The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (59 page)

My great-aunt had once told me she’d helped a guy get started out in Hollywood. His name was Tom Sherak. He was fantastic! Gave me the VIP treatment, said he would call some people. One, Roger Birnbaum, the head of production at Fox, told me about the agency route. He also said his friend Jeremy Zimmer had started a new company called United Talent Agency. I dropped off a résumé and literally, the next day, Zimmer called me.

ROB KIM:
I was born in Korea, moved to the States when I was one, and ended up in northern California. I wanted to get into politics, but I met Bill Cosby during my first month at UCLA. He’d been jogging. We had a very brief conversation—“Hello, I’m a big fan”—and it was so cool.

Through the Bruin Democrats we got celebrities to man voting stations in Westwood. I had to walk Bruce Willis from a trailer to the table where he would sit and register people for a couple of hours. I sat with him. I had no idea what to say, so I told him how much I loved
Die Hard
.

My last quarter at UCLA, I went to work for Mark Gordon, who had a deal at Disney, and started to make connections. The last day of my internship, Mark called me into the office and said, “You should check out agencies—they’re more your style and speed. If you’d like me to, I’m happy to make some calls.”

I’d already been accepted at USC law school, but what I read about show business fascinated me. I decided to defer law school for a year. I got the agency and managers directory and called all the personnel people. I bought two books on cover letters. They said things like “Be aggressive” and “Be confident,” so I wrote this really obnoxious, way overly self-confident letter that included a P.S. I copied out of one of those books: “Your time will not be wasted!”

GLEB KLIONER:
My parents immigrated to Miami from St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1979, when I was seven. I majored in business at Carnegie Mellon and was very much into standup comedy when it was really exploding. I got involved with the activities board in college and was responsible for bringing comedians to campus. That gave me an opportunity to talk to personal-appearance agents in Los Angeles and New York.

A friend wrote a script, and I raised seven grand to do it as a student film. Our senior year we shot the film. Another friend knew a producer in Los Angeles, so for spring break I came out to try to get it sold as a feature. I met with one producer who gave us a thousand dollars for the year and said he was going to make it, yadda yadda.

After graduation I moved to Los Angeles to be close to the project. I asked everybody in town the best way to become a producer, and they all said to start in an agency mailroom.

DAVID KRAMER:
Between my junior and senior years in journalism school at the University of Georgia, I worked on an internship for the Georgia Film Commission. One movie came in, produced by Mark and David Wolper, called
Murder in Mississippi,
the prequel to
Mississippi Burning
. The head of the commission said, “It’s really slow and you’re bored. Why don’t we make you a PA and we’ll pay your salary,” which was $750 for the summer. I worked in the office, I ran errands, I took the film to the airport every day, I drove the director to get a massage. Once they tried to send me out to buy liquor. I said, “I’ve got a fake ID, but . . .”

When I decided on film school I applied to the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC. The guest speakers I found most interesting were those who told stories about how they’d started in mailrooms; some admitted to having faked their résumés to get the job. I decided there was something sick and glamorous about being able one day to say, “I started in the mailroom.”

SUE NAEGLE:
I grew up in New Jersey loving TV. After college I hoped to get some sort of production job in New York but realized I couldn’t afford to live in the city. Then a friend said, “My sister lives in Los Angeles. She’s an actress. She said we could crash on her floor. The rents are nothing and we can for sure find jobs as production assistants, making three-fifty a week.” I worked all summer as a waitress, saving money, and then moved to California in October 1991. We found the cheapest apartment ever. Tons of traffic outside. Very loud. We sent our résumés everywhere, called everybody, got nowhere. I started making brownies and cookies to sell to craft service people and ended up taking over the craft service on a nonunion show,
Down the Shore,
until it got canceled.

Through a friend of my mom’s I met a guy who said I should work at a talent agency. My new pack of Los Angeles friends freaked. “You’re out of your mind. That is the last place you should work. They’re awful people, the worst part of the industry. No one likes them. How can you take a job where people think you’re evil?” All I knew is that I wanted a
job
. No matter what anyone said, I was ready to go.

SEAN FAY:
I graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1991 with a degree in communications. I substitute-taught for a while at my old high school in Glastonbury, Connecticut. When I came across a 1992
GQ
magazine article about the mailroom training program, entertainment sounded exciting. Different. The story mentioned Brandt Joel, the assistant to Nick Stevens at UTA, and said he’d been in the Persian Gulf. I thought that was kind of cool. I got Brandt on the phone, told him I wanted to be an agent, and asked if he could help.

He said, “When you actually move out here, call me and we’ll have lunch.”

I packed my Volkswagen Jetta in September 1992 and moved to Huntington Beach. I called Brandt and he set up a lunch. He gave me an overview of the program: put in a lot of hours, read a lot of scripts, work hard. About a week later I had an interview with Jeremy Zimmer.

PETER SAFRAN:
I graduated from Princeton and from NYU law school, then became an attorney in New York, working for a big Wall Street law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. One night I was at the printer with a partner at the firm and a twenty-five-year-old Goldman Sachs analyst. We were waiting for a prospectus to come off the press. The analyst said, “Okay, guys, so, you’ll take care of this?” and took off. It was about three o’clock in the morning. I looked at my associate, the partner, and thought, This is what I have to look forward to?

A music video producer friend asked me to help him with some of the business and legal affairs and production on a Los Lobos shoot. I spent three days casting, building sets, doing contracts for the actors. Everyone worked their asses off, but they were having a good time and making a living. There wasn’t a trade-off between art and commerce. Very shortly afterward I decided to leave Sullivan and come to Los Angeles.

Ben Press’s family and my family are friends from New York. I met Ben for lunch when I came out. We hooked up on a Saturday at Ed Limato’s office at ICM. Ben was about to be promoted. He showed me Ed’s client list. It was staggering: Denzel, Michelle Pfeiffer, Richard Gere.

