Long before he negotiated billion-dollar deals, represented some of entertainment’s biggest stars and helped build a global business empire, Ari Emanuel was completing coffee runs and making sure another man’s bathroom had enough toilet paper.

That man happened to be Michael Ovitz, the legendary co-founder of Creative Artists Agency who was once considered the most powerful talent agent in Hollywood.

In an excerpt from his new memoir, Roll the Calls, Emanuel revisits his earliest days in Los Angeles—when he had little money, no permanent place to live and only a distant view of the influence he would eventually command.

The result is an unvarnished picture of old Hollywood’s mailroom system: exhausting hours, rigid hierarchies, relentless criticism and young employees competing for the smallest opportunity to prove themselves.

Arriving in Hollywood with nowhere permanent to stay

After graduating from Macalester College in 1983, Emanuel briefly pursued professional racquetball and worked for New York talent agent Robert Lantz.

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His ambitions, however, were fixed on Hollywood.

Emanuel became fascinated by Ovitz, whose reputation had transformed CAA into one of the entertainment industry’s most feared and influential agencies. In 1987, he moved to Los Angeles and joined the company as a trainee.

The move was far from glamorous. According to his memoir, Emanuel initially relied on friends and acquaintances for places to sleep, moving between couches while attempting to establish himself in an unfamiliar city.

There were no celebrity dinners, private aircraft or multimillion-dollar contracts waiting for him. His daily reality involved sorting mail, collecting coffee, running errands and responding instantly to the demands of senior agents.

Yet even the most ordinary tasks carried enormous weight. A late delivery or incorrectly prepared drink could become a public lesson in failure.

The CAA mailroom was Hollywood’s unofficial boot camp

The mailroom at CAA was not simply an administrative department. It functioned as an intense training programme and a testing ground for aspiring agents.

Young employees were expected to learn the names, habits and preferences of powerful executives and clients. They delivered scripts, answered telephones, organised paperwork and studied the business whenever a spare moment appeared.

Emanuel’s responsibilities reportedly extended to checking Ovitz’s private bathroom and replacing its toilet paper. It was the kind of assignment designed to reinforce the distance between those at the bottom of the agency and those already sitting at its summit.

For ambitious trainees, however, humiliation was part of the bargain. The mailroom offered access to a business that was otherwise nearly impossible to enter. Those who survived could become assistants, and assistants might eventually earn the right to represent clients of their own.

Emanuel ultimately rose from trainee to mailroom chief and then became an agent’s assistant. Reading scripts remained difficult because of his dyslexia, but he took material home at night and forced himself to keep learning.

A culture powered by shouting and fear

Emanuel’s account also explores a workplace culture in which yelling was treated almost as a management technique.

“Sometimes it feels as if the yeller is actually getting off,” he writes, before suggesting that some senior employees were simply repeating the treatment they had received during their own mailroom years.

The observation captures a cycle familiar to many competitive workplaces: one generation suffers under an unforgiving system, rises through it and then subjects the next generation to the same behaviour.

Emanuel does not present himself as entirely separate from that culture. His own temper later became one of his defining characteristics, earning him a reputation as an exceptionally forceful—and frequently confrontational—negotiator.

That personality also helped inspire Ari Gold, the explosive fictional talent agent played by Jeremy Piven in HBO’s Entourage.

In Roll the Calls, Emanuel examines rage not simply as a personal flaw but as a source of energy that helped him survive rejection, professional insecurity and the pressure to prove himself.

His departure from CAA was equally explosive

Emanuel spent approximately two years at CAA before former colleagues invited him to join the newly established InterTalent.

When he informed Ovitz that he intended to leave, the conversation allegedly became heated. Emanuel has previously claimed that Ovitz threatened to destroy the careers of those involved, prompting him to pick up a chair and demand to know whether he was being threatened.

Ovitz has disputed Emanuel’s account of the confrontation.

Looking back, Emanuel has acknowledged that challenging one of the industry’s most powerful figures in such a manner was reckless. But the episode also illustrates the stubbornness that would repeatedly shape his career.

He later worked at International Creative Management before co-founding Endeavor in 1995. The agency eventually merged with the historic William Morris Agency, creating one of Hollywood’s dominant representation businesses.

From delivering coffee to reshaping global entertainment

Emanuel’s career eventually expanded far beyond traditional talent representation.

He helped lead Endeavor’s acquisition of the Ultimate Fighting Championship in a deal valued at more than $4 billion. UFC was later combined with WWE under TKO Group Holdings, turning Emanuel into an influential figure across entertainment and professional sports.

His client relationships have included celebrated figures such as Oprah Winfrey, Martin Scorsese, Larry David and Mark Wahlberg.

Roll the Calls, written with Pulitzer Prize-winning author J. R. Moehringer, does not simply celebrate that ascent. It examines Emanuel’s dyslexia, volatile personality, professional feuds, family relationships and the personal cost of pursuing power with relentless intensity.

The audiobook is narrated by Bob Odenkirk, one of the significant early clients in Emanuel’s career. The memoir was published by Alfred A. Knopf on September 22.

The most revealing part of Emanuel’s story may not be the fortune or influence he eventually accumulated. It is the distance between the man who now commands boardrooms and the young employee who once slept on other people’s couches, carried coffee through office corridors and quietly replaced his boss’s toilet paper.