Requirements: One Year of Agency Experience Or Well, there’s always the mailroom

In entertainment lore, there is only one way to the top, and that is by starting at the bottom. This is, of course, absurd. Everyone knows that the best way to make it to the top is to be born there already.

You can also sleep your way to the top, but you need to be devastatingly beautiful for this to work. If you are merely pretty, you will get bedded here and there, but be careful. The trick to sleeping your way up is to make the executive or producer feel as though you are bestowing your graces upon him, like a pixie offering a magical token to an unexpected hero. If the man you want something from doesn’t feel incredibly lucky to boink you, he won’t feel like he has to do anything to keep you. As a result, you slept your way to nowhere. Therefore, don’t sleep with anyone unless you are devastatingly beautiful.

But for those of us poor plebs who are neither high-born nor beautiful, the only option left is to start at the bottom. Luckily for us bottom-feeders, the entertainment industry has been structured in just such a way that starting at the bottom is a clear path to incredible success. And the bottom, friends, is the mailroom.

Almost all of the jobs on the UTA list require agency experience. Agency experience can only be obtained one way—by getting a job in the mailroom of an agency. The theory goes that after you prove yourself in the mailroom, you can move up to the desk of an actual agent as his or her assistant. If you can stand this heat, you may go into training as an agent yourself. If you survive that long, you may someday be an agent.

You will meet all the major players at an agency and see every aspect of how the business works. So even if you don’t want to be an agent, there really isn’t anywhere that you can’t go with agency experience. You could become an executive at a production company, maybe even a studio exec, or an indie producer with a huge rolodex. You will, in short, be rich. Therefore, agency experience is a good thing to have.

You might be asking yourself why everyone doesn’t just go out and get some agency experience. You probably would love to know why I don’t just follow my own advice. Let me explain. As the above implies, the mailroom is a proving ground. You will, in fact, be thrust directly into the fire to be tested. If you can still fetch an agent’s vanilla soy nonfat latte with third degree burns over eighty percent of your body, congratulations. You’ve made it to the second round of interviews for a junior-level mailroom position.

Not all agencies are exactly the same, but they typically fall into two categories. Those that are huge, and those that are not. The huge ones are Creative Artists Agency (CAA), William Morris Agency, International Creative Management (ICM), United Talent Agency (UTA), and Endeavor, which is only recently huge. Then there are the boutiques. The boutiques, as you may have guessed, do not always have mailrooms. They often want to hire people who have experience at the huge agencies. But occasionally, when all the right stars are in alignment, they will show an interest in applicants who do not have agency experience. Don’t assume, however, that those are lucky stars.

The second (and last) interview I received from a job on the UTA list was at a boutique agency. They needed an assistant for one of their talent agents and asked me for an interview. This interview was much better than the last, and I liked all the people I spoke with. Nevertheless, things weren’t going to work out. They explained that the hours were 9am to 7pm, Monday through Friday, for $500 per week. Be warned, friends. Any time someone offers a daily or weekly rate, you will be working overtime, but you will not be paid overtime. The maximum hourly rate I would ever be paid for this job was $10 per hour. If I worked overtime, and I would have, the hourly rate would have dipped even lower.

Entry-level agency jobs pay shit and abuse. But, the theory is, you get invaluable experience and contacts. If you are one of the lucky high-borns, you are actually at the top of the business because your family already has contacts; you don’t have to do any networking. And as anyone in the business will tell you, it’s all about networking. It’s all about who you know.

I disagree completely. You can call me naïve if you like. You’ll be correct in saying so. After all, I have been in Los Angeles for less than a year. But I’m also not wrong. Take note that never at any point in the above description of the agency system did I say that agency experience would make me a better writer. That’s because it won’t. The only thing that will make me a better writer is more writing, and that’s the one thing that an agency job will deny me.

If you’re one of those lovely people who feel like you know exactly where I should hang out and who I should be speaking to, let me explain something. It is not hard to meet people. Networking (and it’s all about networking) is not hard. Because here’s the catch to the whole thing: these people who have walked through fire and hell to be an agent, those lovely agents with whom I should be networking, have to keep proving themselves by finding sellable properties. And I want my stories to be those coveted properties. Networking is easy, but writing a tight, compelling, commercial, character-driven screenplay to hand over to the agents in my network is fucking hard. If you don’t believe me, send me your script. I’m out of toilet paper, don’t have money to buy more, and need to wipe my ass with something.

I am willing to trade my thumbs to be a successful writer. (Successful, for the sake of clarity, means having an audience, not money.) Really, I mean it. I can press the space bar with my middle finger. Look, I am doing it right now. Unfortunately, the gods, muses, or writing genies in control of these matters do not trade in thumbs. Good writing is bought with time, and effort. Getting the ass into the chair to write is the only way to become a writer. In the end, if I get my success, I will have handed over my life to get it.

Now you can see why I don’t work in a mailroom. Because being an agent or a producer requires your whole life, too. And I only have one to spend.