Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

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  As a ninth-grader at Portola Junior High, I got clobbered in an election for class historian. Losing this extremely insignificant contest depressed me for months. I could have accepted my shortcomings as a politician and folded my tent. Instead, vowing never to feel so humiliated again, I analyzed the loss and realized that I had no constituency. I needed to expand my relationships beyond the nerds who haunted the library and the ne’er-do-wells who snuck into RKO.

  The following year, at Birmingham High in Van Nuys, a school of 3,500 students, I put my analysis into action. I made friends with the chess team, the football players, the debaters, joined five or six clubs, and built a base of support across various cliques. It seems funny to me now, but I had no sense of humor about it then. I’m sure I came across as a brown-nosing kid in a hurry. But I was an effective brown-nosing kid in a hurry! I ran for tenth-grade president and won. The following year I ran for student-body vice president. Because we were such a big school, I had to give my campaign speech to three separate assemblies. I got up to speak and discovered that I was extraordinarily comfortable on my feet. I looked people in the eye and pointed to them, calling them out, saying “You can do it! And you! Together we can make this a better school!” I personalized the battle—and won easily. Each victory made winning more addictive.

  After I won that election, my father told me, “If you want to be treated like a king, you have to act like one.” I started wearing J. C. Penney suits to student council meetings. I set up a program to bring in guest speakers and I initiated a clean-campus campaign, in which we’d all get out fifteen minutes early for every day the campus was deemed clean. In my zeal, I totally missed the signals from our student-body president, Mike McConahay, that I was stepping on his toes. It surely didn’t help that when I ran for president that year, aiming to succeed Mike, I ended my speech by saying “I would much rather be a president who has done something that can be criticized than one who has done nothing and can’t be criticized.” I won again.

  By then I was working eight-hour shifts as a box boy at our neighborhood Piggly Wiggly, 4:00 p.m. until midnight, saving toward a car and college and thinking about my future. Being student-body president made me an ex officio member of the Encino Rotary Club, so I met once a month with the Rotarians—car dealers and insurance agents who’d made something of themselves. They were no smarter or more hardworking than my dad, but they had something he lacked: a college degree. That had given them options, and now they composed the local power structure. But I didn’t want to be just part of a local power structure.

  Eight miles from where I grew up, across Sepulveda Pass, stood the mansions of Beverly Hills. I’d stare at them as we drove to family dinners in Westwood, a trip that in those prefreeway days took ninety minutes. That was when I began to hate the Valley, which lacked museums, institutions, a cultural center—any real stimulus for my brain. In the Valley, people grew up carrying a football under their arms. I wished I’d grown up in New York, where people grew up carrying a newspaper. The west side of L.A. seemed like the best local version of New York. And—though I didn’t make the connection at the time—it was where Uncle Sam had his hotels. I wanted to live there.

  This grudge against my surroundings, this sense that I had been raised in the wrong nest, like a cuckoo’s egg, fueled me when I began my working life. I always felt one step inferior to the people around me, and one step superior. I wasn’t as creative or cultured as they were, but I was a lot smarter and more hardworking than most of them. Insecurity and ambition make a powerful cocktail.

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  A month before I graduated, in 1965, I heard about a job I actually wanted. After a hiatus of thirty years, the Music Corporation of America, known as MCA, was reviving its studio tour at Universal’s back lot. They were hiring ten young guides, five men and five women.

  North of Ventura Boulevard in Encino, people lived in houses like ours. South of it were vast homes that cost $50,000 or more. The local melting pot was the town’s Little League, which my dad ran. Through baseball he knew a south side father named Herb Steinberg, MCA’s head of publicity, who agreed to recommend me. I had a strong résumé, but Herb’s referral really helped. That was my first lesson in the business: who you know matters. I was the only high school student MCA hired.

  Our training began in May with four weeks of evening orientation. In June the studio set us loose on the thirty-odd departments on the lot: makeup, hairdressing, set design, props, costumes, electrical, and so on. A memo went out to the department heads about the young people in yellow-and-white seersucker jackets who’d be dropping by. The rest was up to us.

  The other guides worked from nine to six, but I came in at seven each morning and stayed until nine at night. Universal owned the last full-fledged working lot, and I walked its four hundred acres end to end. I read and reread and underlined my studio guide as if I were cramming for a final, writing out lists of questions for execs and technicians and keeping a notebook full of the answers. At the end of each interview I arranged to come back to observe. I had carte blanche at the busiest film and television studio in the world—and I was getting paid for it!

  I spent hours around people putting up sets or taking them down or lighting them for the next take. I’d ask the production manager any dumb thing that came into my head. Why are you breaking for lunch now, at ten a.m.? It turned out that lunch was a subtle calculation. It might pay to take a meal penalty—enforced by union regulation—and skip the break if you could squeeze in one more shot before quitting time. Because after quitting time came overtime (when union members were paid at time and a half). And after overtime—that is, if you worked more than sixteen hours beyond your call time—the crew went into a glorious, devoutly-to-be-wished-for state known as golden time, when they got paid a full day’s wages for each extra hour.

