Before we start, an old agent joke. An out-of-work screenwriter arrives home one evening to find that his street has been cordoned off by the LAPD. Fire engines everywhere, ambulances, police, and smoke from a burning house down the street - his house. Fearing the worst, he asks the detective in charge what's up.
"Triple homicide at number 8705," says the lieutenant. "Oh Jesus, no! That's my house! My wife and daughters are inside!" screams the writer. "What happened?" "Well, it seems the perp was invited inside, sir, then he just flipped out, started screaming and tearing up the place. The man then raped and murdered your family, and torched the house. We found him buck-naked in the street, covered in blood and waving some of the, uh, bigger limbs around."
The screenwriter starts sobbing inconsolably, then asks, "What kind of maniac could do such terrible things?" "Well... he's your agent." The screenwriter's face registers a gradual transformation from anguish and despair to beatific enchantment, astonishment, then a childlike delight. "Irv? You mean to say that my agent... actually came by the house ?"
How did agents earn themselves this much toxic hatred? They serve a useful function, surely, do all the nitty-gritty dirty work, and make their clients rich in the process. And in return they get a reputation for venality, ruthlessness, opportunism, treachery, callousness and amorality. An agent is one step up from a child-molester in Hollywood.
To understand the roots of the bad rap on agents, one could do worse than read David Rensin's The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up, a riotous history of all the Hollywood movers and players who came into the industry through the mailrooms of the big talent agencies. Rensin has interviewed more than 250 of those who passed through these highly competitive training programmes: Hollywood's equivalent of Marine boot camp, where ordinary humans are broken down to nothing and rebuilt in the form of amoral monsters.
It's startling to realise how many of Tinseltown's present-day powermongers started out on slave wages, delivering dry-cleaning, scripts, and even stool samples around town (or Mike Ovitz's Christmas gifts, a process that took "six or seven full days"), steaming open confidential letters ("We all did it" - Elliot Roberts), and faking college credentials ("We all did it" - Jeff Wald) in an atmosphere exemplifying everything that Darwin and Machiavelli dreamed about.
Many of the grads who started out at the bottom of the business now sit at its pinnacle: David Geffen, the "G" in DreamWorks SKG; Elliot Roberts, Neil Young's manager; all-purpose mogul Barry Diller; Universal studios honcho Ron Meyer; ex-Creative Artists Associates chieftain Mike Ovitz, former "most powerful man in Hollywood"; Bernie Brillstein, head of Brillstein-Grey; producers George Shapiro and Howard West, Jerry Seinfeld's handlers; sometime Scorsese producer Irwin Winkler; and Miramax production chief Meryl Poster. All of them attribute their success to their schooling in the mailrooms, principally those at the William Morris Agency, Lew Wasserman's MCA, International Creative Management, and newer outfits such as Endeavor.
The mailroom is no place for cream-puffs. When Endeavor trainee Adriana Alberghetti started at a partner's desk, she made friendly approaches until he yelled, "Get out of my office!" Later he told her, "We have an over/under bet on how long you're going to last. I want you to know I bet against you." Those who can handle the abuse are usually the wilier specimens, like Geffen, blessed with the hide of a rhino and the smarts to learn to read memos upside-down on agents' desks. Faking college degrees and opening and resealing all the mail before anyone arrives in the mornings might be immoral in any other industry, but in the talent agencies, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. "If you want to succeed, you'd better not care too much what other people think about what you're doing," says Geffen. "The mailroom was where you learned that if you haven't got the patience to go through the shit, you're not going to get to the cream."
The only cream available in the beginning, apparently, is the chance to deliver scripts to starlets and see if they come to the door in their negligees. In the book, the stars who come to the door in nighties or bikinis include Mae West, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Shelley Winters, Kim Novak, Julie Newmar, Natalie Wood, Yvette Mimieux, Sharon Stone and Uma Thurman - and not one of them puts out.
Gradually one notices that the smart Jewish and Italian kids from Brooklyn and the Bronx who returned from the second world war are being replaced by the sheltered children of executives and graduates of top east-coast colleges, youngsters whose only experience is of life in the movie business, and as this occurs one can sense the agencies becoming more and more incestuous. Certainly, the anecdotes become steadily duller and less revelatory as the book approaches the present day.
If agents are one of the most important groups in Hollywood - and they own the talent, without which movies can't be made - then this growth of insularity, of a corporate culture marked by timorousness and lack of imagination, surely contributes to the sterility and bombast of the movies we're now bombarded with weekly. The single most depressing thing about Rensin's trainees is that they scarcely ever mention movies. The deal's the thing, the place where all the creative energy is expended - the movies are apparently just an afterthought.
