICM, starting with Anna Adler and ending with Jeremy Zimmer. Jeremy was really tough on me. He asked strange questions. I came out dripping sweat, but I don’t think there was any way they could not have hired me unless I’d fucked up pretty badly. I probably had the job even before the interview process began. And I probably could have worked on a desk very easily—hey, my father was a major buyer—but it would have created more resentment. I decided to start in the mailroom in hopes of creating a level playing field. I wanted to do all I could to lessen the threat of my family name.

It didn’t work. On my first day I was pushing the mail cart down the hallway, and Zimmer stepped out of his office and said, “Oh, look, it’s Medavoy’s kid handing me my mail.” Loudly.

MISHER:
Brian and I started on the same day. I had no other friends in Los Angeles, certainly no guy friends. Being the same age, we bonded from the beginning.

MEDAVOY:
Kevin didn’t know a soul. I introduced him to his first celebrity: Justine Bateman.

MISHER:
At first it was like rushing during pledge week, plus ICM was unstructured and it was hard to pin down clues on how to act. Yet I had the sense that whatever there was to “get,” Brian got it. I just wanted to lean on somebody, and his was the shoulder I picked. Brian was unbelievable at the game because he had grown up in it. We’d get into parties with the right people, or be at assistant parties in the backyard with a keg and a hundred people standing around on the lawn. Suddenly I began to have a network of people who were in my “class.” I always thought it was amazing that the way people treated you was based on whom you worked for. Now that I have some perspective I realize that everyone has an agenda and is schmoozing, and everybody is trying to work everybody else. It’s like a tennis game: Everybody’s trying to play with a better player.

MEDAVOY:
What I loved about Kevin is that he looked at me as just Brian, not “Medavoy’s kid.”

MISHER:
I unknowingly passed a test of sorts. Hey, we were both miserable in the mailroom, not because of our origins or because it was stressful or work-intensive. We just weren’t using our brains. My friends from the East would call up and say, “So, what is being in the mailroom a euphemism for? What do you do all day?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I deliver mail, I sort mail, I Xerox.”

MEDAVOY:
It was brutal. Kevin made it bearable because we spent a lot of time in the freight elevator trying to figure out how to get out of the mailroom.

MISHER:
It felt like we were plotting to overthrow Hollywood. What we were really saying was, “This sucks. How do we get to the next step?” The good news and the bad news were that there was no real order in the ICM mailroom. You could be in it for a month or a year. The ICM program was like the wild, wild West. Fortunately, Brian was interested in the Lit Department and I was interested in Talent, so there wasn’t any turmoil between us. We were able to support each other.

MEDAVOY:
I was more ambitious than I had ever been, and I worked as hard as I could. When I was ready to take it to the next level, I wanted to work for Ed Limato because he was the man. Whenever Ed Limato turned around, I was always in his face, asking if he needed coverage or if I could do anything for him. I knew everything was timing. Then I heard a rumor that he wouldn’t hire me because I was Medavoy’s kid. I walked into his office and asked him, and he said it was true.

I said, “Well, I want to work for you. I’ll work my ass off.”

He was still reluctant because Michelle Pfeiffer and Richard Gere had deals at my dad’s studio, Orion. It was the height of Limato and my dad’s relationship, and if I worked for him, I’d have to listen in on the phone calls, and he was very concerned about confidentiality. I can understand that in some regard, but I was relentless. I kept going back. One day I just walked in—I always used to just walk in; people were threatened by that, too, but I have no fear—and said, “I will not repeat a thing. I understand your concerns, but I can’t take a no. This desk is opening, and I want this job.”

He said, “Okay.”

MISHER:
The tenth-anniversary Hard Rock Cafe television special was being shot on the Universal back lot. John Cougar Mellencamp played, Dan Aykroyd hosted. The invitations had come to the mailroom addressed to the agents and some clients. A few of those agents and clients were no longer with the company; we were supposed to mark those invites RETURN TO SENDER. Of course, one of the rules you learned as an agent wanna-be was to do whatever you could, short of criminal activity, to meet people. I wanted to go to this party. I grabbed an invite and RSVP’d. Now I had two tickets. I called a friend and asked her out.

We were standing in a clump of people trying to get a drink; Jim Wiatt, cochairman of ICM, was behind me. I turned around and said, “Can I get you a drink?” I had met Wiatt at the William Morris–ICM softball game. As guys playing sports do, Wiatt and I became friendly, even though he was a humongous authority figure.

The next day I heard that Wiatt was on the warpath because he couldn’t understand how all these trainees got to the Hard Rock party. He was calling assistants and trainees into his office to find out. Eventually the phone rang for me: “Can you come up in a moment? Jim would like to speak with you.” Instantly I knew I was completely busted. On the walk up I contemplated saying that Brian took me, because Brian got invited to everything.

Wiatt said, “We’re going to have a short, unpleasant conversation. How did you get to that party last night?”

I told him the story. He shook his head and said, “The integrity of the mailroom has to be preserved. You’re either fired or you’re going to resign.”

I didn’t know what to do. I crossed my legs, twice. I thought I would start crying or pee in my pants. In the back of my mind I remembered someone saying that if you resign, you don’t get unemployment, and if you get fired, you do. I’m certain that’s what made me have a little bit of gumption. I said, “I’m not going to resign over something like this, so you’re going to have to fire me. But I just want to tell you, I think this is insane. If you ask around, you’ll see that I’m doing real well here and that people would speak up on my behalf.”

Wiatt said, “I’ve heard only great things about you, but it’s not the issue. This isn’t about you and me. You can’t do that in the mailroom. You’re either fired or resign.”

I started to say something more, but the phone rang and he said, “Excuse me for a second,” and took the call. I broke into tears and walked to Anna Adler’s office, certain I’d been drummed out of the business forever. I said, “Jim Wiatt fired me.” She couldn’t believe it, but I had to leave the building immediately. I’ve always wanted to add a security guard escort to the story, but it didn’t happen [
laughs
]. I went home and lay on my bed. I probably cried the rest of the day.