Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

CAA’s goal was to have all the clients, and therefore all the conflicts; we used to say “No conflict, no interest.” It was a heroic goal, but it cost us. And it cost me.

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.

The Post story made me take a closer look at late night. At CAA we kept a “dashboard” of every project under way in film, TV, music, and books. A copy was placed in each agent’s black binder, together with the latest box-office data, TV ratings, bestseller lists, and other pertinent data that might give us an edge at our 8:30 a.m. staff meetings (which were themselves scheduled to give us an edge—we started sixty to ninety minutes ahead of our competitors). Our rule at staff meetings was “No idea is too stupid.” I consulted the dashboard several times a day, looking for opportunities for clients, potential film packages, or new business, the crazier-sounding the better.

Agents used to be like firemen: they ran from one crisis to the next, reacting to offers and ultimatums, never knowing what tomorrow would bring. At CAA, we prided ourselves on making tomorrows. Could we create a more brilliant one for Dave? We put five people on the project under Lee, and I asked them to analyze Nielsen ratings and late-night time slots and every conceivable bidder for his services. All the data I needed was distilled into three pages of single-spaced type, and we spent hours and hours discussing the game theory of how to play the networks against each other. By late summer I was ready for our one shot at Dave.

Our focus on first impressions won us many new clients before we’d uttered a word. When Dave and Peter Lassally pulled into CAA’s underground garage that August, one of our five parking “concierges” welcomed them by name.

I always tried to instill the negative in advance, inoculating my clients against the worst things our competitors and buyers would say about us. It was like vaccinating them against the flu. With eleven companies eager to land Dave, the odds were high that at least some of them would try to stick a wedge between him and his advisers.

I always tried to plot out, at the beginning of any complex negotiations, the desired end point. After we discussed the problem from every angle, it became clear that CBS was our desired end point. In June 1992, shortly after Leno took over at Tonight, I called one of my favorite executives, Howard Stringer, CBS’s president. Howard was bright and calm and lethally witty—and I knew he was determined to plant his flag in late night. “Dave’s not available now,” I said, “but we’re looking at possibilities after his contract expires. It might be a good idea if you started thinking about it.”

A few weeks after our Fox rollout, Tom joined the art directors’ union. “I’m leaving,” he said, “and I’m recommending you for my job.” To my surprise, I got it. I hired my college roommate as my number two and a dozen guides from my fraternity. We brought in twenty attractive sorority girls as hostesses. Business boomed. By fall I was working sixty-hour weeks while going to school full time. If I had a midday class, I’d hop into my ’65 Mustang for the ten-minute ride to campus and dash back an hour later. I parked in a corner of Fox’s parking lot and changed out of my jeans and white J. C. Penney T-shirt, the college uniform of the day, and back into business attire. My bosses were never the wiser. At school I was a total liberal, counseling my classmates on how to evade the draft; at work I was the best organization man you could ask for. In my first innovation, I took a shot at the packaged bus tours run by Gray Line at Universal. It was a sweetheart deal for MCA, which sold blocks of tour tickets to Gray Line. But after I slashed half off Universal’s block price, Gray Line agreed to divert a few weekend buses to us. I gave discounts to larger groups and threw in an option for lunch at the Fox commissary. Within a month, the feedback was so positive that Gray Line switched all its weekend business to Fox.

We had a file room the length of a basketball court. It was lined with steel cabinets, the hard drives of the era, all packed with seventy years’ worth of manila folders. I viewed those files as an encyclopedia of entertainment, albeit a helter-skelter one, so I helped the woman who ran the file room, Mary, with her mimeographing. And I brought her little gifts—a box of candy, a scarf. One day I said, “You know, I’d love to read some of the files.” She told me to make myself at home. Within a week she was letting me stay on after she left. Then she gave me a key. While other trainees waited to be told what to do and read and learn, I entered Mary’s domain each morning at 7:00 and every evening after work. For ten weeks I made my way from A to Z, through the client files and the network and studio deals. I jotted questions for Sam Sacks, the head of television legal affairs, who was charmed by my interest and lent me a tape of a talk he’d given at USC on contract law in entertainment. I played it at home and came back with more questions. He gave me nine more tapes.

