Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

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.