The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (60 page)

Take Kevin Stolper. I can say this because I’ve known him a long time and he’s my friend: You couldn’t get that kid arrested. Somebody would ask him to temp on their desk and answer the phones, and he would start to sweat. He was petrified. He was nervous, he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t express a clear thought. He’d say the dumbest thing. Jeremy knew this was a challenge, and he believed he could really turn this kid into something great. It took time, but he did it. That’s Jeremy’s thing. He loves to hire the lemons because when he converts them into lemonade, he’s reliving his life.

FERRARO:
I think it’s what side of the bed Jeremy wakes up on. He was in a particularly feisty mood and started attacking me immediately. We got into some heated, in-depth conversation about family and life, and whether I was conservative or liberal. He said, “You strike me as a very conservative person. Is that true?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Doesn’t that make you a bigot?” he said.

I started laughing at him.

He said, “What are you laughing at?”

“Well, no offense,” I said, “but the fact that I categorize myself as a conservative and you automatically called me a bigot—that’s the definition of bigotry.”

I don’t remember the exact response, but obviously it was favorable.

HEYMAN:
Zimmer was very cool. He asked me if I knew how to do coverage. I told him I was fantastic at it—I had no idea what coverage was—and had done it a million times. His assistant brought in a script, ripped off the title page, and told me to write up the coverage that night.

I asked a friend from CAA to help. He gave me sample write-ups. That night I read the script and did the work. Then I did another. Several days later they hired me.

But I don’t think that’s what got me the job. On the way out of the interview I noticed that Jeremy was sucking echinacea from a bottle through a dropper because he had the flu. It is really gross-tasting stuff, so I told him that he should dilute that in warm water, as it dissolves the alcohol and makes the herb more effective. He asked Andrew to get him a glass of warm water. I think this is what really closed the deal.

KIM:
Jeremy said, “So, who’s your favorite filmmaker?”

Believe it or not, I didn’t know what the term
filmmaker
referred to. A writer? A director? Both? I tried to buy some time to figure out my answer: “Well, I’ve haven’t seen a lot of movies lately.”

“Okay, let’s back it up a second. What have you seen recently that you liked?”

“A League of Their Own.”

“Oh. Well, okay. What about TV?”

I thought the cool answer would be, “I don’t have time to watch a lot of TV these days.”

“You don’t?”

“No. I love TV. I grew up watching TV. But I’m pretty busy these days.”

He said, “Well, who directed
A League of Their Own
?”

“Penny Marshall.”

“Right. And where did Penny Marshall get her start?”

“Television?”

“See what I’m getting at?” Then he said, “I’ll give you the job, but your competition is sitting in the lobby, so you’ve got to go get rid of her.”

I jumped up. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take care of it! Thank you.”

He said, “No, no, no, I’m just kidding. Don’t say anything to her. We’ll call you and you’ll start soon.”

WELLS-ROTH:
I was twenty-three, very naive, very eager. I walked in thinking I would have a friendly discussion with Jeremy Zimmer. I wore jeans and a blazer, and the first thing out of his mouth was, “Do you always come to interviews in jeans?” I was shocked. I said I thought it was a favor to Will Davies, so I came in very casually. His whole demeanor changed. “Oh, you’re a friend of Will Davies. How do you know Will?” Then we started talking about tennis. I told him I could beat his butt. He didn’t believe me at first, but then I told him my background. Jeremy said, “Make sure my assistant gets your phone number.”

Two weeks later I got a phone call: “Jeremy Zimmer would like you to play tennis with him.” I showed up at Mulholland Tennis and kicked his butt. I got the job—and a call to play tennis every weekend for the next six months.

JOEL:
The turnover was constant. Some people would come in on a Monday and go out on a Wednesday. They weren’t used to being humbled, getting the crap beaten out of them, getting yelled at, being talked down to. The graduation rate was less than 10 percent. Unbelievably low.

KRAMER:
When you first start, you hear that they get a thousand résumés a week and if you screw up once, you’re out! The only thing you can bring to the party is the fact that you will work hard. You feel so expendable.

