Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas has always had a knack for recognizing experience, from the actors she signed a very long time up to now as an agent at ICM to the celebrities she’s partnered with to offer impactful films and television. A very powerful would most probably be Jennifer Lopez (the pair’s relationship is sort of 25 years earlier). Nonetheless there’s one shopper who has evaded her for a few years, always on the verge of fulfilling her potential and showcasing versatility, and she or he’s been observing Goldsmith-Thomas throughout the mirror.
Goldsmith-Thomas — whose credit score embrace “Maid in Manhattan,” “Hustlers” and the forthcoming “Kiss of the Spider Woman” — has merely revealed her first novel, “Climbing in Heels.” It’s her long-held dream in a metropolis that’s skeptical of established players making a pivot. She hasn’t strayed faraway from what she is conscious of. The e-book is a bit of fiction and a pseudo-memoir, about three youthful women engaged on the most well liked experience firm in Nineteen Eighties Hollywood. As a result of the characters grind for entry to the boys membership, a couple of of them will grow to be “very very just like the monsters who educated them,” she said.
The producer remembers that interval in current enterprise with a salty attract, like all the right insiders. The requirements to be a secretary throughout the days of the William Morris Firm, the place she obtained her start? “Tight sweater. No last establish.” Nonetheless in dialog with Choice, Goldsmith-Thomas speaks with deep emotion about overcoming her insecurities and taking advice from multi-hyphenates like Lopez and guardian angels earlier like Nora Ephron. And if she is her private biggest shopper at the moment second, she’s incomes that 10% charge. Goldsmith-Thomas is adapting her private e-book for a Peacock pilot this summer season.
At first, the problems that go on on the experience firm on this e-book would make any current HR govt bounce out of a window. Nonetheless there’s an attention-grabbing sense of manifest future that I really feel proper this second’s illustration enterprise lacks.
I did a learning at CAA these days for a pair hundred assistants. [Managing partner] Kevin Huvane and I had been talking regarding the earlier days. We started on the same time. I study a scene the place my principal character finds an earring throughout the couch of an agent’s office and learns that the agent “auditions” actresses and lets his assistant hear in. As my character is getting turned on by this illicit and horrifying story unfolding, Kevin’s eyes are boring into me, like, “What the fuck are you learning? It’s a place the place within the occasion you take a look at any person cross-eyed you’re fired.”
Look, this e-book talks about blow and blowjobs and brokers fucking actresses. Nonetheless honestly, the assistants had been lining up after the learning to talk about it. I met a lady named Claire, who said she merely started throughout the mail room and she or he couldn’t wait to study the e-book and see how life was completely totally different then. And I said, “Correctly, Claire, if this was 1983, you’d be relegated to being a secretary or a file clerk.”
I maintain respectfully asking people to not select my characters by the prism of 2025. There was no robust terrain for the three women on the guts of this e-book, ones who wouldn’t be contained by a world that wanted to limit them. I moreover uncover the female brokers in power for the time being, who discovered a method — on their knees or on their tiptoes — to interrupt by.
It seems to be like individuals are embracing the reality that this story in untethered from trendy Hollywood office custom.
The hair was big, the shoulder pads had been big, the telephones had been big — so your wishes wanted to be larger. My lead character Beanie, who’s type of based mostly totally on me, talked her method into being a file clerk throughout the lowliest nook of the enterprise. Nonetheless usually when life seems like shit, you’ve really obtained the lottery. Every memo you typed in as of late at William Morris — or Sylvan Delicate, the fictional firm in my e-book — wanted to be made in triplicate on mimeograph paper. One copy went to the central recordsdata office. Beanie finds she’s sitting on this gold mine of information: purchasers coming and going, who’s a getting fired, transferred, getting a enhance, who’s envious, who’s petty. She figures out a method to navigate this world and use it to her profit.
How did you get your start as an agent?
It was the summer season after highschool. There was a person I was courting and head over heels in love with. He was 5’3, nonetheless said he was 5’8. He wanted a occupation throughout the enterprise, and I believed if I’ll very nicely be an instrument to ship that for him, he’d see me another way. I had no thought of self love, clearly. Nonetheless he requested me to get him an agent. I put collectively an inventory of franchise brokers and spent that summer season going up and down Hollywood Blvd. The first one I tried I was the William Morris Firm. I knowledgeable reception I was there to see Mr. Morris, and they also said, “Attempt Forest Backyard [Cemetery].” Lastly, I get in entrance of an agent and inform him I solely need 10 minutes for him to meet with this man, and if he didn’t agree, he’d be driving down Sunset Blvd and see my man’s face for the rest of his life. The agent said, “You already know what the right half about this baby is? You.” So I obtained the meeting. Nothing felt greater. He obtained a little bit of place on “Joyful Days” as Chachi’s druggie cousin and ended up dumping me. Perception me, it bought right here once more spherical. Nonetheless that’s as soon as I knew I was good at selling people on ideas and the problems I believed in.
You’re a extremely worthwhile producer. How does it actually really feel to pivot to at least one factor so completely totally different?
It’s scary. I really feel we’re all afraid of judgment, nonetheless it’s thrilling and emancipating. I’ve always been a creator and it took me a really very long time to face in my reality. A lady who was very expensive to me, Nora Ephron, famously said, “All of the items is copy.”
All of the items is copy.
And she or he knowledgeable me years up to now that I needed to primarily start writing. All of these angels in my life who urged me forward, I actually really feel like they’re with me now.
Who’re one other angels?
I’ve realized an unbelievable deal from [my producing partner] Jennifer Lopez. She was a dancer who turned an actor, who turned a singer, who turned a world icon. She’s had 80 billion streams on her music and she or he’s an distinctive performer. Nonetheless, she’s marginalized because of she does a number of issue.
It makes me discover that I was really good at being an agent. Getting a “positive” turned my set off celeb. It gave me price, nonetheless I was writing frequently. I need I might need been smarter or assured enough to know then that being a creator made me a larger agent. Ron Bass, bless his soul, was doing a rewrite on “My Best Buddy’s Wedding ceremony” throughout the mid-90s. I talked to him about an idea, and he said, “write that down.” And honestly, he was the one who gave me Remaining Draft and taught me the easiest way to make use of It. I wrote a scene and he shared it with the studio, and said they should give me credit score rating. Ron was a lawyer who merely wanted to be a creator. He made me discover I didn’t have to stay in a single discipline.
