Bright Lights, Literal Poison, and Tangential Weinsteins: A Showbiz Story
By: T.J. Chambers
Tags: Los Angeles, Film, Hollywood Stories, Nostalgia, Terrorism

My first real job in Hollywood was opening poisoned mail. I am frankly not even sure where that ranks on the long scale of Hollywood gig ignominy, especially since this work occurred in regular-ish pants and not a stained Captain Jack Sparrow costume.

I moved to Los Angeles on September 14th, 2001, a date steeped not as much in infamy as in “uh, what the fuck just happened a few days ago?”-famy. The calendar had been circled for a while; instead of forging on with my community college Film & TV Production education (to this day the record remains unclear as to whether I finished an Associate’s degree) I was ready to strike out from Phoenix across the vast desert and make my mark in the glimmering city of blah blah. On September 11th itself, I saw the early morning horrors unfold on TV then headed in for one of my final shifts waiting tables at a place called Charleston’s. Imagine if an Outback Steakhouse tried to cover up its Australian accent, and you’ve got Charleston’s.

Mike Judge to his Office Space location scout: “YES”

The news played silently while people forked blackened chicken caesar into their mouths, and at some point another server asked me “Are you still going to L.A.?” I paused to wipe some creamed spinach dip off the edge of a soup plate and shrugged. “I guess.”

A few days later, I packed up my dull gold manual-transmission Ford Ranger pickup with the custom license plate 24 FRMS, which I figured meant “twenty-four frames” because I was a Very Serious Film Guy™. It turned out everyone just assumed it meant “twenty-four farms” so instead of a clever reference to film frame rates, people probably assumed I was very proud of how many farms I had been to. A manual Ford pickup may be the worst car to take to L.A.; it’s hard to say definitively because I am absolutely certain that I’m the only person ever to have done it. It’s difficult to park, the wheels spin out if there is so much as a drop of moisture on Beverly Glen, and people throw shit in your truck bed. Sometimes you luck out with a partially crumpled New Beverly theater calendar that you can still magnet to your empty-ass fridge, but mostly just they just throw crap.

My former high school girlfriend (these days a notable trauma surgeon!) and her then-boyfriend (now a filmmaker and person with whom I have been drunk in Prague!) installed me on the futon in their Sherman Oaks apartment with INTENSE Sherman Oaks vibes.

The actual building in question. Every single apartment building in the San Fernando Valley was built in 1967. Every. Single. One.

Sharp-eyed viewers with robust mid-2000s DVD box set collections will recognize it as the building the Tara Reid character shows J.D. in Scrubs to explain “what we could afford if we moved in together.” So I guess the place was always destined to birth both doctors, and dudes with relationship hangups. The world was on fire, I had some raspberry vinaigrette-slathered dollars in my pocket, and I was ready to…well that’s unclear. Become a beloved independent film director? Meet Giovanni Ribisi at a French-themed karaoke bar? Have my truck towed by the city and just never bother to pick it up? Slightly over 66% of those things wound up happening.

Apart from bellowing patriotism and promises to “hunt people down” and the rocketing sales of American flag-anything (I put a flag sticker in the back window of the Ranger, where it remained until the towing) the world had pretty much frozen after 9/11. At least it certainly felt that way in the entertainment industry. SNL hadn’t come back yet, movies were delayed, the best way I can describe the feeling is that for at least a few weeks we honestly weren’t sure if anyone would ever want to be “entertained” again. In retrospect this worry quickly became unfounded, but when you’re in the eye of the hurricane and you have like 5 weeks of grocery money to your name and the industry you’ve pointed your little heart and brain towards your whole life is completely frozen, shit is weird.

