A Cast of Many on the Phone Lines

In Hollywood, you’re nobody till somebody listens in.

Forget the allegations of illegal celebrity wiretaps gone wild. In the trenches where the deals go down, it can fairly be assumed that any time an agent is on the phone with, say, a studio executive, four people, not two, will be on the line -- the agent, the exec, the agent’s assistant and the exec’s assistant. Anyone who expects a conversation to be private is either not paying attention or is hopelessly naive.

The unfolding scandal around jailed celebrity gumshoe Anthony Pellicano may be startling because of the number of high-profile names involved and the unsavory practices alleged, including rampant illegal wiretapping.

What’s not surprising to anyone in the know is that even the most run-of-the-mill Hollywood business conversations are notoriously porous; someone is almost always listening in, and doing so legally. Movers and shakers have assistants; assistants are expected to listen in silence, take notes and follow up. While this might strike some as peculiar and possibly even unethical, in the entertainment industry, it is the norm. In this town, to paraphrase the old song, you’ll never talk alone.

Assistants listen in for many reasons: to learn how to be an agent/manager/producer; to make sure that when the boss says, “I’ll get that script/contract/deal point memo to Disney/Universal/Paramount/George Clooney,” the job gets done, posthaste. It takes a person who is important enough, busy enough and paid well enough to be able to have a staff member permanently on call for note-taking, promise-fulfilling and number-dialing. Hollywood, it happens, is full of people who fit that description.

The aspiring moguls who spend their days attached to a headset don’t just handle up to 200 calls a day for a busy boss. They are sometimes exposed to crass banter or uncomfortably personal revelations. In some offices, taking a lunch hour is not possible; simply finding time for a bathroom break becomes a challenge. The reward, however, is the opportunity to become a boss one day ... and, presumably, to have an assistant whose job it is to listen in.

“There is a huge culture of listening,” says veteran Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman. “I don’t think it’s malicious. I think it’s a timesaver. There is an efficiency to having someone listen in. And let me assure you that most of the agents and managers have call lists that would choke a horse. The assumption you should make is that someone is listening.”

“Definitely, I presume with executives and agents that someone is listening,” says producer Cathy Schulman, whose assistant listens in when she needs him. “Less so with other producers and talent.”

Producer Tom Pollock, former chief of Universal Pictures, says he assumes that every agent he talks to has an assistant on the line. It is only because of a “personal idiosyncrasy” -- his training as a lawyer -- says Pollock, that he does not allow his assistants to listen to his conversations unless they walk into his office and overhear a call. Nonetheless, he understands the usefulness of the practice.

“It’s normal,” says Pollock. “It saves them time. If an agent says, ‘I’ll get that script right over to you,’ the assistant just does it and doesn’t have to be told, and then the agent can go right on to the next call.”

Says Schulman: “The reason I have my assistant on the line is it lets me get twice as much done. Every single call is a transaction of sorts. Inevitably a call leads to an actor being called, a vendor being hired, a script being sent and our assistants -- who are executives- and producers-in-training vs. career secretaries -- can do the work and are trained to do the work that the call requires.”

California has laws against eavesdropping on confidential conversations, but the Hollywood practice of listening in is so pervasive, says 1st Amendment lawyer Al Wickers, that it’s “probably legal.”

“The California Supreme Court has said that a confidential conversation is one you don’t reasonably expect to be recorded or overheard,” says Wickers. “In the entertainment industry, there is the expectation that assistants are monitoring calls as they are rolling calls for their bosses. Everyone I know in the industry works under the assumption that assistants are typically listening in.”

At least one movie star never got the memo. In July 2004, when she was embroiled in a lawsuit over the sequel to “Basic Instinct,” Sharon Stone professed to be shocked that assistants to her agent, Ed Limato, had been listening in -- and taking notes -- on their conversations for years, and that the film’s producers had obtained the “conversation reports” under subpoena. In a deposition that was obtained by the New York Post’s Page Six, Stone testified that she had no idea anyone else was on the line. When she questioned Limato about it, she said, he told her that “agents have been doing that for 30 years.”

The path to the top often involves a stop at the assistant’s desk.

Schulman, for example, spent three years (1987-89) as an assistant to former producer Barbara Boyle, who now heads UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television.

Says Schulman: “I had graduated from Yale and had done a double thesis in art history and theater studies. I’d written a play and won a prestigious award, and I remember thinking it was humorous that my job was to listen to phone calls.”

One might conclude that the training paid off; earlier this month, Schulman took home a best picture Oscar for “Crash.”

