Billion-Dollar Kiss Read online

  This is why after a studio releases a film it is frequently followed by a “director’s cut.” In television, pretty much everything you see is the vision of the original storyteller.

  Purely by coincidence, my meetings with the two agents who responded to Wells were set up on the same day, May 26,1988. I distinctly remember telling someone that, strike or no strike, it would be the most important day of my life. (I also remember that this self-seriousness would be quickly remedied when I started working on the staff of a sitcom.)

  William Morris. The William Morris Talent and Literary Agency—just saying the name made me feel like I was in show biz. As far I was concerned, in the late eighties, there were three agencies that controlled the known universe: Creative Artists Agency (CAA), International Creative Management (ICM), and the William Morris Agency (WMA). And the last one seemed to me to be the best of the triad. It was the largest, oldest, and most diversified of the major agencies—even people who didn’t know what a TV writer did knew about William Morris. I mean, my grandmother knew about William Morris. The other meeting I had was with a woman I’d never heard of named Beth Uffner. Evidently, she worked alone and had a little roster of clients. I figured I’d meet with her in case things didn’t work out with Morris—you know, as a backup.

  My first meeting was with this Beth Uffner, which was fine with me. It would give me a chance to warm up before my meeting with Morris later in the afternoon. As I pulled out of the Universal lot in my hatchback, I passed the ever-present sign at the front gate announcing that a smog alert had been issued.

  As though some divine art director had taken it upon himself to create a fitting backdrop for the ruinous war that the strike was becoming, the summer of 1988 was one of the worst smog seasons on record. (There were 187 days over the EPA standard that summer, including fifty-four Stage 1 alerts. The summer of ’88 was the last time a Stage 2 smog alert was ever issued.) During that summer, Angelenos realized that something had to be done. Changes had to be made. The summer of ’88 was a crossroads, a turning point for Los Angeles, and you could feel it everywhere. It was literally in the air.

  The crimson hues of the particulate-filled sky made the San Fernando Valley floor look like the set of Dune. As I drove along Ventura, the main artery of the red planet, taking in the errant palms that lined the boulevard, signs of the strike were everywhere. Much of the $6.5 billion a year the film and TV industry directly contributed to the California economy had dried up. And the aggregate economic impact of the strike, the cessation of indirect revenues, such as the demand for gas, food, and services by the 230,000 people who worked in the industry, was even more devastating. DuPars, an industry coffee shop, was deserted. Hampton’s and Art’s Deli, other storied haunts, were empty. Many local businesses had to lay off employees. Others closed entirely. Dry cleaners and bakeries, auto dealers and banks, nearly all businesses in Los Angeles felt the pain.

  I drove through Studio City, past Laurel Canyon and Whitsett, and pulled into a crappy little mini-mall next to Jerry’s Deli. Could this address be right? I parked my car in front of a cheap nail salon and got out. Unsettled by the stench of corned beef and acetone, I marched up the steaming concrete steps to the second floor of the strip mall, found a door marked BETH UFFNER & ASSOCIATES, and entered.

  The office was small, cluttered; imagine “old Hollywood” with a female twist. I introduced myself to the harried assistant who was juggling the ringing telephone and the directions that were being shouted at her by a gruff voice in one of the back rooms. As I sat, I noticed that the walls were covered with framed tear sheets from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, ads that congratulated various clients of Beth Uffner & Associates for their nominations and wins of Emmys, Humanitas Awards, Writers Guild Awards, every kind of prize given to a television writer. A lot of the names I recognized from the excellent TV shows that I had been watching: Bob Brush, Roger Director, Michael Weithorn, Lydia Woodward, Russ Woody. You’re telling me these writers are represented here? I thought.

  “Send Jeffrey in!” the back-room voice called out. Phone to her ear, the assistant pointed me toward the back. I rose and, feeling oddly like a boy who was being sent to the principal, sheepishly entered the back office. A fifty-year-old woman with wavy brown hair and large plastic-rim glasses sitting behind a desk looked me right in the eyes and said, “You better make this deal happen or there will be hell to pay.”

  “Excuse me?” I gulped.

  “You’re not getting off the hook this easy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Stop messing with my client!”

  I just stared at her, speechless. And she just stared right back at me. Who was this woman? Then she held up her index finger. It was right about then that I realized she was wearing a telephone headset.

  Except for the Time-Life operator on the commercials, I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone actually wear one of those things before. She indicated she wanted me to sit. I did. She continued her conversation, chewing out some poor executive while staring directly at me, sizing me up. Although I can’t be sure, I think she was trying to keep a studio from using the strike as an excuse to cancel one of her client’s deals.

  Finally, she finished her call, ripped the headset out of her thick hair, introduced herself, and immediately launched into a critique of my spec script. She liked it. She thought the “market would respond” to it. But she had some very specific directions for my next spec. I asked her a few questions. She asked even more. Finally, she broke into a smile, satisfied, even tickled. Then she told me to bring in fifty copies of my Molly Dodd. “I don’t photocopy,” she said. “That’s my client’s responsibility.” She got annoyed when she found out I had a meeting with another agency. “You want to drive over the hill, fine. But make them wait. It’s good for them to wait. You’ll meet with them, they’ll love you, but you’ll see. You’ll end up signing with me.”