After I started working for Sam, I conceived a new long-term goal: I wanted to run William Morris. To expose me to deal making, Sam had me assist a TV agent named Fred Apollo. I listened in on Fred’s calls and soon was closing deals with the networks on his behalf. After seven months at William Morris, when I was twenty-two, I was promoted to junior agent—a title so demeaning we’d do away with it at CAA. My pay doubled to $150 a week. Though my promotion came in record time, I’d missed my own deadline by three months. I felt like I had to catch up before the world got away from me.

My first call Monday morning was to the show’s office. I reached the guy who played the rabbi and said, “I’m Michael Ovitz with the William Morris Agency, and I think you’re hysterical. I would love to meet with you.” That’s how a TV writer named Barry Levinson became my first client. It wasn’t long before I got him hired on The Tim Conway Show—about as much as I could do, in those days.

the fees. Howard taught me how to bring clients into a package and keep them happy, how to mediate problems, how to watch over budgets. He always made time for me. (Following his example, I had a series of trainees assigned to me at CAA. I’m afraid I was much less patient.) He was a model for follow-up and presentation and how to think on your feet. And he taught me to tell clients the truth. Agents always get busted when they tell the easy lie: “You look great in dailies” or “Your script is fantastic.”

business. First, I said, the equity had to be split evenly. Second, we had to try to get as big as we could. Third, we’d share our clients and serve them as a group—no turf wars, no silos. At William Morris we had many an agent who excelled at signing artists but stumbled in finding work for them. Wouldn’t it be better, I said, if clients could rotate freely within our firm? We’d be five musketeers, one for all and all for one. Everyone would handle everyone,

shaking. Time crawled by. Fifteen minutes before the deadline a messenger arrived with a new letter from Kaplan. In the space of an afternoon he’d moved from cease and desist to cease-fire. That day forged our siege mentality. To defend our tiny position, we unleashed hell on anyone who crossed us. For starters, we refused to take on any client who used Kaplan, Livingston, and within five years the firm was defunct. I’m not saying we did them in, but we did help nudge them toward the edge. Our counterassault on William Morris took longer to deploy but proved nearly as effective. And

The Jacqueline Bisset meeting convinced me that the way forward was to sell our clients on our reach. We’d give them more info than anybody; they’d see every script and even get hot books in manuscript—preferential treatment befitting the CEO of his or her own corporation. We’d break into film by taking books and scripts and treatments to prospective clients—we’d bring the mountain to Muhammad.

Mort’s Midtown Manhattan office was done in Charles Gwathmey modernism, all angles and curves and rich oak paneling. Trying not to seem overawed, I laid out our book-first strategy. I asked to call him every Thursday at 10:00 a.m. in case he had something for us.

about how to move your career ahead?” Later on, before every meeting we took with our clients, I’d send a memo out to everyone in the company even faintly or potentially involved in his or her work, trawling for ideas, and we always had a minimum of five people in the room.

bill. Now, a few years later, Ted had heard that I was one of the rising new breed, along with Barry Diller, David Geffen, Michael Eisner, and Terry Semel, so he put me together with John Calley, Warner’s cultured, soft-spoken production head. John had an artist’s eye and ear. Directors loved him, and he was especially tight with Sydney Pollack and Mike Nichols and Clint Eastwood. When I learned that John was a speed-reader, I began shipping him three or four Mort Janklow specials per week. Most had no future on the screen, but John finished every one. I sent him piles of scripts, whatever I could lay my hands on. John appreciated the attention and guided his friend Bob Towne, the community’s most prestigious screenwriter, to CAA. It was one of the great favors of my life. Towne, who wrote such legendary scripts as Shampoo and Chinatown, was friends with other A-listers like Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. Having him as a client gave me instant credibility: now I could make bold plans about whom to go after next.

he opened Giuseppe’s in West Hollywood.) By the time I intercepted the check, Gary and I had established a rapport. He understood my ambitions, and I knew all about his passions. The next day I sent him a barrel of Hershey’s chocolate Kisses; the day after that, a good bottle of wine; the day after that, a first-edition volume on the law. We met several times for lunch, until one morning he called and said, “I’d like you to meet with Sean Connery.”

