“Robert’s like a fan. A fan that somebody let into the club,” says Greg Berlanti, whom Newman called up out of the blue one night in 1996 after reading the young writer’s spec script about a group of gay friends coming of age. Berlanti, then 22, signed with Newman and has gone on to direct that film, The Broken Hearts Club, and to create a hit TV series, Everwood. “He sees something in you that you don’t necessarily see in yourself yet,” Berlanti continues. “He’s the un-agent agent.”
ROBERT NEWMAN WORKS STANDING UP. HE CHOSE HIS DESK because it hits his five-feet-ten-inch frame at about waist height. When he puts on his headset and talks on the telephone, he walks around behind the desk, which is usually empty but for a computer monitor and a stainless steel pitcher of iced tea. He doesn’t pace exactly. He just can’t be still.
Newman’s second-floor office is brightly lit, with white carpeting and a wall of windows that overlook Wilshire Boulevard. Bookshelves holds scripts, carefully arranged. Frames display black-and-white photographs of his wife and daughters (taken by Lucy Liu as a surprise birthday gift). On the walls are a still from A Clockwork Orange — his favorite Stanley Kubrick film — and a caricature of Newman drawn by Robert Rodriguez in the style of a movie poster. A FISTFUL OF CASH says the poster, which depicts a muscular Newman wearing dark glasses with dollar signs on the lenses.
All around are snapshots of Newman with Hollywood people he likes. Nicole Kidman is the only one you’d recognize. Mostly they’re directors. Newman and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whom he’s repped since 1991, mug in front of the spacecraft from Alien: Resurrection. Newman smiles devilishly in a shot snapped by Steve Norrington in 1998, the year his movie Blade was released. At the bottom Norrington wrote, “His every word is gospel.”
Newman’s two assistants answer about 150 phone calls every day This afternoon the agent is on with Baz Luhrmann. Newman has dined recently with producer Dino De Laurentiis, who is teaming with Luhrmann on his next film, the big-budget epic Alexander the Great. “It was a great dinner,” Newman reports. “Oh my god! I said, ‘How did Three Days of the Condor come together? Serpico? Mandingo? Crimes of the Heart? Wild at Heart? Dune?’ It was like hearing war stories. I could have been there for another five hours.”
Newman will always be a New Yorker — he still roots for the Jets — but his accent is less striking than his delivery He talks fast, but he is decidedly not smooth. There are interruptions and exclamations and bursts of merriment. “The Verdict has one of the greatest lines of all time,” he’ll interject out of nowhere and then quote the film exactly: “‘Good man? Good man? He’s the prince of fucking darkness!’”
Sometimes this talent seems like a tic. Mention Dog Day Afternoon, and the word “Attica!” — Al Pacino’s famous rallying cry — flies out of his mouth. Acknowledge Newman’s baldness, and he lets Orson Welles do the talking: “As they say in Citizen Kane, As it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane.’”
Newman is known for being prepared. If he’s taking a business associate to a Rolling Stones concert, he finagles a way to get the set list — just to know what’s coming. On the weekends, if he takes his 14-year-old daughter shopping in Beverly Hills, he can be found on the sidewalk outside, squinting in the sunlight, reading a script.
“Typically from an agent you get ‘I read your script and I loved it!’ and you question whether they read it at all,” says Greg Berlanti. “The first time Robert called, he did what has since become a sort of ritual for us. He went through my script page by page, pretty much line by line, pointing out his favorite parts. He gets into your vision. You really feel like yours is the only creative mind that he’s connected to.”
He can be curt. In the departmental meetings over which he presides each Wednesday morning, two things make him nuts: ignorance and long-windedness.
“He’s very aware that we’re shutting down the agency for two hours,” says ICM agent Ben Smith, a former Newman assistant who has seen his impatience up close. “Whatever people say in that meeting had better be worthy of that.” One well-known entertainment lawyer says Newman’s patter “lacks slick gloss. Robert is bang! There’s an abruptness about him. He cuts to the chase.”
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