The Mailroom: Hollywood History from the Bottom Up is a 2003 book by David Rensin that recounts what it is like to work in the mailroom in Hollywood’s most prestigious talent agencies. Rensin interviewed over 200 mailroom graduates from agencies like William Morris Agency and Creative Artists Agency. Mailroom employees often aspire to become agents, themselves. Rensin was already a successful ghostwriter for celebrities, including Tim Allen and Chris Rock. Ballantine Books bought The Mailroom for six figures in 2000 and the original title was reportedly The Mailroom: Big Dreams and Raw Ambition in Hollywood's Power Boot Camp. At the time of publication, graduates of Harvard Business School were known to turn down high-paying corporate jobs to instead work for less than $400 a week at major agencies. During an interview with USA Today, Rensin was asked how competitive it was to obtain jobs in mailrooms, to which he replied, "They say it's tougher to get into the mailroom at a place like William Morris than to get into the Harvard Law School, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, or Stanford Business School. A New York Times story placed the ratio at 30-1, and EW said 10-1, so it's somewhere in there."

List of notable interviewees

Reception

Kirkus Reviews praised the book for containing "edgy, frenetic, and entertaining reports from the room that launched a thousand deals." Publishers Weekly wrote "Rensin...captures the ambition, manipulative plotting and hustler mentality of a few Hollywood mailroom employees in this series of raunchy, realistic interviews." David Freeman of the Los Angeles Times "[grew] weary of prideful tales of half-baked banditry" and noted that "Agents live by a code: Never say no to the talent. Consequently, they tend to be very demanding of their own servants." In 2003, Variety reported that HBO and Brad Grey planned to make a documentary based on The Mailroom. Grey also considered creating a scripted series.