Entourage: A Lifestyle Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

CHAPTER 1

victory how it all got started

Before Turtle there was Donkey. Before the character of E there were two real-life inspirations: a cool-headed confidante who also went by the single-letter moniker and a trusted, longtime manager. There was also John Alves, a.k.a. Johnny Drama, the chef-slash-actor who served as the crew’s spiritual guide. And, of course, before Vincent Chase there was Mark Wahlberg, the Boston-raised rapper who became an A-list actor, making a name for himself in films such as The Basketball Diaries, Boogie Nights, and The Perfect Storm. Back in 2001, the guys were struck with a simple, yet stunning, idea. Why not make a TV show about themselves hanging out and living the high life in Hollywood? They could base it on their own entourage: charismatic characters looking for success—friends that kept the actor grounded while he was pursuing fame and fortune. Wahlberg’s manager, Stephen Lev Levinson, took it to his college buddy, a young and talented stand-up comedian and writer/director named Doug Ellin. What they ended up with has become a pop-culture phenomenon, a hit show that not only offers a VIP pass into the intoxicating and often absurdly hilarious world of celebrity, but one that also imparts a deeper message—that true friendship can, in fact, conquer all.

Mark Wahlberg: How did this thing get started? Everybody’s got their own story. That’s the funny thing about it, you know? Lev has been working with me since day one. He was my agent’s assistant when I first started acting. Then he became my manager. And he’s been with me ever since.

Stephen Levinson: Mark and I have been working together for a long time, and we used to go on the road for business and travel internationally when Mark had to promote his movies. It would be me, Mark, Eric Weinstein, Johnny Drama; Donkey would come, too. Funny things always used to happen to us, and we would say, Wouldn’t it be funny if we had a camera and turned it into a show? So E and Mark and I would always joke about that. And then one day, it just kind of popped into our heads: We should really do this as a fictionalized show for HBO.

MW: I always had a crazy group of guys around me. I mean, people from everywhere, all ages. Sometimes you just want to hang out with your friends. You’re getting to experience all kinds of crazy stuff, so you certainly want to share it with them. Everybody was just fascinated by them because it was crazy.

It was hilarious, you know? Random, bizarre shit going on all the time. We had been kicking around some ideas for a show, and we were very interested in getting into television. And Lev knew Doug; they were good friends, and I knew how talented Doug was.

Doug Ellin: I’m from Long Island, New York. I came out to Los Angeles after graduating from Tulane University and worked in the mailroom at New Line Cinema. I made a couple of independent films and wrote a bunch of scripts that didn’t get made. Fortunately, Lev also went to Tulane, and he and Mark had this idea and came to me and said, "Entourage. Mark and his friends in Hollywood. And I said, I don’t really get it. Why would I want to see a bunch of guys living off another guy? And Lev said, Why don’t you just do it and you’ll figure out how to do it the way you want to do it?" He has done that a lot in my life, pushed me into things that I figure out along the way. Lev’s a very big-picture guy. I’m more of a small-detail guy, so it’s a good balance.

MW: When we first started talking about the idea, people thought it sounded like a reality show, but that wasn’t what we wanted to do. I certainly didn’t want to be putting my own business out there.

SL: Doug’s strengths are character, dialogue, and comedy. He has a diverse skill set that goes beyond just writing. Since we had worked on Kissing a Fool together, I knew he was an accomplished filmmaker. We certainly had a dream that went beyond just having a script developed. We hoped that we could beat the odds and actually make a show, because it’s such a long shot to get a show made.

DE: Their initial idea was just Mark and his boys. I needed to find some way to make it something I could really understand. So I came in and said, They’ve got to be like a family. These guys have to have grown up together, known each other from way back when. And then we went from there. When I came on, I asked Mark if they could be New York guys, because I didn’t know anything about Boston.

MW: I didn’t care if they were from Boston or not. All that mattered, you know, was getting the right characters that really clicked well together. I didn’t care if they were from Ohio. As long as they had that family thing together, you know what I mean? With my family, when I was growing up, there was a lot of tough love. The way we grew up, we always would mix it up a little bit. I’d fight with my brothers and my sisters. That’s how we settled a lot of disputes.

DE: I knew Mark from Lev. We were more acquaintances than friends, but I had met his guys. I looked at Mark and his friends—E, Donkey, Johnny Drama—basically as models, like, Let’s take a movie star and let’s take these character traits from his friends. More than anything about Mark’s actual guys, I was obsessed with the name Johnny Drama. I had to have it on the show. So the real Johnny Drama, who I love and I know very well—he’s a great guy—some things are taken from him, but a lot of things are taken from friends of mine, and it’s just a mix and match of stuff.

MW: Johnny Drama, I call him my cousin. He’s from Plymouth, Massachusetts, but I met him out here in Los Angeles. My brother hired him to keep me out of trouble; this was like when I got out of jail. He was basically, you know, babysitting me while I had to go back to court over and over and over again. Johnny Drama was one of the big reasons why I became an actor. Believe me, back then, I had no interest in acting.

