The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up (62 page)

CONWAY:
Yeah, there’s a lot of that. I found out an assistant was having sex
on my desk
. It was, like, God, I had to get Windex and clean it [
laughs
]. He was just a dog, and still is.

IWANYK:
I lived with all these guys and we’d often go out en masse. At a bar called Mom’s, in Brentwood, I talked to a beautiful girl for about three hours. I was hitting on all cylinders. I was so charming. She laughed at all my jokes. Her friends were talking to my friends. Right out of a movie.

At a quarter to two I said, “Hey, we all live in the same house. Let’s go back and hang out. We have a pool.” She and her friends were, like, “Sure! Yeah!”

The door to the bar opened and Weird Al Yankovic walked in. I went to settle my tab and I saw Weird Al go over and talk to my girl. I thought, Oh, God, poor guy; she’s with me. Three minutes later she walked out with Weird Al. The other girls came back to our place. I’m, like, “Did she know Weird Al Yankovic?” They’re, like, “No, but he was so nice . . .” Never saw her again.

I totally got the movie business in that one evening.

WELLS-ROTH:
I thought I could make some friends but that didn’t happen. My peers in the mailroom decided they were going to show me exactly how things worked. About eight-thirty one night, after all the agents and most of the assistants had gone, they asked me to come into one of the offices. We all sat down and they said, “You either learn to play the game our way or you’ll never get out of the mailroom.” I didn’t know what they meant, why they were doing this, or what to do. I had never talked much to any of these people. I just ran around smiling, delivering mail. I learned that if you don’t act social, they think you’re a know-it-all. They also didn’t like that I played tennis with the partners as a way to get ahead. Now I know it was exactly the right thing to do, but they wanted to make my life miserable because of it.

I went home crying. Like most women, I thought it was my fault. Instead of focusing on the job I became a basket case. I stopped talking to my classmates almost altogether. I didn’t go to the parties. Every day somebody said something cruel. I got to do the stupid jobs. They wouldn’t let me in on information—who people were meeting with, what scripts and talent were hot.

There was no one I could trust, no mentor. The only person who befriended me was an assistant who supposedly slept with people at the agency. I don’t know if that’s true, but in an elevator I witnessed some of the agents saying things to her that I thought were inappropriate. She was very tall, very pretty.

Before I left UTA only one person apologized: Sue Naegle. She said, “I’m really sorry for what we did. It was wrong.” It meant a lot to me.

KIM:
Sharon Sheinwold was bizarre. We called her Beetlejuice because she had jet black hair, pale skin, and dark makeup, and she wore these weird, drapey black clothes every day. I don’t even know what the style is—mod, Goth, something. We were all freaked out by her.

SHEINWOLD:
If anything, I fostered my weird reputation just because I knew people would ask me to do less work if I was kind of unapproachable. I didn’t think that my job required me to stop hanging out with all my friends, so I would work crazy hours and then go out crazy hours. I worked at these weird underground nightclubs and was slightly notorious as the palest, most tired assistant in the company. You just can’t have a job and party all night, I guess. I wore weird motorcycle boots. I dyed my hair black. People here probably thought I’d gone Goth. But even though I had a little rougher exterior than most of my colleagues, I took my job very seriously and they couldn’t get rid of me.

KIM:
David Kanter was a feature lit agent. His assistant, Jenny Mintz, called me and said, “Hey, you seem really cool. People seem to like you. If you want David’s desk, it’s opening up because I’m leaving. I’ll get it for you.”

I’m, like, This is the greatest! Everyone’s nice to me, and now I’m going to get a desk! I said, “Okay, I’ll do whatever you say.”

Jenny said, “Why don’t you have lunch with me today?”

We popped in her car and she told me about David: “He’s never had a male assistant. He likes hiring women because he wants tips on how to get his hair cut. His wife used to be his assistant. But this could work. I’ll set up the interview. When you walk into his office, if he’s on the phone, pick up the other phone and listen. He’ll be impressed.”

At the interview he
was
on the phone. I started listening, like I knew what he was talking about. He hung up and I hung up. I followed everything he did, kissing his ass like you would not believe. I said things like, “I know I have the tools, I just need someone to help me put it all together.” Just cheesy, cheesy stuff. But he seemed to buy it.

SHEINWOLD:
Jenny told
me
David’s desk was available. I remember thinking, I have to get out of this fucking mailroom, so I’m gonna get that desk. Rob also interviewed. I don’t know what either of us had to offer, except we could pick up a phone. Turned out David and I were born in the same hospital on Long Island. It was a weird coincidence that we both clung to as a sign that it was all going to be okay.

To get the desk I utilized a skill I didn’t even realize I had, but it’s something every agent needs: to be able to switch from idle mode to being the person who can sell anything or get the answer you want.

KIM:
The next week Jenny came to me right before lunch and said, “David’s going to make his decision today. He’s at lunch right now. Go over to his office as soon as he gets back and make the one final play, and I’m pretty sure you’ll get it.”

I went to lunch, came back early, and wandered around. At two-thirty I guessed David had gotten back. Someone must have also called Sharon, who was inside the copy room, and told her David had returned.

I walked past the Dutch door to the copy room on my way to David’s office, and I heard, “Rob! Rob! Come in here!” It was Sharon, calling me.

I stopped, turned around, opened the bottom of the Dutch door, walked through—and saw Sharon literally run out the other door. She ran over to David’s office and got the job.

SHEINWOLD:
I don’t remember it exactly as Rob told it, but I’m sure I did it. It sounds like me exactly. I’ve done similar things since.

KIM:
It was such a devious thing to do. But she probably wanted it more than me. Afterward I didn’t speak to Sharon for the longest time. Now we’ve gotten to know each other a little and it’s fine.