  She was the most unapologetically aggressive person I had ever met. Having been raised in the polite South, I had no reference point for someone like this, especially a woman. This single-minded forcefulness, characteristic of agents, when combined with the maternal instinct, made her scary, downright ferocious. But at the same time, there was something comforting about her. In a world where a mattress on a garage floor was home and whether to buy gas or dinner was a frequent decision that had to be made, the idea of being taken care of by her suddenly seemed very appealing.

  “All you care about now is getting a job, but trust me, in three years you’ll be calling because you’re not being paid enough. The only time I’ll hear from you then is when there’s a problem.” If there was such a thing as the mother of all agents, this must be her.

  As I was trying to leave, she said to her overwhelmed assistant (who I began to understand was the “Associates” in “Uffner & Associates”), “Doesn’t he look nice?” But before the assistant could answer, she turned to me and added, “When you go to your meetings, don’t you dare dress like that. You don’t need to be the best-dressed person in the room. Remember, you’re a writer.”

  As I drove up Coldwater and down into Beverly Hills, I felt disoriented. But as I pulled up to the William Morris offices, whatever bewilderment I felt was immediately superseded by something greater: awe.

  William Morris was everything Uffner & Associates was not. Furthermore, it was everything I expected—and more. The WMA agency occupied the entire building, most of a city block, really (in fact, in 1998, the entire street was renamed William Morris Place). The palms that lined the front of William Morris Plaza in perfectly planted symmetry seemed to breathe easier than the ones in the Valley. As I left my vehicle with a white-suited valet in front of the Plaza and entered the commodious well-appointed lobby, everything began to feel surreal, dreamlike. The effect was certainly compounded by the massive, circular reception desk where I was greeted and offered bottled spring water by a stunning long-haired finalist in the genetic lottery—I’d never seen a human being
this beautiful in person before. And behind her were not one, but two more supermodel-hot receptionists, their overlapping voices blending and harmonizing to create a melodious mantra as they worked the phones: “William Morris, may I help you? William Morris, may I help you? William Morris, may I help you?” The sound of harps playing at the gates of heaven came to mind.

  Historically speaking, talent agents haven’t exactly been the most beloved people in show business. At the end of the nineteenth century, as vaudeville became the predominant form of American entertainment, agents sought out performers and then sold their services to the vaudeville theaters for a cut of the pay. Aware of how popular and well-represented performers affected costs on vaudeville, early Hollywood producers made sure their actors remained anonymous. Actors’ names were not listed in credits. Close-up shots were avoided. Performers were not featured in advertising. But despite their efforts, the studios were unable to keep the genie in the bottle. Movies created an intimacy between audience and actor. And unlike Broadway theater, motion pictures were a purely populist medium. Common folks felt a kinship with the personalities they saw on screen, and they wanted to know more. So whether the studios liked it or not, Hollywood had given birth to the “star system.”

  In the twenties and thirties, actors, or rather, stars, became the central product in Hollywood, more important than any other aspect of a movie. Audiences were sold a Mary Pickford film, a Charlie Chaplin flick. Young actors were found, molded, and promoted, rapidly becoming household names. Publicity departments flourished at the major studios, churning out all manner of carefully constructed behind-the-scenes information about their stars. Fan magazines appeared. A culture of celebrity was created and it was a very good time to be a representative of those celebrities.

  There’s an old Hollywood legend that an agent would not drink tomato juice during this time because people might think that the agent was drinking his client’s blood. Whether or not agents were indeed bloodsuckers, no one disputes the phenomenal rise in the price of blood during the twentieth century. According to the St. James Encyclopedia, billings at the William Morris Agency went from $500,000 in 1930 to $15 million in 1938, a thirtyfold increase in just eight years. It’s fair to say that the vast majority of this money was not coming from writers. The studios during this era were factories, quite literally. The immigrants turned moguls who ran them churned out products with the same kind of assembly-line mentality that Henry Ford applied to automobiles. Stars were created by publicity departments while writers typed away in story buildings. The difference between the two crafts was that stars were designed and marketed as unique talents, whereas writers were simply replaceable hired labor. Sure, there were certain types that could be cast in certain roles, but each actor had his or her own style, personality, and box-office draw. A studio often assigned numerous writers, who might not even be aware of each other, to work on the same project at the same time, but actors were perceived as generally inimitable. The Pandora’s box for the studios was that while it was in their interest to create stars, the power of the stars ultimately began to threaten the iron grasp that the studios had on the business.

  In the 1950s, after the tightening of labor laws and a series of antitrust suits, the studios lost their ability to keep talent in long-term contracts. Actors now began to form their own independent production companies, competing with the very studios that created them. Agents also began to get “back-end” deals for their actor clients. This guaranteed not just a salary, but a share of the box-office revenues. In 1950, Lew Wasserman, an agent with Morris’s biggest rival, the Music Corporation of America (MCA), got Jimmy Stewart a historic profit-sharing deal that amounted to half the profits of his western Winchester ’73. The era of indentured labor and the so-called studio system was ultimately usurped by what could rightly be called the “agent system.” Agents began to leverage their management of talent, most notably by creating “packages” around their stars. Agents put together projects staffed exclusively with clients from their rosters and offered the package to studios as a whole. If a studio wanted to be in business with a particular star, they now had to accept an entire package of costars, directors, writers, and supporting talent from one agency.