We do our patriotism on the freeways and with watermarks here in L.A., baby

Quick scene-setting of late-90s and early 2000s Hollywood: pretty much…just watch Swingers. It seems too easy to say but it really is all the primer you need. By 2K1 some of us had mobile phones (no texting, strict adherence to nights and weekends for calls) and me and my crew were trying to be directors and screenwriters, not actors, but essentially Swingers nailed it. You checked your Thomas Guide to map the drive from a screening at the NuArt to the Roscoe’s off Pico, maybe head northeast and close down Ye Rustic Inn, rinse and repeat. If there were only two of you maybe you ate at the Apple Pan instead, but that one old guy behind the counter was legit mean and it just didn’t feel like a place that wanted four assholes sitting there at 11pm. Haircut and shirt style aside, no Vince Vaughn was I when it comes to brashness. And, never ever Pink’s Hot Dogs.

Angelenos simply cannot get enough of mentioning how we do not ever ever go to this Los Angeles institution

Television wasn’t quite full of prestige yet, but the movie industry was still in what felt like a momentous time. The indie explosion had continued exploding and it felt like a lot of people were looking to make “films,” which for purposes of this essay is any sequential series of moving pictures and sound which does not feature Iron Man. The most consistent ways to break in to the industry were either fancypants film school credentials (which I will call “Tischin’ The Scales”) or your dentist uncle fronting indie film financing (which I will call “Tischin’ The Scales, Post Graduation”) so the avenues the majority of us had to find work, make rent, get a foot in the motherfuckin’ door were:

Bug and/or give drugs to your friend who had a gig reading scripts and answering phones at any one of the dozens of production companies which took a few million dollars a year from the studios to rent an office in Beverly Hills, put up an oversized poster for the Polish release of The Third Man, and “develop” movies. Try to take over for them when they get caught doing too many of the drugs you gave them. Check the classifieds in industry publications and send out unconscionable amounts of paper resumes, plus headshots if you’re an actor. Imagine if LinkedIn was physical mail. One time my buddies made a short film, so we took out a tiiiiiiny classified in Backstage West seeking actors to AUDITION for a short which offered zero pay and was made by literally nobody. Every day for two weeks straight, a mailman dropped off CRATES of headshots and resumes at our apartment and we drank Bud Light and decided whose face was striking enough to even deserve an audition for this unpaid short film. Temp agencies, babyyyyyyy

Around town the production companies and networks and talent agencies were whirlwinds of office action, like Hudsucker Proxy shit, and major and independent movie studios had office space everywhere full of people running around doing the (STAGGERINGLY inefficient, but more on that later) business of Hollywood. At some point you just had to throw bodies at the whole thing, and when the person rolling calls for some big producer went down with a hold button finger repetitive stress injury, or more likely a hangover from bullshitting their way into the Thir13een Ghosts premiere party, a temp agency would spring into action and find someone with a functioning car who and a can-do spirit, and give them a day or two or week of work.

Here’s a the Bradbury building just because there hasn’t been a picture for a bit, enjoy.

The Friedman Agency was the premiere entertainment one. They had a floor at 9000 Sunset, and you’d go in and talk with Mr. Friedman and he’d sort of kind of pretend like he gave a shit what you “wanted” to do in the film business, then like soldiers pouring over a trench wall except literally not like that because it’s just fucking movies, he’d send eager young people out to stuff For Your Consideration envelops over at New Line or check people in for meetings at TriStar or whatnot. He called me the day after my meeting with him to offer a day’s work, I slept through the call, and he left a message that absolutely contained his not-optimistic prediction as to whether I would ever work in this town again.

Miraculously, I also happened to wander into the AppleOne temp office in the Valley. This was a regular temp agency. They were in no way entertainment or show business specific. Like, you could potentially get assigned a gig cold-calling doctors for some pharmaceutical company out in Thousand Oaks. Shudder. I had a good interview with a surprisingly kind woman in the office, told her I wanted to be in the film industry, and thought nothing of it. A few days later she called and said that a request had come across her desk from one of the company’s corporate clients, Disney. But for a subsidiary of Disney called Miramax, and weren’t they a film company, she had heard? “Because I remember you said you wanted to do film.”