When Sean came on the line, I told him, “If you’re going to build your brand, you can’t take roles at random. You need to choose better projects.” I told him he needed to have exposure to a range of possible scripts and to have them developed into packages with him as the star. I also said he needed to work with better directors and that we’d get him those introductions and those jobs. This became the pattern for how I’d sign a star: start by politely criticizing his choices; tell him he needed to see and choose better material and better directors; promise him both. I made no promises that he’d work with specific talent, because the easiest way to lose a client is to make a promise you can’t fulfill; the client always remembers. Sean didn’t ask which of our directors and actors I thought he should be paired with, which was fortunate, because we didn’t represent anyone of his stature. If he

definitive 007, I said—and he could not dispute me. I made sure Micheline Roquebrune, a French-born artist who was Sean’s wife, supported the move, and I had Gary Hendler support the idea, too (I cleared everything client-related with Gary, behaving almost as if I were his assistant). I wore down Sean’s defenses until

time I ever offered to take less than 10 percent, much less work for free. If word of the arrangement got out, the haggling with other clients would never end. But we desperately needed a top-ten film star like Dustin Hoffman. I deluged him with material, and signed him six months later.

In dealing with the studios, Ron and I developed an effective one-two punch. After I opened with a hard line, asking for an amount somewhere between more than we expected to get and ridiculous, execs would back-channel Ron and say, “My God, he asked for six million for Warren Beatty against ten of the gross”—meaning 10 percent. “Can you help us out?” Ron would smooth their feathers and say, “I’ll talk to him,” or “Try this.” After they called me back, I’d tell Ron where things stood for the next round. On occasion I would offer a small concession. More often I’d hold firm and close the deal where I started, but the buyers always felt better because they’d been listened to. They never seemed to get that Ron was my agent. Yet there wasn’t a day when

gravitate to one agent for most conversations—though if that relationship soured, we had multiple backups ready to step in. Our point of differentiation was that a client got regular phone calls from not one but several agents—all coordinated among the client’s team with the interoffice memos we called buck slips. You just can’t beat five with one. All of our agents really did represent all of our

music division dressed down—formality didn’t play with their artists. 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

wanted the “Don’t cross those guys!” message to be as obvious as a flashing sign at the border. Yet our MO was to be attentive, polite, and well informed. I wanted worldliness to be one of a CAA agent’s defining qualities—Be able to talk knowledgeably about what your clients love. This will encompass pretty much everything. I insisted that our agents have a reading list: one national newspaper, one international newsmagazine, and

of Jack’s favorite topics. I told our staff we should know about every news story days or weeks before it was in Variety. The trick was to find the hidden mother lodes of information, and to do that we had to exploit a niche the rest had overlooked. Ron and Bill and I began by handling studio executives’ own employment contracts, as we’d long done for TV execs. We took no fees for this; we were after something more valuable—an inside track. The vice presidents we handled would give us tips and take a second look at our clients. Then we shared those tips with the most powerful people in town. In the preemail era, when people were flooded by phone messages, which calls did they return first? CAA’s, on the chance they might learn something useful.

with no obligation beyond Ivan’s first film. Ivan at my side, I marched from Michael’s office to a pay phone in the Paramount parking lot and called Frank Price at Columbia. A former television writer, Frank was the rare studio chief who could read a screenplay and give you surgical notes to improve it. He brought TV-style discipline to the movie business, giving you a prompt yes or no. Within five minutes, Frank and I had a verbal agreement

watched. His reports were revealing. The head of distribution at Fox told me he “didn’t much care” for the movie—having slept through two thirds of it. Another executive gabbed on the phone throughout the eighty-nine-minute run time. As a last resort, I called Frank Price. “I know you want these

Stand by Me went on to gross more than $50 million. It was nominated for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars and best picture and best director at the Golden Globes. Variety ran a fascinating story on why everyone else had passed. The Fox executive said he was dying to buy this marvelous movie but could not come to terms with CAA. The phone yakker said the same. If you believe what you read in the trades, the studios never make a mistake. —

At any other time his obtuseness would have been funny. “Michael, I’m serious,” I said. I was able to maintain an even tone only because I knew he didn’t really give a shit. “John’s dead. I don’t know how it happened, but there won’t be any meeting.” —

Eisner looks terrible in this.

met him at a booth at the Grand Central Oyster Bar for an 11:30 lunch. Paul ordered four dozen littleneck clams and began scarfing them down. He loved eating clams, talking about clams, exploring every nook and cranny of the vast and fascinating culture of clams. I happen to hate clams. But if Paul Newman loved clams, then I loved clams. In full chameleon mode, I mimed tossing some back and then slurping up the liquor, the liquid residue in the shell—when in fact I was dumping the whole mess beneath the table. An hour later, after a good chat, we shook hands and parted. I raced to the nearest deli and got myself a nice, safe tuna salad sandwich.

