Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

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.