Ben and I went across the street for lunch, and he said, “Listen, the agency thing is great, but it’s really hard work. I don’t know if I’d recommend it, because if I’d known then what I know now, I don’t know if I’d have spent all this time doing it.”

“But you’re getting promoted,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “and I’m going to get paid properly, not, like, as an assistant.”

“What did they bump you up to?” I was expecting him to say eightyfive, ninety grand.

“Thirty-two thousand.”

My jaw dropped. You get
promoted
to get $32,000 a year? It blew my mind that somebody could work so hard and make so little money. But once I decided to go ahead anyway, the relief was greater than the fear. By quitting my job, I had removed the safety net. I’d thrown my hat over the wall, and there was no way I could go back.

SHARON SHEINWOLD:
My mom is an attorney, and my dad is a retired high school principal who’s now a member of the Israeli army. He builds tanks there. He’s just totally gung-ho to save the country. My mom and I would like him home.

I went to NYU film school, then to the American Film Institute. I loved movies, but I quickly realized that, surrounded by incredibly talented people, I didn’t feel I had anything meaningful to contribute— except that I could
identify
talent and put people together.

One of my teachers was the producer Rob Cohen—a UTA client at the time. He’s now a big director. Each week he’d come in and talk about film development and conversations with his agents. I was seduced. I knew mailroom programs were the best way to get an overview of the industry. It could be a continuing part of my education, like postgraduate work. After a year at AFI my parents cut me loose. I needed health insurance, so Rob got me a job in the UTA mailroom.

KEVIN STOLPER:
I’m from Denver, Colorado, which could not be any more removed from the entertainment industry. I went to school at USC, joined a fraternity. I was intent on Wall Street, the hot place at the time, but one day I was farting around at Sigma Alpha Mu, and a buddy said, “Hey, why don’t you come check out this little talent agency I’m working for? We need interns. It’s really fun and you get to be in the movie star business.”

It was a disaster. I drove all over town. The big client was the guy who played Harry in
Harry and the Hendersons,
the TV show. Quite literally, the guy in the gorilla suit. It wasn’t the right job, but I liked the industry. Besides, my friend Jason Heyman had gotten a job at UTA, and now he went to movie premieres, dated women in a league that he hadn’t dated before, and talked to Mike Myers every day. Through Jason and socializing I started making inroads at UTA.

TONI WELLS-ROTH:
I was one of the top ten junior tennis players in the East and earned a full college scholarship based on that. In school I took a film criticism class and fell in love with the movies. After graduation I wanted into the business. I asked everybody I knew, and through a connection my father had in the shipping industry, I wound up meeting the Pettis brothers, who produced the Coen brothers’ first films, in Washington, D.C. They said that if I wanted to be in the movie business, I had to be in Los Angeles.

I moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Brentwood with a roommate, for eight hundred dollars a month. It was the shittiest building on the block. I drove a little white Nissan. A friend, Will Davies, who cowrote
Twins
and had coauthored a book with John McEnroe, was represented at UTA. Through Will, I got a meeting with Jeremy Zimmer.

BOWEN:
Jeremy immediately made me feel very comfortable. He asked what movie I’d seen last. He asked me if I partied a lot in college. He asked if I got a lot of pussy. He played to my ego, which was smart. He pointed to one of the trainees, pushing a mail cart, and said, “You can’t fuck her because she’s dating a client.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. He was a little more articulate.

Then he said, “If you want the job, the job is yours. But I need to know immediately.” When you’re twenty-two years old and haven’t had any experience in that world, you don’t realize that you have time to think about it. He was hot-boxing me. Jeremy gave me until Monday.

I decided to drive to San Diego to see a friend from Texas, talk over the decision, and hang out at the beach. But I got caught up in traffic and pulled off the freeway, found a phone, and called UTA. I said, “Jeremy, I don’t need the weekend. I’d love to do it. I’ll start as soon as possible.”

IWANYK:
I lied on my résumé. I made up a literary agency reference— the Watershed Literary Agency, located in Santa Monica—and said I’d read scripts there. I thought there were hundreds of agencies around town and Jeremy wouldn’t know.

He studied my résumé and said, “What the fuck is the Watershed Agency?”

“Oh, I used to read scripts for them.”

“Who are some of their clients?”

“Oh . . . writers you wouldn’t know.”

He said, “Are you kidding me? That’s such a lie. And not even a
good
lie.” I thought it was over, but he said, “Jesus Christ. Do you at least play sports?”

“Yeah, I play basketball.”

“Well, good. I can’t look at this résumé. If you lied so obviously, I don’t believe anything on it. But we need some guys, so go ahead. You’re hired.”

I was thrilled.

FAY:
Jeremy said, “Why did you go to junior college?” I told him I’d had terrible grades in high school. I was a misguided youth and didn’t get my shit together until I had to. Then I got a scholarship at UConn. He thought that was interesting. “So, you were a fuckup in high school?”

“Yeah.”

A week later his assistant called and asked if I wanted to start working.

KLIONER:
The weirder and more different the interview is, the more Jeremy likes it. Mine was about almost everything
but
the business. He was very paternal, and that appealed to me. He gave me an opportunity to talk. I can’t say I gave a good interview, but he hired me, probably because I was very different. That’s what’s interesting about Jeremy: He hires people from different backgrounds on purpose. He knows that talent is diverse. CAA hires a lot of fraternity-type guys, but not every artist is interested in being with a fraternity crowd. I’m a Russian. I was the state chess champion of Florida. He knew some client would have a kid who wanted to learn chess and he could say, “Oh, Gleb was the state champion.” Jeremy understands the value of being unique.