would stir up strife. He hated the constraints I put on him; hated that I insisted he read the scripts he was sent and respond quickly. The real problem was that he hated being a movie star, hated being fawned over and treated like a rare and valuable commodity. He’d once been a painter, and he would have been much happier if he’d kept doing that. Sydney Pollack told me that Bob was, at heart, deeply embarrassed by acting. All of which was entirely human and understandable. But instead of choosing another profession, he took his unhappiness out on the people around him.

the meantime, write him a fan letter.” People still wrote letters in longhand then, and their impact was underrated. I often sent out more than a thousand letters a year, commemorating every opening of a film (I’d send along a lucky horseshoe from our gift office), award nomination, or award—and those were just the rote letters. The ones that really had an effect were the personal ones, the ardent ones, wooing and praising and letting people know: I saw what you did and it was terrific.

Scorsese’s films, was sure to follow. I had never bought the Agenting 101 rule that representing two similar stars is a conflict of interest. Instead, I preached, “No conflict, no interest”—we wanted all the conflicts because that gave us leverage; the studios couldn’t threaten us that they’d opt for a similar piece of talent at another agency. Three guys competed for roles in Bob’s category of the character-actor leading man: Bob, our client Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino. Dusty’s fee in the mideighties was $6.5 million, about the same as the other two—and as Newman and Redford, pure leading men who played versions of themselves. The only actors who earned more—a lot more—were the action heroes, Stallone and Schwarzenegger. Also, and crucially,

But I didn’t get movies until I started watching them with Marty in the late eighties, when he rented a one-bedroom apartment in my building in Manhattan on West Fifty-seventh Street. After getting in from L.A. at one in the morning, I’d drop my bags at my place, rap on Marty’s door, grab a plate of food, and sit in front of whatever was playing that night on his projector.

Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans. The film overwhelmed me; it was like a 112-minute oil painting. I called Michael from my car and said I had three words for him. The first was brilliant. The second and third were Albert Bierstadt, the nineteenth-century painter of luminous landscapes of the American West. Michael was surprised and pleased: “How did you know?” He said Bierstadt was an inspiration for him to make the movie. I felt happy, hearing that, because it ratified an idea I’d had for some time. As I’d become more involved in the New York art scene, I’d begun to see parallels between art and fashion and movies and television—a connection among all things creative. The more deeply I understood painters and sculptors, the better I related to film artists.

By 1985, we had about six hundred clients. We’d gradually become a corporation, with buttoned-down execs running large fiefs of our expanding empire.

By the late eighties, CAA had become a story factory. Hundreds of scripts, treatments, articles, and novels poured into our office each month. Ten full-time readers generated three- or four-page synopses for our agents, who read the most promising material in full and brought it to staff meetings for review. On Friday, any of our agents could pitch me one-on-one, so each weekend I plowed through several scripts they’d recommended. Our packages were in full swing. ICM or William Morris might package half a dozen multiclient projects a year in TV and film; we assembled thirty or more. As a rule, we loaded artists into a film until their aggregate share of the producing studio’s gross totaled 20 percent to 30 percent. If the film returned $100 million to the studio, our clients earned $20 million to $30 million. Ten percent of that was a handsome payday for CAA—$3 million in 1985 is the current equivalent of more than $7 million.

Lew wasn’t too happy about it, but Wolfgang got his shot on air. The day before he went on, I sent around a memo telling everyone in the agency to have their relatives call ABC’s switchboard the following morning, after Wolfgang’s appearance, to say how much they loved the new chef. Switchboard calls were the networks’

never pulled that trick again; it’s something you can only do once. But it was all to help a genuine talent who would have made it as a TV personality on his own—just more slowly. And ABC could hardly complain that I’d pulled a fast one, as Wolfgang remains a regular on Good Morning America to this day.

wasn’t easy to find someone who could read a script as shrewdly as a spreadsheet: there were only a handful besides Eisner, including David Geffen, Barry Diller, Terry Semel, Bob Daly, and Frank Price.