BOWEN:
There’s an incredible amount of contradiction in the mailroom. You’re asking naturally aggressive people to sublimate the strengths you value, to work as a team. That’s really hard. Everybody in the mailroom wants to be the first and the best and the fastest and the strongest. Then they’re told to answer the phones, be someone’s “person,” and live vicariously through their boss for three years. That conflict was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to deal with.

MICHAEL CONWAY:
As the guy who ran the mailroom, I’ve seen a lot of these kids come in with big aspirations, great college degrees, lots of ambition. And it’s a big ego deflation to push a mail cart for three hundred a week. Their feet bleed; they work twelve-hour days and come in on weekends. Someone’s throwing things. They get yelled at because they dropped a call. Or they’re sent out to get Lamb Chop panties for an agent’s daughter. Suddenly they realize, I got a degree from Harvard for this? There have been more than a few crying sessions. It’s psychological warfare.

JOEL:
In the navy I had to be at work at six-thirty every day, did not have a weekend off in four years. At UTA they said I didn’t have to be at work until eight o’clock and I had weekends off. I’d been living on a ship; suddenly I worked in beautiful offices, with glass everywhere. It was like Disneyland. People talked on headsets; they used computers. You’d think the military would be very high-tech, but we’re the most prehistoric, poorly run organization. We had only one computer on the entire ship. At UTA a guy came up to shine agents’ shoes. Everyone was well dressed. I could not get over the fact that some of the assistants had even nicer cars than the agents. It was a world I had not remotely been exposed to, and it was incredibly intimidating.

IWANYK:
The first guy I met was Kevin Stolper, who said, “I’ve been here six weeks, man, and this is a tough gig. This is really tough. I’m gonna train you today, but it’s hard, man.”

I was, like, Fuck, what’s gonna happen? Are people gonna throw shit at us? We went to the first agent, put stuff in the in-box, took stuff from the out-box. He said, “How you doing, nice to meet you.” Did it again and again and again. Kevin was so nervous and there was so much tension, it was almost unbearable.

Back in the mailroom, I said, “That’s it? That was hard?”

Kevin was, like, “Yeah, man, that was tough.” All the other guys were, like, “You got through it all right?”

I’m thinking,
This
is hard? How hard can it be?

STOLPER:
There didn’t seem to be any structure to the training program that I’d read so much about. It was just a bunch of kids. I realized I’d been sold on a “training program” and duped. I’d believed the magazines, not realizing that they have to glamorize things to sell copies. I’d envisioned, in a horribly materialistic way, one day driving a Mercedes, talking on a cell phone, and doing business. I couldn’t quite get my head around the fact that my first job was in the fourth-floor closet— literally a closet—where they’d stuck a smaller copy machine to handle the overflow. I wasn’t alone in this closet. With me was Stacey Boniello, a really attractive, cool woman. I stepped inside and thought, This is the greatest day of my life. I have a new job and I’m locked in a closet with a cute girl, and there is nothing to do but copy paper and hit on her until she is so completely sick of me that she says yes to going out with me.

Of course, I’m sure Stacey was thinking, “Get this geek away from me.” She’d already been there for a couple of weeks, and she knew the score.

SAFRAN:
Some twenty-two-year-old walked me around, showed me a room with three giant copy machines and a script library. Soon I was in my Brooks Brothers suit, Oxford shoes, shirt, tie, and cuff links, sweat dripping down my forehead, scrambling to collect pages of a script that were stuck in the machine. Meanwhile, assistants called every two seconds: “Where’s my script? Where’s my script?” yelling at me as if I were the bellhop at a bad hotel. I got home about ten-thirty, absolutely exhausted. I thought, What am I doing? I took a pay cut of
$1,900 a week
to do this?

