"Limato was an agent in the Stan Kamen mold - quiet, persuasive, dedicated to his clients to the exclusivity of all else. Tall and saturnine, with thick black hair and deep-set eyes and a brooding air, he seemed a throwback to the Hollywood of Johnny Hyde’s day, when the stars dined at Romanoff’s and Los Angeles was shadowy and noir.  After bumming around Europe during the sixties (including a stint as Franco Zeffirelli’s driver in Rome (on the shoot of The Taming of the Shrew), he started in the New York mailroom at International Famous, then stayed on as an agent after the merger that created ICM. In 1978, seven months after his arrival at ICM’s West Coast office, Stan Kamen lured him to William Morris…Limato was an action junkie. He thrived on the adrenaline rush of phone calls and crises and deals, and in the past two years established himself as one of the firm’s top motion picture agents. He’d persuaded Richard Gere to take the lead in An Officer and a Gentleman, which John Travolta had rejected as too slight – and Gere, too, until Limato talked him into meeting the producer.  In the meantime, Limato had signed Mel Gibson, a blue-eyed Australian who’d starred in a postapocalyptic B called Mad Max, and put him in The Year of Living Dangerously, whose success suggested that he could be the town’s next superstar. Then Limato saw the end of the year bonus they were offering him.  He was so angry he stayed home for a week.  He met with Jeff Berg…president of ICM…and agreed to go back to his old agency." 

Excerpt from "The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business" by Frank Rose