USC’s New Hollywood Connection

Sometimes the people who’ve been around, stick around . . . loved, honored and listened to.

At 76, Howard Koch is still producing movies and in his mid-70s Ray Stark is doing the same with his Rastar Productions. Walter Cronkite doubles as TV wise man in times of crisis. And George Burns is still doing stand-up.

Even in the youth-tilt of show business, experience is occasionally valued and productivity for some can endure for the long term.

And so after 47 1/2 years working his Rolodex files, making deals and taking meetings, talking up the players and the playees, William Morris Agency’s Larry Auerbach found life beyond the Morris Beverly Hills office. He’s now agent to the wanna-bes at USC’s pioneering film and television school where it’s claimed 76% of the school’s graduates get show-business jobs.

USC should be comfortable territory for Auerbach, with buildings there named after such show-business people as George Lucas, Marcia Lucas, Harold Lloyd, Johnny Carson and Steven Spielberg.

The idea of a show-business agent for the film school belongs jointly to Elizabeth Monk Daley, who became dean of the school last year, and Marcia Lucas Rodriques, who funded the newly created position.

Auerbach’s title is executive director of student-industry relations. Language aside, he’ll be--to use his description--more a representative, a big brother, a counselor to the school’s seniors and graduate students. At the same time, he’ll keep his industry contacts, hitting the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screenings, mixing at the Columbia Bar & Grill or La Veranda, doing the kind of contact work he’s done for the only other employer he’s known, save the U.S. Army, until now.

Auerbach has touched all the bases in an agency career that goes back to the final days of vaudeville where, at age 19, he was booking live acts into movie houses. He then moved into television in its formative years, started his agency’s rock music department, and as one-time head of the film and TV departments experienced the seismological movements that swept through those areas of entertainment.

He negotiated some of Bill Cosby’s major TV deals, including a variety show few people remember as well as the mammoth syndication package for “The Cosby Show.” In pop music, he represented Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson. Mitch Miller, too. Through such film clients as Norman Jewison and Bernardo Bertolucci, he was involved in negotiations that produced 25 motion pictures, from “Last Tango in Paris” to “Moonstruck.” Posters from those two movies are the major decorations in Auerbach’s new, spare, corner office where an answering machine rather than a secretary takes his calls and a computer is slowly replacing his Rolodex.

He’s making the adjustment. “The first few days up here,” Auerbach says, “the phone didn’t ring much. But the word is getting around.” Almost echoing that thought, he fields three calls in quick succession: a would-be student wants to learn how to be an agent, then two studio contacts call.

While Auerbach is making adjustments, the school is doing the same. It got into TV production training late and for most of its 64 years has concentrated on film. Now it is moving into new areas, for the first time setting up a board of advisers headed by former Columbia chairman Frank Wells to advise on trends and industry matters. It recently worked with Apple Computer in the development of an integrated computer system for film production. Some of its people worked with the USC medical school in developing a revolutionary computer imaging/animation system that provides a dress rehearsal for surgeons before--as the phrase goes in Hollywood--the first cut.

Daley recently set up a workshop for faculty and students in high-definition television that included a student competition in making half-hour films for this new medium.

So how does an agent with 47 1/2 years of client representation going back to vaudeville fit in with computer-integrated studios, medical imaging and high-def TV along with enough student film production in one year to make 20 feature-length films?

Slowly, comfortably, realistically and confidently.

“The toughest thing in show business,” Auerbach says, “is getting the break. There are a lot of talented people who will never get that break. If we can help, we will try. At the same time, I hope to show students and alumni how to handle rejection. Right now, while they’re in school it’s time for them to think about what they can do well and not to try to make a ‘Die Hard 4.’

“I don’t know how many jobs we’ll find. But we’ll help, we’ll point the students in certain directions. Maybe they will get good meetings but they have to do the hustling.”

His language is bejeweled with Hollywoodese: “close the deal,” “know the players,” “make the connection.”

In his first eight weeks at USC, Auerbach has been meeting the faculty, holding meetings with the seniors and the graduate students (also alumni from the past two years who need his help), looking at student projects, reading scripts.

“I’m doing my homework first,” he says. “Then I go out to the industry to tell the leaders what we are doing and to tell them to give me a chance to help fulfill their needs. I will find them people they can use. If I don’t have them, I will tell them. But I will personally interview each student and will handpick them for certain areas in films and television. I intend to sit down with all the heads of the studios, all the heads of the networks, the leading independent production companies to tell them what we have in the school.”

Auerbach may also be doing some educating in a different direction. Daley hopes eventually to develop a $50-million endowment fund for the school. Despite the school’s high-profile names on its buildings, the cinema-television school has no chairs or large endowments.

Its image of a richly supported cinema school is just that, Daley says. Image.

Auerbach, too, through his industry contacts may do something about the USC image. But for the present he’s concerned with day-to-day realities, like advising students not to try to write for established shows like “Murphy Brown” but to pick a new show that might be around for awhile. “Write the script, I tell them,” Auerbach says, “and if it’s good I’ll try to get it to the producers.”

Then he reflects: “It is sad to see some people who have had years of experience and knowledge who can’t give all that back to anyone, who can’t share it in the way I have been given a chance here. If what I do works, I hope it helps.”