Who Is Michael Ovitz?: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Most Powerful Man in Hollywood

by Michael Ovitz

And it was all because our agents carried a heavy club: the implied threat of terrible consequences if the buyer didn’t do what we wanted—a boycott by our talent; all the best films going elsewhere; total humiliation. I taught our agents to reach for the club every day, but to never—or almost never—pick it up. Power is only power until you exert it. It’s all perception. I

Nothing in Hollywood is anything until it’s something, and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief.

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.

If a guy walked in with a huge gold chain and gold watch, he’d better be a hip-hop artist. Otherwise, he was announcing his insecurity.

“Power is all about shelf space,” he’d say. “And to get shelf space, you’ve got to be big.”

By eighteen, I’d absorbed a basic rule for success: love what you do. (Too many people fight their job, a battle they cannot win.)

One of the strongest bonds Ron and I shared was a belief that any betrayal must be avenged.

We worked insanely hard, but we fostered the illusion of working impossibly hard. I believed momentum was everything—once a company relaxed, it was done for.

“That was a great lesson—how you made everyone feel comfortable and important, while you were learning everything you needed.”

Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard Frères banker who had almost single-handedly rescued New York City from bankruptcy in the seventies,

We trained our young agents in how to read by giving them a 1978 Esquire article by Aaron Latham, whom we represented, about a honky-tonk bar with a mechanical bull.

Eisner and I shared a ski instructor, a charming young man named Patrick Hasburgh. As a lark, almost as a practical joke, we got him a job writing for Stephen Cannell on the TV show The A-Team. It was like, “Can we create a Hollywood player out of thin air?” Within a few years, Patrick had cocreated Hardcastle and McCormick and 21 Jump Street with Cannell, and become one of the biggest TV producers around. Make of that what you will.

I gave him a Wall Street Journal and told him to read the front page every day. He glanced at it and said, “I have no idea what they’re talking about. I don’t understand the fundamentals.” Just jump in, I said: “The only thing holding you back is overcoming the jock stereotype and sounding as savvy as I know you are.” I bought him subscriptions to the Journal, Forbes , and Fortune, and quizzed him weekly,

Akio Morita’s Made in Japan,

Hirata made good on the Brink’s truck. He gave me a colossal check to distribute as I saw fit: $135 million. After paying the bankers and all the consultants, I was left with $60 million for CAA (worth $110 million today). It changed everything for us. First, it put more money in our partners’ pockets—ten million for Ron; ten million for Bill, one to three million each for the guys who’d worked on it; and the rest for me. Second, it enabled us to hire more people without depleting our reserves. Third, it allowed us to keep paying our agents well-above-market rates and to ensure they didn’t leave. And fourth, it signaled that our company had stepped up in class. In Hollywood, where people didn’t know Goldman Sachs from Saks Fifth Avenue, everyone was dumbstruck that a talent agency could earn that kind of fee, let alone arrange and execute a deal of that magnitude.

“Timeline” was devised by Len Fink on an Apple IIe computer: “In 1886, Coca-Cola was invented in Atlanta, Georgia, ushering in the modern period of peace, harmony, tranquility, fire and rocks.”

Peter Sealey sent me a check for $10 million for the ads. Not bad, but I returned the check with a Post-it Note attached: “Pete. Let’s discuss this.” We did, and then I called Don and Robert. I was friendly but unrelenting, and Pete finally sent me a new check for $31 million. They thought it was too much. I still think it was too little. I should have insisted on a royalty for the polar bears, which they’ve used ever since.

Another board member was Bill Campbell, a legendary mentor to people like Steve Jobs at Apple and Sergei Brin and Larry Page at Google. I learned an enormous amount from Bill, who had nearly impeccable judgment (when the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins sent him to Amazon to fire Jeff Bezos, Bill came back from their meeting and said, “You can’t fire him”).

HOLLYWOOD IS like high school with money, As people often say, the lesson from that eBay meeting is that Silicon Valley is a true meritocracy. The best idea with the best execution wins.

Brian asked, “How did you learn to think so big at CAA?” I reminded him that Airbnb had consistently thought big: it hadn’t been at all content with its original business of renting out air mattresses on floors. Then I added that one way to conceptualize how to think in business is a martial-arts precept: “If you aim at the target, you lose all your power. You have to hit through the target to really smash it.” To get where you want to go, you have to set out to go even further.