  What I learned at Universal, the way glorious films blossom out of an intricate mesh of mundane practicalities, enthralls me still. I went in even on Sundays, when I could wander the empty soundstages to my heart’s content. I passed through Dracula’s castle, the courtroom for Inherit the Wind, the battlefield in All Quiet on the Western Front, the Bates Motel from Psycho. I once disturbed some props on a TV set marked as a “hot set”—meaning one in the midst of shooting—and the director chewed me out the next day. I said, “You’re one hundred percent right—I’m new. I’m sorry, and it won’t happen again!” I postmortemed everything, and never made the same mistake twice.

  The heart of the tour for visitors was a two-hour ride on a candy-striped Glam Tram. I sat up front, wired for sound, and gave my spiel. As we passed the white house from the popular sitcom Leave It to Beaver, people oohed and aahed. I went into the characters’ back stories and how the show was produced. I might halt the tram and open Beaver Cleaver’s front door to reveal the emptiness within (an irony lost on most visitors). Or dispense tidbits about historic Universal movies, such as The Phantom of the Opera.

  The back lot was overseen by Al Dorskind, an MCA vice president who tried to evoke the Golden Age by inscribing actors’ names on their bungalows. If our guests were impressed by seeing “Lana Turner” on a door, they went wild when they saw an actual star. I chased after Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Lee J. Cobb, but they all raced off. I had better luck with the young Michael Caine, then shooting The Ipcress File. Michael liked to walk to the set or the commissary instead of riding the studio golf cart. Telling my driver to wait, I’d call out, “Michael, come say hello to your fans!” Then I’d go on about Michael’s fabulous career until I shamed him into signing some autographs.

  I was a great guide because I believed in the product. 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.) My supervisors picked me to run the once-weekly VIP tour on a deluxe single-car tram. It was reserved for the friends and
favor recipients of Lew Wasserman, MCA’s legendary CEO—and a man whose career would intersect with mine in ways I could never have imagined. He’d be the making of me and, in a sense, I’d be the unmaking of him.

  Some of us Valley kids followed the studios like boys in New York tracked the Yankees. I wasn’t interested in the stars, but in the process of making pictures and in the people who were truly responsible. I loved the book Frank Capra: The Name Above the Title, which explained how the famous director took his writers to Palm Springs for ten weeks and worked with them until they had a script they could shoot. The idea of sitting in Palm Springs with a close pal, drinking mint juleps and making art, entranced me. And I loved reading about Irving Thalberg, “The Boy Wonder” who became the head of production at MGM at twenty-six. It gave me the idea that film could be a young person’s game.

  All the foul-mouthed magnates who founded the modern film business were fascinating: Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, William Fox. But the one who interested me most, in part because I worked at his studio and in part because he had the most far-reaching ideas, was Lew Wasserman. As I learned when I scrolled through microfiche to find old newspaper stories about him, Lew was a top Democratic Party fund-raiser and wielded unmatched power in show business. (To hedge his bets he had a senior MCA executive help out the Republicans.) Some said he was tied to the mob, and Lew never denied the connection; if anything, he liked being feared. It was good for business.

  He began as a talent agent. After moving to Los Angeles from Chicago in the late 1930s, Lew built the town’s paramount talent agency. His rules were simple: tend to the client, dress appropriately, divulge no information about MCA, do your homework, never leave the office without returning every phone call. He insisted on dark suits, white shirts, and a dark blue or dark gray tie, and he’d sweep papers left on people’s desks into the wastebasket at the end of the day. His credo was “Messy desk, messy mind.” On the one occasion I saw Lew’s office as a tour guide, his desktop held only a phone, a clock, and a handsome desk set. Not one scrap of paper that could yield a secret.

  He invested being an agent with power and respect—for a time, anyway. In 1950, when MCA insisted on half the net profits for Jimmy Stewart in a western called Winchester 73, it rewrote the rulebook. There were back-end deals before that, but never for such a big hit. Winchester 73 became a moment. Cornering the market on movie stars, Lew swung decisive leverage to the talent and their representatives and helped finish off the old studio system. Later, he bought the Paramount library of old films when no one thought it was worth a dime. MCA was everywhere, packaging a huge number of TV shows and taking up to 75 percent of their production costs. The company’s reach was so vast it became known as The Octopus.

  In 1962, after MCA bought Universal, the U.S. Department of Justice (run by Lew’s friend Bobby Kennedy) moved against the company for antitrust violations. Lew could have sold his agency intact to the next generation, as we did later at CAA. Instead, he used Kennedy’s threat as a pretext to break it up and scatter his top agents to a dozen boutique outfits. Sellers were Balkanized and their power neutered—brilliant!

