Hollywood's Hottest Club Is on Zoom

Talent agent Richard Weitz produces Quarantunes—hangouts for the homebound

- Joel Stein

Some people—introverts, poets, couples returning from their honeymoon—are good candidates for weathering the lockdown. Richard Weitz wasn’t. The Hollywood agent’s pre-Covid-19 Instagram posts show him courtside at a Los Angeles Lakers game with Josh Groban, at a party in George Lucas’s Chicago apartment, going to the movies with LL Cool J, eating with Lionel Richie at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, posing with Chrissy Teigen in a photo booth, and hanging backstage with Lizzo at her show in Brooklyn, N.Y. For his 50th birthday last year, a fellow agent gifted him a “Richard Weitz 2018-2019 Tour” T-shirt listing the locations of 100 events he’d attended.

Now, like the rest of the country, Weitz is stuck in his house, trying to work with only a laptop, spotty Wi-Fi, and a Zoom account. “When shelter-in-place started, I asked Richard if he was OK,” says Candace Nelson, founder of Sprinkles Cupcakes and a judge on the shows Cupcake Wars and Sugar Rush. “Then he started his first Quarantunes. I said, ‘Of course. He’s bringing the events to him.’ He is in his flow right now unlike anyone else I’ve seen.”