Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  My pitch to Dave later featured in a made-for-TV movie called The Late Shift. The scene was unusually accurate because the producer was my client Ivan Reitman, and I told Ivan exactly how I’d done it. Treat Williams, who played me, got the even tone I maintained in order to keep clients calm, as well as my compulsive hand washing. I’d wash my hands thirty times a day, and insist that my assistants not touch my food—which seems bizarre, I know, but I was in a people business, meeting dozens every day, and I was determined not to get sick. (And I never did, until one of my rare vacations, when I always collapsed.)

  My pitch ran the risk of sounding fulsome: another salesman, full of blarney. But it’s only blarney if you can’t make it happen. If you can, then it’s the truth—and the truth is the supreme sales tool. When I accurately foretold future events, my client: (a) felt good about getting the outcome I had predicted; (b) thought I was a genius for predicting it; and (c) spread the story, which helped us sign the next client. I knew from talking to CBS, ABC, and Fox that the other networks were interested in Letterman. The syndicators were bound to come knocking as well. Dave was too valuable to be ignored.

  Dave talked about what he’d been through. Losing Tonight was his first soul-crushing disappointment, and he was still depressed. He was also forty-four, no longer a kid. One day soon he’d age out of the 12:30 demographic, and then what? I told him that all his options, including The Tonight Show, remained open, except for one. He could not stay on Late Night. Jay Leno was a likable personality with millions of fans, and Dave would be twisting in limbo, waiting for the guy to screw up. Could he wait five years? Ten?

  “If we don’t get involved,” I said, “you’ll end up at 12:30 on NBC by default, because you’re the nicest guy in the world and you won’t fight them. But you won’t be happy.” He nodded in agreement, and I moved to close. “We’re ready to do this for you,” I said. “Do you want us to do it or not?”

  At that point, ninety-nine times out of a hundred the potential client would say, “It’s been a great meeting. Let me sleep on it.” Despite CAA’s power—maybe because of CAA’s power—he’d be reluctant to yield too easily.

  “Let’s do it,” Dave said.

  Walking him to his car, I said, “There will be times when you’ll want to jump ship. Lots of people have a grudge against me and will do anything to work with you. They’ll say we’re destroying you—they’ll try to put a wedge between us. If you think they could get to you, don’t take this step.” 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.

  Dave said, “First of all, no one can reach me.” Outside the studio he was a hermit. He laughed and added, “I’m not sure you’re going to be able to reach me.” We shook hands and something clicked. We were going to get along.

  David Letterman was a huge test of CAA’s strength. The situation could blow up in ten different ways, and under a national spotlight. The safe play was to let it be somebody else’s headache. Two of our top execs and an astute corporate lawyer advised me to stay far away. If Dave wound up trapped at 12:30—or, worst of all, out of a job—how could the next client buy in? But something about Dave’s helpless decency made me want to take his part. And I could never resist a challenge.

  My first move was to call Bob Wright at NBC. “I’m glad you’re involved,” he said heartily, which was probably untrue. There’s nothing sincere in entertainment: every call has at least one agenda, and usually two or three. Insincere flattery was actually more flattering than sincere flattery, because it was a tacit acknowledgment that I had power and had to be propitiated. But understanding that dynamic did make it hard to trust anyone.

  “I’m not here to tell you what to do,” I told Bob. “You’ve got two great choices. But the guy who loses—you’re really expecting to hold on to him?”

  “I’ve got a contract with both of them.”

  “I understand that, but let’s get beyond the contract and look at the human being. Are you telling Dave he has to stay eighteen months to back up a guy who will take three years to build? You’re going to lose Dave anyway. I don’t get it.”

  “Well, that’s a point,” Bob said.

  I was planting two seeds with that call. One, the choice of Jay Leno for Tonight was not irrevocable. Two, it was unconscionable as well as shortsighted to lock Dave in at NBC. Bob needed to give him the job he wanted or let him go. I had Jay Moloney send a memo to our 550 employees: “We are pleased to advise that we now exclusively represent David Letterman.” News of the memo turned up the heat on NBC.

  * * *

  —

  Before the DVR and video on demand, the TV business was all about counterprogramming. The networks eyed their programming boards, which displayed the competition’s shows, and asked, “What’ll play against this? And that?” The Tonight Show had always seemed unassailable because nobody could match Johnny.

  While the 11:30 Carson/Leno audience was squarer than the 12:30 Letterman crowd, I knew Dave could adjust. Thanks to Brandon Tartikoff, who’d made NBC much younger in prime time, Dave could take Tonight’s audience “down,” or younger, with him. There was a middle ground between Carson and the hip sarcasm of Late Night, and Dave was smart enough to find it. If Warren Littlefield thought Dave was too edgy for 11:30, other buyers burned to prove him wrong. We could spin Warren’s brush-off as proof that our client was different, the alternative choice for discerning viewers. What’s more, Dave’s show was a plug-and-play commodity with no development costs. What better counter could you have to Jay Leno?