NAEGLE:
The first day I made two mistakes: I parked in the wrong lot and walked over, and I wore heels. But we all bonded quickly. It didn’t matter how much money you or your family had. We all got paid $275 a week. My first lunch was at Hamburger Hamlet. What’s creepy is that I still remember what I ordered: a Morgan sandwich. For fun we went to industry events and ate from the buffet. We snuck into premieres. We had our own parties on a rotating basis. We didn’t get much sleep.

SHEINWOLD:
I showed up in some retarded burgundy dress. I really tried, but I’m so not a dress girl. Right away I did filing, but I was so uninterested, I didn’t even look at the stuff. Then I got to wheel the cart around. A guy in the mailroom gave me a crumpled map, a diagram of where every agent’s desk was. He lectured me about how I had to make sure I put the right mail into the right agent’s box or some travesty would unfold. And above all, “Don’t lose this piece of paper.”

JOEL:
I was temping for someone when his wife called and asked if I would make a dinner reservation for them that night. In the time she took to call me, she could have called the restaurant and made the reservation herself. That’s the first thing I wanted to say; of course I didn’t. Afterward it struck me if I didn’t make it as an agent, I could always be a hotel concierge.

KRAMER:
I had to take one agent’s family—the kids, the nanny, the wife—to the airport for their vacation in the Hamptons. The son was about eight years old and, on the way, puked all over the backseat of the car. This was what I had to do to make it in the film business: drive a puke-filled car.

KIM:
I had to pick up lunches for a meeting with seventeen people. Every order was some fucked-up request like “Turkey sandwich on sourdough, nothing on it, a little bit of onion and lettuce on the side.” There was even some kind of sandwich I’d never heard of. I got all the orders and walked to Judy’s Deli. Closed for remodeling.

I freaked out. It was a hundred degrees outside. I had half an hour. I started walking. I went into each restaurant and coffee shop and asked if they had the sandwich I’d never heard of. “No, sorry.” Finally one guy said, “Roll up your sleeves and get back here. We’ll get you out in ten minutes.” I did as he said. Order by order, we made the sandwiches together.

HEYMAN:
Mike Myers was our biggest client at the time because of
Wayne’s World
. He called and said that he was going to London and he wanted two tickets to the Wimbledon semifinals or the finals. That is about as tough a request as you will ever find. I thought about it, saw that it was on NBC, looked up who was the head of NBC Sports. I called Dick Ebersol’s office in New York, and told them I represented Mike Myers, who had just gotten married and wanted to go to the finals of Wimbledon. Could Mr. Ebersol accommodate the request? Amazingly he got two box seats, center court, free, no questions asked, compliments of NBC. Mike was very happy.

STOLPER:
I gassed Peter Benedek’s car. Picked up Jeremy Zimmer’s tie from the cleaners. Got Marty Bauer’s laxative medicine. Fed somebody’s cats. Delivered a package to Charles Grodin, and he opened his door in his underwear. Illuminating: boxers.

One partner had a birthday party for her three- or four-year-old kid, and a few of us mailroomers worked the occasion. We were paid; it was perfectly reasonable. But I remember literally jockeying for position to play with the kids of the more significant partners, so that they would see me being nice to their offspring. I recall some pushing and shoving.

KIM:
Sometimes it could be fun. When I put gas in Jeremy Zimmer’s Jaguar, a woman at the station checked out his wheels—and me. I thought, It must be nice to have a Jaguar. I came back and told Jeremy the story. He said, “Rob, if you ever have an opportunity to get laid, do it—and when you come back late, tell me, and I’ll be fine with it.” I thought, I love this place! Where else are you going to hear that kind of encouragement?

KLIONER:
As an agent, there isn’t one thing a client can ask you to do to which you can say no. They say, “I need you to baby-sit my kid and change his diaper.” You say, “Sure. What time do you want me there?” That said, someone’s also got to service the agents. There are a lot of people in the mailroom who don’t understand that. You never say to your boss, “I can’t take this shirt to the dry cleaner because Tom Cruise needs a ride.” They don’t care—even if they represent Cruise. They want their shit at the dry cleaner. Find somebody else to pick up Tom Cruise.