MIRAMAX. It pretty much goes without saying, and evidence from earlier in this essay and also just sort of my whole general vibe can confirm, that Miramax throughout the previous decade had a massive hand in taking me from a middle school football player with dreams of [undecided] to a community college possibly-graduate with dreams of becoming Wes Anderkevin Smith Soder-tino. She said they needed someone for their mailroom, which was even better! A mailroom gig was, anecdotally, a famous first step on the path towards an ACTUAL CAREER IN THE FILM BUSINESS.

The reason, however, that they needed someone for their mailroom turned out to be…less glamorous.

Remember earlier when I mentioned the date I moved and maybe you went “yeah, gotcha, 9/11?” Your payoff cometh. Now somewhat forgotten in the absolute whirlwind of news, on September 18th, just after me and 24 FRMS made our way to L.A., the first of what would become dozens of envelopes containing spores of the deadly bacteria anthrax were mailed to a variety of news organizations, like the offices of anchor Tom Brokaw, and Democratic politicians, like Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. It was a mystery of gigantic proportions. Some letters got found, postal workers got sick and died, people got sick at other offices where letters were never found, and suddenly all over the country “suspicious” seeming envelopes were identified and fretted over.

It seems like big “Mr. Police I gave you all the clues” energy, but was legitimately bad and scary.

Miramax, despite having their main offices in New York City, and their main West Coast office on Beverly Drive in Los Angeles, was convinced that the mysterious terrorists were surely also out to get the Dimension Films and Miramax TV divisions that were housed in a building right smack in the middle of the Sunset Strip. And thus, having decided that the mail was unsafe, therefore THE PRUDENT THING TO DO WAS BRING IN SOME OTHER DUDE TO OPEN ALL THE MAIL IN THE SUNSET OFFICE.

The building in question now. Next to the Comedy Store, and just down from The Saddle Ranch. Extremely Sunset Strip.

The morning after the nice temp agency lady called me on my precious anytime minutes with the good but vague news about a Miramax mailroom job, I arrived at the offices and was put to work. And by work, I mean the kid who usually manned their small mailroom was moved to a different part of the building, and I would now be in charge of receive, sorting, preparing, and when tasked OPENING the mail, since at least some of it was bound to be tainted with the deadly toxin caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis.

Worry not though, dear reader, about a bright-eyed freshly 21 year old dreamer being chewed up and used by the unfeeling machinery of the business of show, for I was provided a (1) box of latex gloves with which to open any potential death mail. No real further instruction was given.

I had never seen or set foot inside a mailroom, and while it seems pretty simple, taking a couple crates of disorganized mail and sorting it into 120 inboxes of people you’ve never heard of but within that ecosystem are each the most important person in the world is tiresome work. A postal worker would drop the crate at the entrance, I would go get it, and try to place everyone’s envelopes into the right hole while I kept an eye out for weird stuff and waited for people to call me to come to their desk to open the previous day’s mail or packages. If anything looked suspicious or lumpy or powdery or whatever to someone’s assistant (equally untrained in the ways of postal terrorism as I was) after the mail made its way from my room to their desk, they would call me and I’d grab the latex gloves and, to tweak the parlance of showbiz, go do the opening of an envelope.

I should note, this didn’t seem particularly weird to anyone. Some combination of the absolute insanity of Hollywood mixed with the theater of security kind of…set everyone at ease? The thing is there’s no one specific, objective skill to being a film or TV executive or producer. This is not to say that’s its not incredibly hard and the people who do it well aren’t incredibly talented; it’s just that the whole thing sort of relies on a low-grade mass hallucination where things only get done if we all sorta pretend like the people calling the shots know what they’re doing to a degree. So if someone at Miramax says “we’re gonna bring in a new kid specifically to handle the mail because that will be safer” no one goes “well what the fuck special skill or training does HE possess?” or “I think he’s wearing pants from Structure, though, and didn’t those all close a few years ago?” They just sigh with relief that the poisoned mail responsibility isn’t theirs and call in the guy (me) who is using even less safety equipment than he would if he was prepping hand-passed cucumber bites for the Golden Globes afterparty (also a job that I have done.)