Every actor, writer, or director believes he or she is responsible for his or her own success. All I did was sell that belief back to them. “Look, you’re going to make it with or without us,” I’d say. “But we can keep you at the top, because we see every project first, we develop for you, we represent every important studio executive—so we can match you with the perfect projects. And we take care of all your other personal needs so you can focus on your work. Going with us is just like taking out career insurance.” A lot of agents preyed on people’s anxiety and desperation, pitching themselves as a golden ticket: “You can’t make it without me!” To me, that went against the grain of human nature.

a potential client was reluctant, I’d say, “You should take all the time you need. No pressure.” And by “no pressure,” I meant, “No pressure until the next time I’m in touch, which may be in an hour.” I tried to avoid coming across as a nudge, while making myself ubiquitous and inexorable. The smarter clients could see what I was doing, see how it worked, but it worked nonetheless because everyone wants to be wanted. And the realization that your would-be agent has a plan to handle whatever may be coming, and that he can execute it, is reassuring. I signed Kevin Costner, in 1989, in part by convincing him that he needed to take $3 million for directing and starring in his passion project, Dances with Wolves. He wanted to take just a million, to keep the costs down so it could get made. I told him he had to trust me, and that he’d understand why later. So he took the $3 million, and when the production ran out of money, as I knew it would—first-time directors on big projects always run out of money—he was able to draw on the extra salary to finish shooting. I’d gotten him the insurance he needed to finish his dream film.

Creating a zone of calm, in a chronically overexcited world, proved disarming. Whenever disputes arose with a studio, and I had to deal with an exec sputtering with outrage, I’d go even calmer and say, “I’m confused about something.” Or, slightly more aggressively: “Could you educate me?” They’re expecting you to ream them, and you’ve put them at ease by being neutral and...

My recurring nightmare was a big public event where the name of a client or potential client might escape me. I took to having one or two assistants study the guilds’ mug shots and shadow me, warning me sotto voce when they spotted a relevant face. Even then I feared I’d blow it. I had a huge zone of protection around me—five assistants—and it never felt like enough. One assistant, such as Richard

had learned about gifting from my father, with his bottles of Seagram’s. So one of my assistants kept track of all our clients’ hobbies and charities. When an agent found out some new bit of relevant data—Tom Hanks is taking scuba lessons, or the like—it got passed to the gifts assistant via a buck slip, or interoffice memo. The next time the client had a birthday or a book coming out or a movie shooting, he’d get an outdoor watch or a nice piece of luggage or, say for Paul Newman and Tom Cruise on The Color of Money, an ornate pool cue.

you to Penny.” We pioneered the start-date gift—the $500 “survival kit” food basket that would arrive in an actor’s dressing room, on some remote set in Malta or New Zealand, the first day of shooting. We gave them to nonclients, too, working the theory that a nonclient is just a future client who hasn’t realized it yet. A typical memo from my right arm, Susan Miller, covering a three-week period of birthday presents, noted that I had given (among many other gifts) “Dustin an E-Tak, Armyan Bernstein a CITY OF NETS book, Walter Yetnikoff AKG headphones, Robert De Niro a FUTURISMO book, large MATISSE book, and several CDS”—his father was a painter—“Robert Redford a Malcolm Morley print, Terry and Jane Semel some Abrams art books, Sean Connery AKG headphones, Michael Jackson a personalized robe & Hollywood Musicals book.”

Except for start-date gifts, my rule was that important gifts shouldn’t be disposable: no champagne, no muffin baskets. Instead, rare first editions from Heritage books, ancient Greek coins, paintings and prints, even the occasional car—sturdy, thoughtful presents that would last. If a client was paying us $500,000 a year in commissions, and we spent $5,000 on a gift for him or her, it didn’t hurt us much and it made the client feel fabulous. Our gifts office spent more than $500,000 a year, and generated a ton of good will (though we did send one writer for The Simpsons the same Weber grill on three separate occasions). Every Christmas we gave Tiffany key rings or the like to the secretaries of our favorite executives, and we messengered over $500 to $1,000 to our favorite restaurant owners and maître d’s, those who’d made us seem more important at the beginning than we actually were—Ronnie, Tommy, Julius, and Pearl at Chasen’s; François and Anna at Harry’s Bar; Tom at Yamamoto’s; MaryLou and Monte at Scandia; Peter and Pam at Morton’s; Nobu at Matsuhisa; Giorgio and Elena at Giorgio’s; Jimmy and David at

I had two assistants handling calls because the calls never ceased. I’d look at the phone logs every morning and afternoon and put dots next to each message in red ink. Five dots meant “call back right now”; four dots was “call within thirty minutes”; three was “call before next meal”; two was “call by end of day”; and one dot signaled “call before end of week.” Even the most important clients wouldn’t necessarily get a return call right away. When I signed Marty Scorsese, I told him, “I’m not going to spend an hour...