  We wanted Dave to realize that he was in demand. But his contract prevented him from talking to his would-be suitors, and in our discussions with NBC the network was adamant about holding him to it. “We can’t do any meetings,” Lee Gabler kept telling me. It occurred to me that Dave wouldn’t be in breach if we confined our talks to what might happen after he became a free agent. You couldn’t kill a guy for planning his future.

  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.”

  “But how can I legally talk to him?” Howard asked.

  “It falls under no harm, no foul. I’ll set up some social meetings and you’ll give it your best shot.”

  Next was ABC. I liked Ted Koppel’s show so much that I often taped The Tonight Show to watch Ted live on Nightline. Yet I broached the unthinkable. “I know this is crazy,” I told Bob Iger, the president of ABC Entertainment, “but would you ever consider moving Koppel to another time slot?” Iger didn’t reject the idea out of hand.

  As everyone in the business talked to everyone else, those two phone calls got the ball rolling.

  * * *

  —

  We set our buyer meetings across four days in July and decked the black marble table in our meeting room with plates of fruit and homemade chocolate chip cookies. When the leading figures in television entered our lobby, we kept them waiting long enough to be spotted by anyone who happened to be in the building. We wanted our very private discussions to be very widely discussed.

  Howard Stringer led with his top trump, an 11:30 slot on a true network. He made an impassioned presentation, telling Dave he was “much too decent a person to go with Fox!” As I
said, lethally witty. Our concern was CBS’s clearance rate, the percentage of affiliates with an 11:30 slot available to carry this potential new show. NBC’s clearance for Tonight was well over 90 percent, but our research suggested that CBS’s clearance would start at about 65 percent, then surge after Dave debuted. The low rate was a negative but not a deal breaker. Money was off the table for now. We couldn’t address it without running afoul of Dave’s contract, and Dave, with his midwestern ethos, was glad to skirt the subject, anyway.

  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.

  Next came Columbia Television, King World Productions, and Paramount. I had warned Dave that I was skeptical of syndication. What if ten southern stations pushed his show to a different time slot? What if the local baseball game ran late? Who knew what Dave’s lead-in would be, or the lead-in to his lead-in? The variables scared me. Syndicators would offer ridiculous sums (“Oprah money,” Dave called it), and that would make CAA’s commission lavish. But Dave needed a solid core audience, night after night. Still, I told him to keep an open mind. It was a vital part of my self-presentation not to reflexively pronounce as most agents did, but to address questions or difficulties by taking a beat, then saying, “I’m not sure about that,” or “Let me look into it.” I wanted it clear that I didn’t just make shit up.

  Last, we heard from Bob Iger at ABC. Nothing was off the table, Bob said. He might shorten Koppel to half an hour and start Dave at midnight. He might even move Nightline to prime time, which Koppel probably would have welcomed. It was an exciting conversation, but I privately doubted that ABC would mess with success. (Iger’s sales department soon informed him that neither of those ideas was feasible.)

  We then flew to New York, where we met with Chris-Craft and Disney and Viacom. Viacom volunteered that it would pay Dave some $50 million a year. We told him to let it all marinate. Bound by his contract for another nine months, he couldn’t commit even if he’d wanted to. Besides, his top choice, NBC, had yet to pitch.

  For Dave the process must have seemed surreal. After a decade building Late Night as his stepping-stone to The Tonight Show, he’d found himself casually discarded. Now he had his hyperactive agents calling him five times a day and a who’s who of television wooing him—and, of course, trying to undermine us.

  But Dave shut out the gossip and whisper campaigns. There was no end of rumors about Dave’s future and no shortage of reporters on the story, but our buyers kept their mouths shut. We had told them all that our discussions had to stay private, given Dave’s contract with NBC—and that anyone found leaking would be out of the bidding.

  In any case, the real story was being written inside our heads. Though we privately favored CBS, we had to give everyone a fair shot, or at least the appearance of one. And we had to get Dave a Tonight Show offer, not just because he wanted it, but because that way he could leave them, rather than slinking off as the rejected suitor.

  Two scenarios troubled me. One was a bold or reckless bidder backing up the money truck. Say Rupert Murdoch said, “We’ll give you a five-year commitment on the air and twenty-five million worth of stock options in Fox.” And then he told Peter Lassally and Robert “Morty” Morton, the show’s producer, “You’ll each get five million in options. And instead of paying your guests scale”—about $400— “we’ll budget five thousand dollars each to get the best people every night.” That would blow Howard Stringer and everyone else out of the water.

  My other fear was what might happen if Dave got offered Tonight—which we wanted only as an offer, but which he desperately wanted as a job. If he took Tonight, I could foresee him getting off to a slow start and Leno’s camp conspiring to unseat him. What was to stop NBC from reinstalling Jay on the show? (Seventeen years later, the network would do just that with Jay and Conan O’Brien.)

  We wanted to set a record for a host’s salary on an initial deal, and we wanted to make Dave happy—and the best way to do that was to have downside protection. We wanted Dave at a network where no one was waiting for him to fail. More selfishly, my preference to marry Dave to CBS—after an amicable divorce from NBC—was also in CAA’s interest. We needed to stay on good terms with Bob Wright and Warren Littlefield and Howard Stringer. In a zero-sum business, as I’ve noted, that’s almost impossible.

