Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

Unfortunately, Warner Bros., which had a first-look deal with the film’s production company, Guber-Peters, passed. I told Peter Guber I wanted to run with Rain Man, and he said great. It was dead, so why not let me try? The script had no sex, no car chases, and no third act, but I was convinced that if we could keep the budget to $25 million, we could earn back $50 million from date-nighters and grown-ups. So I started talking up the project. Nothing in Hollywood is anything until it’s something, and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief. If you keep insisting that a shifting set of inchoate possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one. Sometimes.

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Because it’s human nature to resist being sold, I avoided cold-calling prospective clients. Better for them to come to me; better to be wooed than to pitch.

Next came Fox. I considered Rupert Murdoch the top executive in modern media—cagey, prescient, with an unmatched appetite for risk. Rupert floated the idea of an 11:00 p.m. start to get the jump on Leno, and he could make it happen. But while Fox had the younger viewers we wanted, it was just emerging as the fourth network. To really compete with Jay, Dave needed a network that could clear more than two hundred stations.

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Frank Capra: The Name Above the Title,

ease. Gravel-voiced and sleepy-eyed, Ron was a high school dropout who’d served a hitch in the military—he had a Marine Corps tattoo on his arm—and who presented himself as a self-taught, well-read street fighter. He was terrific at his job but felt a little insecure at a place where a college education had become the norm. He reminded me a lot of my dad: a friendly street guy with savoir

Sydney was Hamlet reincarnated—he never made a fast decision.

We had group meetings every day, and sometimes twice a day, to ensure that we were all on song. I also did rounds twice a day, like a doctor, carrying a sheaf of papers so it looked like I was going into a meeting—when actually I was gauging the general mood and taking note of anyone who seemed out of sorts. I viewed our people as my children, and for the first ten years I’d call every employee who didn’t show up at work to make sure they were okay and to see if they needed anything, from chicken soup to a good divorce lawyer. I did it out of concern, but I also wanted them to know I was keeping a watchful eye. Our idea was to make everyone feel that our building was a comfort zone—and to balance that with a little anxiety should they step outside the building. We wanted the “Don’t cross those guys!” message to be as obvious as a flashing sign at the border.

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The Last Temptation of Christ,

I went to Rupert Murdoch’s house for lunch once, and, always looking for an edge, asked who his internist was. When he said he didn’t have one, I immediately made an appointment for him with the head of internal medicine at UCLA. He got great care and became a donor to the institute. Years later, in the early ’90s, I had a problem when one of our top stars had been caught on video being chased by a disgruntled husband. It seems the star had slept with the guy’s wife on one of his films. A Fox entertainment show was planning to run the video, and our client, who was also married, was very upset. I called Rupert and explained the situation and said, “I would be eternally grateful if this problem went away.” He said, “Michael, I cannot interfere with any of our shows or magazines—you better than anyone should understand that.” He paused, then added, “But I will look into it.” He called back the next day and said, “We have looked high and low for any such video in the Fox library, and we simply cannot find it.” Then he hung up. I owed Rupert forever after that, and contributed to every charity and political candidate he asked me to.

I’d floated the idea with the guilds, telling them we were interested in an ad agency, and their reaction was violent: You can’t produce ads. We thought that getting our clients ad work would help strengthen the guilds, but they didn’t see it that way. Once again, being an agent had put me at the intersection of exciting possibilities—and prevented me from pursuing them.

endeavor about to go public

menschy

In a big company you’re defined by whom you report to and who reports to you.

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In my first week on the job, Eisner told me to fire Bob Iger. He thought Bob was stupid, or so he said. I thought he was being rash and said so: “Bob Iger knows ABC cold.” I later spent three hours over dinner with Iger—who’d heard of Eisner’s dissatisfaction—persuading him not to leave. I told him Eisner had a short attention span, and would soon be on to someone else. That was true: he promptly told me to fire Dennis Hightower, our head of television. Dennis was our only high-ranking African American executive, and I told Michael, “That’s a terrible idea for me or you.” Hightower stayed. In 2005, after Eisner resigned under pressure and Iger replaced him, I finally grasped the method behind Eisner’s madness: he saw Iger as a future successor. Bob has led Disney to new heights as CEO. He built the business with high-wire acquisitions and a stronger foreign profile, more or less what I’d tried a decade earlier. He made big M&A bets on Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox, and built the Shanghai Disney Resort. Bob was smart about it. First he changed the culture, dismantling the strategic planning group and erasing Eisner’s imprint. And then he empowered the people around him, as any successful leader must. I

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While Chandler cleared the board of impropriety, he had harsh words for their conduct. Disney’s directors “fell significantly short of the best practices of ideal corporate governance,” he wrote. He called Eisner a “Machiavellian” CEO who stacked his board with cronies and “enthroned himself as the omnipotent and infallible monarch of his personal Magic Kingdom.” That’s the tragedy that can befall the company man: we come to believe we are the company.

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CAA is still a force in entertainment, but the real heirs to Ron and me are Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell, who’ve turned William Morris Endeavor into a multihyphenate business, a new octopus. Ari is now an agent, a producer, an advertiser, and an investment banker. Naturally, he trained at CAA. And, naturally, Ari and Patrick met at InterTalent, which Ron Meyer worked so hard to put out of business. You can’t kill the good ones. William Morris learned that after we left to start CAA, and CAA learned it when Ari and Patrick rose up to battle them.

Operating out of fear is bad business.