In between the occasional heart-pounding lumpy envelope openings, the gig delighted me. I worked at goddamn Miramax. Bob Weinstein would be in the elevator! Still by all publicly accounts probably a crappy person, but all things are relative now, and yes that is an intentional homonym situation! Billy Bob Thorton had an inbox that I sorted mail into, since his production company was housed under Miramax, and he never ever came to get his mail so I just kept cramming shit addressed to Billy Bob in there. There was in inbox where small theaters from around the country mailed the checks they owed Miramax for their box office receipts. Like Billy Bob, I never saw this box get emptied. Checks just piled up while a two-screen joint in Kansas waited for their check to clear their account, and no one really bothered since I guess it wasn’t gonna be big Regal Cinemas Gangs of New York money.

My little mailroom had an orange iMac connected to the internet. There was a delightfully scruffy older Scottish dude who worked as a messenger assigned to the building. In retrospect he was probably like 38 at the time, but he was a DJ on the side and hard Scottish partying had done its thing. I saw him around town a few times in the subsequent years, someone reading this with a long Los Angeles history or who used to spend time drinking at the Cat & Fiddle probably knows who I’m talking about.

Anyway, he would come into my mailroom day to shoot the shit and ask me to pull up Soccernet.com, since he had no idea how, to check the European soccer scores. I liked doing this and any opportunity you have to chat with a Scottish DJ who is missing a couple crucial teeth but absolutely still got chicks, you should take.

Sometimes the main receptionist girl would ask me to man the phones while she went to Starbucks to meet her boyfriend for a bit. Figuring that it was a surefire path to become her or anyone’s boyfriend at some future point, I would do it, despite having absolutely no idea how the transfer or extension system worked. People would call into Miramax and I would put them on hold for minutes on end while I just hit buttons hoping that it might magically connect them to the person they’d asked for. This wasn’t too dire, though, as most of the incoming calls in September 2001 were from parents of young girls wondering why Miramax was delaying the release of their Lance Bass film On The Line.

There is SO MUCH going on with this poster. Take a minute.

Imagine loving your child so much, or wanting to shut them up enough, that you found out what company made the film On The Line and you cold-called them in Hollywood, California to personally demand specific reasons why a multi-million dollar business had pushed the release. Kinda heartwarming.

This went on for a couple weeks. My newfound expertise as a front-line combatant against the horrors of bioterrorism was not coming into play, although I did get invited to a party at a celebrity video game designer’s house in the Hollywood Hills where people did a shitload of something that looked like anthrax but was almost certainly not. Another evening I ran Monty Python’s Eric Idle in a lobby; he was standing near a TV playing the World Series, so I asked him what the score was and he went “Umm, nil-nil?” which is most definitely not how you say a baseball score. Nothing changed in the international anthrax hunt; years later a perpetrator was posthumously declared by the FBI, but there’s still some mystery surrounding the accuracy of that. Imagine, doubt about an FBI conclusion! What a thing!

It became clearer that probably no terrorist was looking to extract correspondence revenge for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and the futon life was grating on me. I mused to Scottish guy and receptionist girl that I might just move back home for a while since the industry was at a standstill, and though I hoped the company hire me on full time, my future as a temp canary in the cinematic coal mine was admittedly bleak. A few days later an office manager called me in and said they liked me but heard I was “moving back to Indiana” (Arizona, but honestly what’s the difference) and it seemed like this whole anthrax thing had blown over (precisely the opposite of what you want anthrax to do, but again whatever.)

My first foray into show business was in the rear view, as was Los Angeles for now, and I trucked it back to Phoenix with my tail in something akin to its normal position, as well as in time to see the Diamondbacks win a tragedy-delayed World Series over the Yankees.

Jay Bell scored the winning run of the 2001 World Series wearing, as he generally did, what appear to be a tasteful LensCrafters fashion frame.

Eventually I would return and move onto some even weirder and more random Hollywood hustles, tales of which I will surely foist upon you in the near future; but in a long and winding career where I have been everything from a red carpet champagne-holder to a full-on show runner, I will always weigh any task asked of, or by me against a box of latex gloves and a poison envelope.