One ambitious young assistant has worked the past two years for a top Hollywood agent, a man whose clients include A-list actors, directors and producers. The assistant, who has been accepted into the agency’s training program, estimates that he makes and/or listens to between 150 and 200 phone calls a day.

Using a seven-line phone and a mute button, it is not unusual for him to juggle four lines at once, lining up callers in order of his boss’ preference. Unless ordered off the line, he listens to every call his boss makes or takes. “At first it’s intimidating. You forget who people are, and who is on what line, but actually once you get good at it, it’s fun to juggle the calls.”

He would not allow himself, his boss or his agency to be identified for fear of alienating his employer but talked about the valuable experience that listening in provides to someone learning the ropes.

“This is the last true apprenticeship program,” says the assistant. “A lot of very intelligent people go from undergraduate to business or law school, but a lot of people in Hollywood become an assistant, and that’s their graduate school. You listen in to calls to learn how they do business, how you handle yourself, what’s the culture like, because it’s unlike anything else in the entire world, and this is the proper training ground.”

A 20-minute conversation with this young man is an almost comical illustration of the rapid-fire, intense life of the assistant whose main priority is to execute the commitments his boss makes to callers, and keep the calls moving.

Before he can fully answer a reporter’s question, he says, “Oops, that’s my boss calling in, one second!” The rest of the conversation is punctuated by variations of “Hang on, that’s my boss.”

If he misses anything important, it could mean his job. “You always have to be there,” he says. “The second you are not, you are failing ... and there’s a line of people out the door who want to take your spot.”

Fortunately, his boss has two assistants, so there is time in the 13-hour workday for bathroom breaks. “We always joke that if we had colostomy bags,” he says, “we’d be the perfect machines.”

Like any subculture, the Hollywood boss/assistant dynamic has generated its own lingo and customs. No one “picks up” a phone or “hangs up.” They “jump” or “hop” on or off. They don’t make phone calls, they “roll” calls. And no one asks if Mr. So-and-So can “return your call.” They’re too busy to speak in whole sentences, apparently, so instead they will say, “May I have him return?”

Schulman says that sometimes one is forced to pretend, just out of courtesy, that one’s assistant is not on the line. “Everyone does this,” she says. “You’re on the phone and something comes up that needs to be written down -- go out and buy X book, whatever -- and people will say to their assistant, ‘Will you hop on and take that down?’ And the assistant will say, ‘Oh, hey, I am here, what was that again?’ It’s symbolic, a pleasantry.” There is also a custom associated with the need for privacy -- actual privacy, not Hollywood privacy -- that often crops up in these conversations.

“Someone will say, ‘Assistants off! Everybody off!’ ” says the A-list agent’s assistant.

Pollock bristles at being put in the position of having to ask whether someone is listening in. “If I am about to say anything personal to anybody, I am forced to say, ‘Are we alone on the call?’ And the burden should be the other way around.”

Another studio publicist, who asked not to be named because people in Hollywood often reflexively ask for anonymity for no particular reason, said that some assistants have to develop thick skins in the course of their work to deal with conversations that can be offensive, sexually explicit or just plain gross.

Paul Allen Smith, an agent who works with directors, is upfront about that aspect of his personality. He spends time training his assistants to understand they will in some cases be exposed to foul language and uncouth sentiments and that they must learn to turn a deaf ear to objectionable content (while never missing the tasks they are expected to follow up on).

“When I interview my assistants, they are warned like crazy not only by me but by those who oversee human resources that while I shoot the breeze they are going to hear stuff that will offend them,” he says. “I don’t want to censor myself when I am on the phone with people. Our preambles can be terribly, terribly offensive. And I am a pig, in the Lenny Bruce sense. My assistants are warned time and again that they need to tell me if they hear anything that can cross the line. I don’t want to have to worry about their feelings.”

Allen’s assistants, he says, know him better than just about anybody else -- which becomes problematic only when they leave. “Especially if they leave under difficult circumstances,” he says, “they walk away knowing everything about me.”

There are, of course, stories about assistants who illicitly use information they glean from phone conversations.

“Defamer and other online sites are claiming they are getting a lot of sourcing from the assistant pool,” said Paul Pflug, senior vice president of media relations for Universal Pictures, who spends a lot of time on the phone off the record and on background with journalists and believes an assistant on the line would compromise confidentiality.

“I think there is more caution now, though it is still the norm to have somebody sitting on. People do talk like there is nobody listening, which is sometimes concerning because you might think that your assistants love you, but then again, they may not.”