WELLS-ROTH:
I substituted on Gavin Polone’s desk, and one day he walked up and yelled at me: “Aren’t you afraid?” I looked up at him and said, “Of what?” Maybe I should have been. He walked around his office with a bullwhip, cracking it in the air. He did karate kicks. He tried to scare and bully people because he thought it was funny.

KIM:
I’d been in the mailroom three days when Gavin Polone walked right up to me and said, “Are you a fag?”

“What?”

He said, “Are you a fag?”

“Uh, no.”

“Then here,” he said, and he gave me two tickets to a boxing match at the Forum that night. I thought, Wow, that’s really cool, he’s giving me tickets to something.

He said, “You’ve taken them. Now you have to go.”

I looked at the tickets and they were for seven o’clock—and it was seven o’clock.

He saw my face and said, “You have to go. If I give you the tickets, you have to go,” and he walked away.

I didn’t go. I was nervous about it, but I couldn’t leave.

For some reason, Gavin thought that Asian people worked harder. The stereotype, I guess. He asked his assistant, Michael Brown, about me, and Michael said nice things. A few days later Michael said he was going out of town and Gavin wanted me on his desk. I was intimidated as hell.

There’s a Fruit of the Month Club in which they send you a box of fruit each month. The day before I was supposed to start with Gavin, a box of fruit came for him. I took the fruit, walked it up to his office, and said, “You once asked me if I’m a fag.” Then I handed him the box that read FRUIT OF THE MONTH with his name on it.

He laughed. Okay, I got one in. He didn’t kill me.

I went psycho working for Gavin. I got in at seven-thirty and didn’t leave until eleven o’clock at night. I could not have been more focused. At the end of the week, Gavin said, “You did all right, but you have no personality.”

I said, “I didn’t have time to have a personality. I was scared shitless all week. I just wanted to get the job done.”

Michael Brown later told me, “He thought you were great. He wants to hire you when I get promoted.”

FAY:
A lot of people were afraid of Gavin. I thought he was a trip. Gavin did martial arts and always walked around in his socks and a quasi ponytail. He threw spinning back kicks in the hallway, which I thought was hysterical. He actually called me “Sean,” which is a big deal. Even though he’d pose for photos with brass knuckles on, I knew he was a great agent. He certainly paid for himself and then some at the company. He became a partner at twenty-eight or twenty-nine. He was the guy. I looked to him as sort of a role model.

NAEGLE:
For all the horrible stories about him, Gavin was actually very approachable, very smart. He was incredibly helpful and taught me a ton about how to interact with clients, about how he found material.

KLIONER:
After two months in the mailroom, my first desk was as second assistant to Jeremy Zimmer and Gavin Polone. Marty Bowen, who worked for Jeremy, was on one side and Rob Kim, who worked for Gavin, was on the other. They drove me nuts. They were killing me. But Gavin always created that friction between people who worked for him, because that’s how he stayed in control of the situation. If people were worried about each other, they weren’t worried about him. But he’s also a great guy. Everybody who worked for him, he protected vigorously. He was just an asshole to everybody else.

KIM:
Gleb was the rag doll that Marty and I beat on every day.

KLIONER:
One day the phone rang and it was the actress Gina Gershon, Gavin’s then-girlfriend. I had no idea they had a thing, didn’t even know she was an actress.

Rob listened in on the call, and he said, “Tell her you saw
Love Matters
and you really liked her in it.”

She was very sweet to me, and I thought, Okay, I’m a big shot and I’m going to be nice, too. “Hey, I saw you in
Love Matters
. Thought you were great.”

I didn’t know that she was
totally naked
in that movie, that it was a piece of crap and she hated it.

Gavin was home sick with the flu that day. That afternoon I brought over some chicken noodle soup, his trades, and the mail. He invited me in. He was like, “Hey, Gleb, come on in,” all nice. I sat down on the couch and he said, “Gleb, why would you tell Gina Gershon that you saw her in
Love Matters
?” This was the first I knew I had said something wrong. “She’s totally naked in the movie and it’s a piece of shit, and she was totally freaked out that you mentioned it. She called me and asked why my guys were watching naked movies of her.”

I said, “Gavin, I had
no
idea. Rob told me to say it. I didn’t even know what I was saying.”

Suddenly Gavin said, “Rob, do you hear that?”

I didn’t realize that Gavin had Rob on the speakerphone. Rob had already testified that he hadn’t said anything, so Gavin had set me up to rat out Rob. I got back to the office, and Rob looked at me like I’d just sold him down the river.

KIM:
It was just a joke. Gleb, of course, didn’t get it. After he left for Gavin’s, Gavin called me and screamed, “What the fuck is wrong with you? You think you’re fucking funny?” He was crazy.

I said, “Gavin, Gleb fucked up. I’m not taking the heat for this. I said it to Gleb as a joke. I didn’t know he was going to tell Gina and say I thought she was great.”

Right then Gleb rang the doorbell. Gavin left me on the phone and said, “Gleb, did Rob tell you to tell Gina that he saw the Showtime movie and thought she was great?”

Of course Gleb goes, “Yeah, he did.” I could hear it all happening.

Gavin was livid. He went into a whole thing where he said, “This is how you prioritize my life. Number one, matters of my dick. Number two, matters of my clients. Number three, me.”

SAFRAN:
I’d been in the mailroom four days when Adam Isaacs’s assistant moved to Judy Hofflund’s desk. Adam had a lot of European clients— Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, Catherine Deneuve, Christopher Lambert—and he likes to have an assistant who speaks French. I put myself up for the job. I said, “I know I haven’t been here a long time, but it’s a meritocracy and this is the one instance in which I truly add value right from the start.”