Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(22)
“Can you say, ‘Hi’?” asked the director.
“Yes, I can,” replied Meghan. “But I read the script and I really respond to this other character and I would love to read for that.” Naturally the other character had a bigger role.
The director and the casting staff exchanged glances. This girl certainly has some balls, their looks said. Meghan didn’t get the role she pitched herself for, but she did get the part for which Roth had recommended her. Once on set, the director allowed her to improvise, expanding her lines from one to five. In movie terms that was a triumph.
Next she landed another small part in the futuristic law office drama Century City, starring Viola Davis and Nestor Carbonell, among other old hands. She played a staff member and delivered one line: “Here’s to Tom Montero, who had the vision to install this amazing virtual assistant.” Her scene was over in one day, and she was back to casting calls, at the mercy of the Abominable No Men. It was a scratchy hand-to-mouth existence, one experienced by thousands of Hollywood hopefuls.
On the way to an audition one day, the electric button that unlocked the doors to her Jeep Explorer failed to open. She tried the key but to no avail. Trying not to panic, she went around to the hatchback, which used a different key. By some miracle, it opened. Running short on time, she had no choice but to crawl in through the back and clamber over the seat. Thank goodness she was in shape from yoga and running, and thank goodness the car started and had a full tank of gas. When she got to the casting studio, she pulled into a deserted part of the parking lot and exited the same way.
Too broke to get her Jeep repaired, Meghan repeated this routine for months, parking far from other cars and waiting for the coast to clear before emerging from the hatch, feigning that she was searching in the back of the car for a script or photos before climbing back inside.
Of course, she knew there would be setbacks. Meghan had been around the entertainment industry for too long to believe in rags-to-riches stories. So, she stayed optimistic. Her motto was “I choose happiness,” and she made it a point to stay happy, getting together with friends over pizza and wine, taking yoga classes, and going out as much as her budget permitted. One night her budget took her to a dive bar in West Hollywood that had been popularized by the young Turks in the entertainment industry (young hotshots keen on challenging the older Hollywood establishment) who liked to feel that they were slumming in an authentic beatnik environment. A loud voice tinged with a New York accent caught her attention. The owner of the voice was shooting the breeze with a couple of friends.
Over six feet tall with reddish blond hair and blue eyes, Trevor Engelson looked like a surfer or volleyball player, an archetypal California golden boy. He had the drawl and the air of a Matthew McConaughey lite, although he was born and raised in Great Neck, New York, the son of a successful orthodontist and great-grandson of Jewish immigrants.
Like Francis Ford Coppola, Trevor had attended Great Neck North High School, and like Coppola, he originally wanted to direct movies. “I realized you needed talent to do that, so that was out the window,” he says self-deprecatingly. While still in high school, he managed to get himself hired as a production assistant on shoots in New York City, working tirelessly on weekends and during school breaks. The experience paid off and he was admitted to the Annenberg School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He was on his way.
After he graduated in 1998, Trevor worked on the low-budget movie Safe Men, notable only for the appearance of Paul Giamatti as the strangely monikered Veal Chop. Then Engelson, who liked to think of himself as a hustler, was hired on Deep Blue Sea—a film that needlessly demonstrated the inevitably bloody consequences of genetically engineering super intelligent great white sharks—as a staff assistant. During his time in the office he studied how his bosses, the movie’s producers, worked. He liked what he saw. It didn’t seem that they were working very hard and yet they made a lot of money and got the prettiest girls. He approached one of the producers, Alan Riche, and told him earnestly: “Alan, I want to do what you do. I want to produce.” Riche advised him that first he had to work as an agent. Once Deep Blue Sea wrapped Riche got the ambitious assistant a referral to the Endeavor Talent Agency. He started at the bottom of the ladder in the mailroom working as a driver, delivering scripts and other agency-related packages around town.
Trevor was personable and eager, and in due time he worked his way up to assistant to the motion picture literary agent Chris Donnelly. He was on the fast track to higher things. Then his ambition got in the way. While Donnelley was on vacation, Trevor sent out uncommissioned scripts, known as spec scripts, to actors and directors under the Endeavor letterhead. “I thought I was being a self-starter,” Trevor admitted later. While there were no lasting hard feelings, he was fired for overstepping his remit. Never down for long, he quickly found work as an assistant to fellow USC alumni Nick Osborne and his partner Jeffrey Zarnow at O/Z Films. As Trevor put it: “They needed a hustler who could bring food to the table.”
When Osborne began his own movie company, Underground Films, Trevor became his assistant, taking over the company several years later. Beneath the banter and the wisecracks, Trevor was a driven soul, a young man out to make his mark in an uncompromising industry. When Meghan first met him on that night out in West Hollywood, she liked what she saw and was attracted to his passion, drive, and ambition. He was a guy with an aphorism for every occasion. “Hope is the greatest currency we have in this business,” he told the wide-eyed wannabe. True or not, it’s a great pick-up line.