  * * *

  —

  Helen Kushnick had been a great representative for Jay, but after she started executive producing Tonight, she got drunk with power. When Bob Wright asked her to have Jay say something warm about Johnny Carson on his first show, she flatly refused; and after that show taped, she muttered an audible, “Fuck you, Johnny Carson.” She banned stars who appeared on competing shows, such as Arsenio Hall’s, and battled with Letterman’s producers. Then, one night in August, she canceled the whole broadcast after the Republican National Convention ran into Leno’s monologue time. NBC had to scramble to plug in a rerun, and we began to hear rumblings from the network: Out of control. Knife to the throat. (My source was Dick Ebersol, president of NBC Sports.) Jay Leno was supposed to be the low-maintenance host, but it wasn’t working out that way. NBC fired Kushnick in September.

  Throughout all this drama, Dave’s camp in New York was pressuring Bob Wright to change his mind. But Warren Littlefield and John Agoglia, the executive vice president of NBC productions, were holding firm, particularly as Leno’s ratings were strong. When I saw Bob at an industry function that fall, I appealed to him for a waiver to allow us to solicit hard offers. After all, NBC would retain its matching rights. After Dave tested the waters, I said, he’d be more open to whatever the network proposed.

  Bob agreed, in exchange for a three-month extension of Dave’s contract through June 1993. They’d sold Late Night that far in advance, and networks hate giving money back to advertisers. We shook on the quid pro quo, a no-lose proposition for our side. It took a new show six months to find a space, build a set, and assemble a staff. Assuming Dave went elsewhere, he couldn’t start before late ’93, anyway.

  We asked our bidders to respond in writing on nine deal-point questions, including salary, budget, ownership, and time slot. Once we saw Dave’s options on paper, the choice was obvious: CBS and Fox were the finalists, with CBS the front-runner. We kept hashing out the details with Howard Stringer, and by December we were satisfied.

  We asked Dave to come in. “It is CAA’s formal recommendation,” I told him, “that you accept the CBS offer and so inform NBC.” We laid out the deal points. CBS was offering Dave’s company, Worldwide Pants, two hours a night, including whatever show Worldwide chose to produce at 12:30 a.m. Dave’s three-year pay-or-play deal would be $14 million a year, double his Late Night salary. The production budget was generous. The network’s prime-time lead-ins were thriving. The 11:30 time slot was ironclad.

  Dave agreed that CBS’s offer was the best—though he clearly still hoped to use it as leverage with NBC. We gave Howard the news and made consolation calls to the rest, beginning with my friend Michael Eisner, the chairman of Disney. Michael’s standard move was to lowball (he’d offered Dave just $6.5 million a year) and then complain vociferously when he lost. “I can’t believe you did this to me!” Michael said, launching into his customary guilt game: Disney was the greatest company in history. Therefore this was a strategic mistake, an immoral decision, downright un-American. He spent more time trying to make you feel bad so you’d give him the next deal than he did trying to win the deal in the first place. I said I was sorry and called the next also-ran.

  After Dave approved the terms from CBS, Lee Gabler detailed the offer to John Agoglia, who had a m
onth to put up or shut up. NBC had made noises about matching, but I doubted they would. The rich CBS package, which included guarantees for Paul Shaffer and his band, announcer Bill Wendell, and Dave’s writers, was plausible for an 11:30 franchise. But in the 12:30 slot, with its lesser ad revenues, the math wouldn’t work. At the shrewd suggestion of Bert Fields, the lawyer advising us on the contracts, we’d had CBS agree to pay a $50 million penalty in the event Dave failed to get the 11:30 slot it had promised. The point was to block NBC from matching and then stalling Dave on Late Night or keeping him off the air entirely. It was one of the subtle ways we loaded the dice to favor CBS.

  Bob Wright offered to move Dave to 10 p.m. That was the wrong time—the audience that was accustomed to seeing the networks’ dramas at 10 p.m. skewed both older and younger than the late-night sweet spot—and we turned him down. Two weeks later, Bob asked to see Dave alone. I was against it, but Lassally and Morton outvoted me, and they proved to be right. Dave used the meeting to satisfy Bob that he could adapt his style to 11:30.

  The next day Jay Leno told the New York Times he would “leave NBC immediately” if Tonight went to Dave. He mustered his friends at the affiliates, and their pro-Leno position made it into the Los Angeles Times. The pressure was building on Bob. When we met over New Year’s in Aspen, he sought assurances that Dave could be a “team player” on Tonight. He seemed ill at ease—an encouraging sign, I thought. According to our sources, NBC’s research showed Letterman beating Leno head-to-head. (We had similar findings from CAA’s focus groups and supermarket exit polls.) The network buried the report and cherry-picked a new study to get data more favorable to Leno. But it was clear that, seven months into Jay’s tenure, Tonight was still in play. I could tell that Bob wanted Dave. But he didn’t want to jam through a move that could come back to haunt him.