THIS IS A book about Hollywood, a town that supports an ethnic group called agents. One of the best of these agents, Ron Meyer, now head of Universal—soon, I guess, to move to Comcast—the studio, that is, not Ron Meyer—once declared correctly that talent agents are mainly flesh peddlers, in which capacity they help actors get parts and writers get contracts.
When people mouth off about how Hollywood has changed I remind myself of a correspondence I once perused—in my capacity of rare book appraiser—between the great Bertolt Brecht and the legendary agent Spud Weed, who departed the hills and the valleys before I came to town.
Neither Brecht nor Spud Weed bothered with long philosophical exchanges. The letters between them—notes, really—were about deals. That is to say, money. So much for this play, this short story, this script. Neither man wasted words—three sentences was a long letter for Spud Weed, and Brecht was not much more voluble. He said take it or he said leave it and that was that.
In the course of my long years in Hollywood I’ve found friendships with agents to be a sometimes thing. Long ago I had an agent named Evarts Ziegler, a very elegant man who had been, I think, to Princeton. He was said to prefer to represent Princetonians, which left him with James Stewart and not much of anybody else. I got along well with Mr. Ziegler, and this despite the fact that I hadn’t been to Princeton. I don’t remember our parting—at some point Evarts Ziegler just drifted away.
I was never a client of H. N. Swanson either. Swanie was an old gentleman who overlapped with Spud Weed, though not with myself. At various times I’ve toured the three major agencies: William Morris, ICM, and CAA, and have been a client of two of the three, though never a particularly happy client. Probably that was because I was a writer and writers are always small potatoes at the big agencies, particularly in the budgetary sense. They want Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and the like. You can’t blame the agencies for that: after all, they are in business to make money. Spud Weed knew that, and so did Brecht.
I’m a normal screenwriter; I like to be paid a goodly sum for my efforts. But I’m also atypical, in that I like human color—even when I wasn’t earning handsome monies I have often enjoyed Hollywood for the color. Lunching outside on Santa Monica Boulevard I used to see two little men drive by in a big yellow shoe. I assume they were cobblers and the yellow shoe their means of advertising that fact. I also glimpsed them once or twice in the Valley, tooling along Ventura Boulevard.
A town where men can drive around in yellow shoes is just my kind of town, I guess. If more agents drove around in shoes I might find them more likable but I’m afraid that won’t happen soon.