Agent to the Stars | Page 5

up doing was staring blankly. Fortunately, Miranda was on the ball. "Gentlemen," she said, excusing herself. On her way out, she dug the spike of her shoe into my pinky toe, and snapped me back to reality. I stood up, looking for where to sit.
"Why don't you sit here," Carl said, and pointed to a chair on the far side of the table, next to the aquarium.
"Great. Thanks," I said. I walked to the other side of table and sat down. I stared at Carl. He stared back. He had a little smile on his face.
There are legends in the world of agents. There's Lew Wasserman, the agent of his day, who went over to the other side of the movie business and thrived at Universal Pictures. There's Mike Ovitz, who went over to the other side and exploded, humiliatingly, at Disney.
And then there's Carl Lupo, my boss, who went over to the other side, took Century Pictures from a schlock-horror house to the biggest studio in Hollywood in just under a decade and then, at the height of his reign, came back over into agency. No one knows why. It scares the Hell out of everyone.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"What?" Carl said. Then he almost immediately laughed. "Relax, Tom. I just want to have a little chat. It's been a while since we've talked."
The last time Carl and I had talked directly to each other in a non-meeting setting was three years earlier. I had just graduated from the mailroom to the agency floor, where I shared a pod with another mailroom escapee. My client list was a former teen idol, then in his 30s and a semi-regular at intervention sessions, and a cute but brainless 22-year old UCLA cheerleader named Shelly Beckwith. Carl had dropped by, shook hands with me and my podmate, and blathered pleasantries with us for exactly two minutes and thirty seconds before moving on to the next pod to do the same thing.
Since then, the former teen idol strangled in his own saliva, my podmate imploded from stress and left the agency to become a Buddhist monk in Big Bear, Shelly Beckwith became Michelle Beck and got lucky with two hits in a row, and I got an office. It's a strange world.
"How are things going with Michelle Beck's negotiations?" Carl asked.
"They're done, actually," I said. "We're getting twelve five, cash and percentages, and that's before merchandising."
"That's good to hear," Carl said. "Davis thought you'd hit a wall at about $8.5 million, you know. I told him you'd top that by at least three and a half. You beat the point spread by a half million dollars."
"Always happy to overachieve, Carl."
"Yes, well, Brad's no good at bargaining anyway. I stuck him with Allen Green, of all people, for 20 million. How that film is ever going to make a profit now is really beyond me."
I chose not to say anything at this point.
"Oh, well, not our problem, I suppose," Carl said. "Tell me, Tom. Do you like science fiction?"
"Science fiction?" I said. "Sure. Star Wars and Star Trek, mostly, same as everyone. As a kid I remember begging my mother to let me stay up and watch 'Battlestar Galactica'. And there was a period when I was 14 when I read just about every Robert Heinlein book I could get my hands on. It's been a while since I've really read any, though. I watched Murdered Earth once, at the premiere. I think that's killed the genre for me for a while."
"Which do you like better, movies with evil aliens, or movies with good aliens?"
"I don't know," I said. "I haven't really ever given it much thought."
"Please do so now," Carl said. "Indulge me, if you don't mind."
Carl could have said Please disembowel yourself and sauté your intestines with mushrooms. Indulge me, if you don't mind and anyone in the agency would have done it. It's disgusting what sycophancy can do.
"I guess if I had to make the choice, I'd go with the evil aliens," I said. "They just make for better films. Put in a bad alien and you get the Alien films, Independence Day, Predator, Stargate, Starship Troopers. Good aliens get you *Batteries Not Included. No contest."
"Well," Carl said, "There is E.T. And Close Encounters."
"I'll give you E.T.," I said. "But I don't buy Close Encounters. Those aliens were cute, sure, but that doesn't mean they weren't evil. Once they got out of the solar system, Richard Dreyfus was probably penned up like a veal. Anyway, no one really knows what's going on in that movie. Spielberg must have been downing peyote frosties when he thought that one up."
"The Star Trek movies have good aliens. So do the Star Wars movies."
"The Star Trek movies have bad aliens too, like the Klingons and those