Getting Big
GETTING BIG
Be careful what you tell people. The friend today could be your enemy tomorrow.
—BEALEADINGLADY.COM
1987–1989
A few months into his tenure as an agent, Moze Goff had lunch with Sheila Day who, wanting to solidify his loyalty, said four words that changed the course of his career.
“You represent Burt Reynolds.”
Never mind that Biff Abrahamson was his agent at Sylvan Light and guarded all Burt Reynolds intel like state secrets in enemy hands, Sheila advised that a smart agent represented the whole client list, not just those people he was responsible for.
“That way,” she explained, “a call from Moze would be as good as a call from Abrahamson. And trust me,” she continued, “they’d rather speak to you.”
Since Samuel Lesser and Garry Sampson, his two mentors, were gone, Moze had to find his own way. Sure, he represented some of the stars they’d left behind, but without protection he needed to make a name for himself by himself.
Though he didn’t trust it completely, he accepted Sheila’s friendship and advice and began to forge his own path, trying to put together films much like Sam had, representing filmmakers and actors. So, when he heard that Harrison Ford had dropped out of the lead role in Big after Steven Spielberg had dropped out as director, he suggested to Sheila, who was close to Penny Marshall, that they slip Penny the script for her to direct. He knew that Penny only had an attorney who might not have access to the material or up-to-date information. This was all happening in real time, so there was an urgency to the information and how it was relayed.
Sheila, who rarely read anything in its entirety, wanted to know what it was about.
Describing the script as a fantasy about a boy who just wants to be a grown-up, Sheila was instantly charmed, and called Marshall, who had just had a huge commercial success with Whoopi Goldberg in Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and urged her to read it.
“I’ll have someone hand-deliver the script to you,” said Sheila.
Two and a half hours later, Marshall called her back, telling her how much she loved the material, and notified her attorney that she wanted Sheila to get her the movie.
Forty-eight hours after that, Penny Marshall had the offer to direct Big.
The following week Marshall, who was still not an official client, came into Sheila’s office to discuss potential actors who could star. Travolta had passed on it that morning, and her feeling was that Eddie Murphy would as well.
Sheila, still not having read the material, invited Moze to the meeting.
“Tom Hanks should do this,” he told them, explaining that he had been invited to an early test screening of The Money Pit, Hanks’s next film. “It scored through the roof,” he said, adding that the director, Richard Benjamin, an ex-client of Lesser’s who had invited Moze, said it was the highest-testing film in Universal history.
Marshall, who had known Hanks for years, loved the idea, but was concerned that his last film, Nothing in Common, directed coincidentally by her brother Garry, hadn’t been quite the smash critically or commercially and that the studio might be hesitant.
“Not if they see The Money Pit, ” Moze said. But the question was how could the executives from one studio be persuaded to show the executives from another studio a film that was not being released for six months?
“Easy,” said Sheila Day, who picked up the phone and expertly charmed Tom Pollack, the new head of Universal, into showing The Money Pit to Leonard Goldberg, the new head of Fox.
An hour after that screening ended, a firm offer was made to Tom Hanks, who read the script, loved it, and accepted.
While Hanks may not have known that Moze was the engine, Marshall did. Four months after the film wrapped, she signed with Moze Goff and Sheila Day, in that order.
Sheila, looking for an ally in Moze rather than a client in Marshall, never stood in the way.
Moze Goff, meanwhile, continued to target filmmakers, actors, and writers, once again leveraging the in-house client list, signing others he didn’t represent, then selling “the package” to the studio. Within a year he established himself as a packaging agent.
Like his mentor Sam Lesser, Moze, affable, honest, and with a great deal of integrity, began to attract people in power. Jason Wolf and Henry Dunn who, some say, hijacked SONY, then hijacked Moze, began flying him on private jets to Aspen and introducing him as one of their own. Taking a liking to the New York kid who had authenticity and hustle, they steered clients his way. By 1989 he was representing heavy-hitting directors such as Milo? Forman, Robert Benton, and Richard Donner; ironically, even Richard Benjamin, who had directed The Money Pit, called Moze, asking him to be his representative.
Moze quickly became one of the youngest and most important packaging agents at the company. He soon moved to New York, where it was rumored he was living in the Village and dating Cher.
On the occasion when someone asked how he got started, Moze would always reference Beanie—who had, over time, gained both weight and perspective. Yes, she’d gotten him in the door, but not because he’d asked. It was the only way she could control and perhaps intertwine their destinies. She’d put him on the path to greatness and hoped he’d take her along. She didn’t feel so much used by him as abandoned. And though they were both agents at the same agency, he was in a different stratosphere now, a part of a boys’ club that had sought him out.
Moze had gotten Big.
He was the next generation and iteration of who they wanted to be.
Beanie, like Sheila, was marginalized; reduced to a stereotype: a know-it-all Jewish girl with a big ass and a big mouth who might have pushed her way into the job, but not the club. Never the club.
For Beanie to succeed, she needed to do what she’d done her whole life: circumnavigate them, climb over them, somehow ascend in spite of them.
“Study the wave, Beanie girl,” her father had once told her, “and ride it all the way into shore.”