  William Morris, who had experience with the concept from the days of the vaudeville circuits, mastered packaging in the new rapidly developing medium that was challenging the movie business—television. Shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C., and Make Room for Daddy (from which it still purportedly draws packaging fees) brought great wealth to the agency. When an agency packaged a show, rather than draw a 10 percent commission from its talent the agency received a packaging fee—5 percent of a show’s license fee (the money a network pays a studio for the right to air a show), plus a 15 percent stake (today it is 10 percent) in the show’s ultimate adjusted gross, typically syndication revenues less any costs not covered by the network. As this practice became increasingly standard in the emerging medium, agencies were no longer mere representatives, they were equity partners, just like their clients who got back-end deals. The business was changing.

  The promise of acquiring an ownership position in a series’ syndication potential—which could be worth tens, perhaps even hundreds of millions of dollars—redefined the nature of talent representation. Other agencies followed Morris, and the TV package soon became the bread and butter of the agency business. But rather than strictly building their businesses around actors, talent agencies began to shift the spotlight to writers—the force that was starting to drive the TV package.

  While marquee actors still had their place, the nature of the business, the way television was made, soon created a demand for talent that could manage stars, oversee production, and, simultaneously, write. As quality writer-driven television became more and more popular, having a capable and talented writer-showrunner attached to a project became just as important as the actor. Eventually, it would become more important.

  By the late 1980s, when I came to Hollywood, agents began to seek and market television writing talent with the same vigor that studios in the thirties and forties applied to finding and selling stars. Writers were discovered, guided, and then promoted by agents to studios as unique talents with distinctive “voices.” Like star actors, writers—especially TV writers—were represented as inimitable. Agents created an aura, a buzz, around their writing clients. New TV writers, like I was about to be, were referred to as “baby writers” and were strategically positioned, marketed to fill a specific niche or perceived need. Agents often instructed us to focus exclusively on a certain genre—say, family sitcoms or one-hour police dramas. Sometimes we were even positioned as masters of a subspecialty. Agents called network and studio executives all over town to talk about their hot new clients who could write “half-hour with heart,” “procedurals with edge,” “strong female protagonists,” and “killer punch-up.” Many young writers became near instant sensations before they ever had their first job.

  Superagent Mike Ovitz applied the concepts of TV packaging, which he learned at William Morris, to motion pictures, making CAA what most viewed as the premiere Hollywood talent agency. With clients like Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Costner, Sydney Pollack, and Steven Spielberg, CAA basked above all in the glamour and prestige of the movie business. According to The New York Times, in 1988, the same year the Ovitz-packaged hit Rain Man was released, CAA pulled in revenues of about $65 million. However, around that same time, William Morris received about $60 million from a single deal—its share in the syndication revenues of The Cosby Show. Movies may have been a glamorous business, but television was a far more lucrative one. By the late eighties, TV packaging had become more than the bread and butter of Hollywood. It was the main course. Perhaps not as fancy as movies, but far more sustaining.

  Years later, a very well-known television director told me that he was going to encourage his sons to become writers. “Why?” I asked.

  “Because in televisi
on,” the director replied, “he who writes holds the keys to the kingdom.”

  This was true. However, writers may have held the keys to the kingdom, but he who held the writers, held the kingdom itself.

  A well-dressed kid about my age with an unyielding enthusiasm similar to my own approached me in the William Morris waiting room and introduced himself as Lanny’s assistant. Lanny Noveck was the literary agent I was to meet. On the way to Lanny’s office, my doppelgänger in Armani talked about two things: how much he liked my writing, and how much he liked William Morris. He referenced specific scenes and characters in my Molly Dodd. He quoted my own dialogue to me. Then he talked about how totally jazzed he was to have made it out of the mailroom and how completely psyched he was to be assigned to such an amazing agent as Lanny. As we turned a corner and walked down a long hall, we passed in front of several desks staffed with similarly jazzed and psyched assistants and newly minted hotshot MBAs and JDs who had also recently made it out of the mailroom. They all smiled at me as I passed. Several greeted me. I was introduced to another assistant outside Lanny’s office who, after shaking my right hand, immediately seized the warm depleted Evian from my left and rapidly replaced it with a properly chilled one. My head spinning, I was then whisked into an impressive office where three agents stood to greet me.

  If you’ve ever been through fraternity rush, you’ll know exactly what this process feels like.

  Lanny looked like a man named Lanny. He was at ease, paternal, the kind of guy who brings you comic books when you’re sick, who teaches you why Gulden’s spicy brown mustard is the best condiment for hot pastrami on rye, the kind of guy who was so connected he didn’t need to make a big deal about it. One had to fight the urge to call him Uncle Lanny. Although he had only been at the agency for seven years, Lanny was William Morris incarnate.