DE: The character of E came from Lev, but obviously Lev and Mark didn’t grow up together. Lev was a young assistant; nobody believed he knew what he was doing, but Mark believed in him, so they rose up together. E’s also based on Mark’s old friend, Eric Weinstein. Honestly, when we started, there were about eleven characters in the entourage and we slowly whittled them down. With three guys, everybody had a purpose. From minute one, we were like, Let’s be as realistic as possible. Let’s not overexaggerate it. Let’s find the funny in what actually goes on in Hollywood instead of taking it to a level that isn’t accurate. Because the best movies and shows are the ones that make you say, That’s me and my friends, when you see them.

MW: Doug’s a really talented guy. I mean, you immediately felt like these guys were really from a neighborhood—that they grew up together. He knows this world. When we went in, it seemed like it was going to be one thing; and then when we came out, it was guys from Queens.

DE: So at this point, we have the concept, and Lev and I are sitting around going, OK, what should we do? Should we come up with a whole treatment? Should we write a script on spec? What should we do? We always wanted this to be an HBO show. It was HBO or bust. So we sat down for dinner with Mark’s agent, Ari Emmanuel, and said, "We’ve got this idea for a show called Entourage." He listened and then he goes, We’re going to HBO tomorrow. We went into HBO and honestly, I didn’t say a word. Ari said, "It’s Entourage," and then he said, Doug will write it. If it’s not good, we’ll get someone to rewrite it. That’s what he said right in front of me.

SL: Ari wasn’t Doug’s agent at the time, but the pitch was comical, as you can imagine. We sold it based on our experiences. It was more about what the story was going to be, not really anything we had done yet with the execution.

DE: The way I originally wrote the pilot, they’re sitting in a limo after the premiere, and it’s gone really badly. I mean, the movie sucks and nobody knows how to tell him. And that was what I thought was interesting. How do you tell a movie star his movie’s a disaster? To make matters worse, he’s running out of money. They’re living a ridiculous lifestyle, and everything is crashing. We wrote the pilot, and Steve, Mark, and I thought it was awesome, you know? When I handed in that script, I was a hundred percent sure we were getting it shot. And I will never forget, I was sitting on my bed and had my baby son in my hands, and Lev called me. He’s like, They don’t like it. I’m like, What don’t they like about it? And he said, Everything.

SL: Doug said, Really? I said, Yeah. And that was that. He asked what we were going to do now. I said, I think we’re going to go in and talk about it.

HBO President Carolyn Strauss: When we first started developing the script, Doug had a very, I would say, gritty idea of what this show was. I think it was just like a bunch of knuckleheads with money. Truthfully, what we saw was the opportunity to have a lot more fun with it. In our conversations with Doug, which he responded to incredibly well, we talked about having more fun with the characters and with the situations and really taking advantage of that sort of fantasy element of what the show was.

DE: In that meeting with them, they’re like, We still feel there’s a show here. At that moment, I’m wondering, Are they going to get another writer? Am I out of this thing? What happens now? I went off to Palm Springs for a week and wrote a completely different script with a different tone. The note that they kept giving was, Fun. We just want it to have more wish fulfillment.

CS: Putting this show together was a process, like anything else, and Doug just rose to the occasion every step of the way. We knew there was definitely something in there that was going to work.

DE: It’s not that the story was so different in the earlier version. It was the tone that was different. It was much darker. I’m not sure why I was inclined to go that way. In the rewrite, the guys had a great premiere. There are hot girls all over the place. And they have a big agent who’s telling them they have a big movie that’s available to them. It’s all wish fulfillment. You want to be Vince in that one. You don’t want to be Vince, the down-and-out movie star whose life is over before he’s thirty. It was definitely the smarter way to go. HBO committed to seven episodes after the pilot. We didn’t have any of the rest of the season planned. No arc. Nothing. So after we did the pilot, it was like, OK, what’s next?

It’s all wish fulfillment … it was definitely the smarter way to go.

DOUG ELLIN

JOHNNY ALVES

The Real Johnny Drama

How did you meet Mark Wahlberg?

I met Mark through his brother, Donnie. Donnie ended up being the best man at my wedding. We’ve been together since Donnie and I were probably eighteen and Mark was going on seventeen, during the New Kids on the Block era. Back in the day. How it all started, my cousin was a bodyguard for the New Kids, and that’s how I met Donnie. We immediately hit it off. We were like brothers. And later on he said, My brother’s in jail right now. Would you be willing to go home and help him when he gets out? Meaning back to Massachusetts. I was in Los Angeles then, acting. I got a couple of commercials, you know, a Gatorade commercial and stuff like that. I had done the ABC series Coach. But when I found out only ten percent of actors actually work and then only three percent can pay their bills, I had to get on a hustle, you know what I mean? So Donnie hired me to keep an eye on Mark—he was just getting out of the Plymouth House of Correction. It was almost like the good Lord had everything in store for us, because when he got out of the Plymouth, I took Mark down to my mother’s house there, and he was like, I know your mother. I’m like, How do you know my mother? He said, I met her in the jail. My mom goes and talks to the prisoners about the Lord.

How did you help him out?

I called myself the big brother. I think Donnie only paid me three or four hundred dollars a week. Back in the early ’80s, I was making $1200 a week, so it was kind of humiliating. I did all Mark’s cooking. I did all his cleaning, the whole nine yards. I used