  Lew coming on the lot was a visit from royalty. One day he took my VIP tour with his friend Mort May, of the May Department Stores Company. Lew was tall and imposing in his big glasses and dark suit. He looked at me, unsmiling, and said, “How’s it going with the tour; are you enjoying it?”

  “I’m enjoying every second of it!” I said. That was our last conversation for twenty years, until we went at it hammer and tongs over Robert Zemeckis’s directing deal. I never reminded Lew that he’d given me my start in show business, though maybe I should have, just to piss him off.

  I worked weekends at Universal throughout my first year at UCLA. Because I was putting myself through college, where I was majoring in psychology, I had to work every spare hour. I returned full time the following June, when the tour really took off. The studio added rides and concessions and threw up a building for demonstrations of stunts and makeup. After getting off the tram, guests could pick and choose where they wanted to go—it was like a mini-Disneyland. I signed on for extra shifts.

  My immediate boss was the assistant operations manager, Tom Center. Tom was older, around thirty, but we talked about movies all day. A few weeks into the second summer, he left to start a weekend tour at 20th Century Fox and asked me to come along. The new job was year-round and closer to UCLA, so I quit Universal to go with him. I’d be making almost $600 a week at Fox, at age nineteen—more than my father. As Fox’s back lot was too small for trams, we improvised with walking tours around the soundstages. There weren’t many movie fans from Dallas or Philadelphia—or from the Valley, for that matter—who’d seen the infrastructure behind the magic. They were as slack-jawed as I’d been at RKO.

  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.

  Al Dorskind, my old boss at Universal, called. I had cut sharply into his weekend profits, and he was furious. “Michael,” he said, “you stole Gray Line from us. It’s inappropriate, and I’m not sure it’s legal. You need to stop.”

  I should have been cowed. Al—bald, tanned, fit, and rough around the edges—was Lew Wasserman’s hatchet man. Instead, I felt a strange rush. “The last time I checked, this is America, and competition’s a good thing,” I said. “But I want to thank you for calling, and I’ll certainly refer this to our legal department.”

  I went to Fox’s top lawyer and told him the story. He grinned and said, “You didn’t do anything wrong. And you tweaking Al Dorskind is going to play really well up the ladder.” It was true. My bosses were delighted that some college kid had shaken MCA’s tree.

  Standing up to Al Dorskind taught me two things about myself. One, for reasons I cannot explain, I was fearless in confrontations. Two, I liked the entertainment business.

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  I met Judy Reich the first day of my sophomore year. After registering for classes, I went to get a coffee at the student center and spotted a gorgeous blonde reading a book. There were a dozen tables open around her, but I walked up and said, “Hi, is that seat taken?”

  “No,” she said, eyeing me like I was deranged. An hour later, without my ever having told her my last name—I was just “Michael” to her for some time—she agreed to our first date: pizza and a Hollywood jazz club called Shelly’s Manne-Hole. Great plan, but they wouldn’t let Judy in because she wasn’t yet eighteen. For our second date I took her to a rooftop restaurant and spent thirty bucks, a ton of money at the time.

  Judy was an engineer’s daughter from Beverly Hills, but she’d grown up in the flats south of Wilshire, the poorer part of town. So she was a reach for me, but not totally out of the question. She
was bright—a better student than I was—sweet-tempered, vivacious, and crazy about the theater. She dreamed of singing and dancing on Broadway. When I met her, she was pledging Kappa Alpha Theta, the big gentile sorority, and dating a handsome but wooden fraternity man. I convinced her that an ambitious guy from Zeta Beta Tau, the Jewish frat I would become president of, could be more fun. From day one, I was content just to hang out with Judy, a first for me. She made me feel like I was working for someone other than just myself. She loved my drive, the way I got everything out of my days—what she called my “last squeeze of the toothpaste” lifestyle. I loved that she loved it, that she got me. We were in total sync. In the summer of 1969, my BA in hand after just three years in school, I married her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MAIL MAN

  After graduation I applied to three companies: William Morris, the oldest talent agency in the business; Creative Management Associates, or CMA, an up-and-coming talent agency led by MCA alumni Freddie Fields and David Begelman; and the ad agency J. Walter Thompson. Only Morris called me in for an interview. I went to their Beverly Hills office in my ninety-nine-dollar navy blue suit, wing-tip shoes, rep tie, and white button-down Oxford shirt. I looked like a rookie FBI agent.

  Almost everyone at William Morris started in the company’s mailroom. After a year or two, trainees were sent to secretarial school for shorthand, or “speed writing.” They came back as an agent’s secretary. If they did well at that, they became an assistant, then a junior agent, and finally a senior agent. It could take three years to become a junior agent and four more to start signing your own clients as a senior agent—and more than 80 percent of the trainees washed out along the way. The way you got ahead at WMA was nepotism: everybody was somebody’s nephew. It was an old, soft, corrupt place.