The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up [Paperback]

It’s like a plot from a Hollywood potboiler: start out in the mailroom, end up a mogul. But for many, it happens to be true. Some of the biggest names in entertainment—including David Geffen, Barry Diller, and Michael Ovitz— started their dazzling careers in the lowly mailroom. Based on more than two hundred interviews, David Rensin unfolds the never-before-told history of an American institution—in the voices of the people who lived it. Through nearly seven decades of glamour and humiliation, lousy pay and incredible perks, killer egos and a kill-or-be-killed ethos, you’ll go where the trainees go, learn what they must do to get ahead, and hear the best insider stories from the Hollywood everyone knows about but no onereallyknows. A vibrant tapestry of dreams, desire, and exploitation,The Mailroomis not only an engrossing read but a crash course, taught by the experts, on how to succeed in Hollywood.“Entertaining, instructive, and irresistible . . . Readers will feast on plenty of name-dropping . . . and hair-raising accounts of backstabbing.”
—Variety

“A TERRIFIC BOOK . . . Loaded with great stories, unusual insights, and laugh-out-loud humor. You will love this one.”
—LARRY KING

“FASCINATING . . . A bracing lesson in the acquisition and exercise of power . . . with a big emphasis on the maxim that what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.”
—Los Angeles Times

“THE MAILROOMIS A BLAST TO READ. This is the way Hollywood operates—the fun, the giddy high, the espionage, and the wrenching twists of luck and disaster. David Rensin is a master at eliciting the truth nobody else captures.”
—CAMERON CROWE

“SHAMELESS SCHMOOZING, casting couch know-how, plotting and hustling are all detailed inThe Mailroom.”
—The New York Post(Required Reading)

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