Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  I didn’t know anybody, so I needed another way to stand out. I told the head of personnel, “I have a proposition for you. I think I can learn all I need to know to become an agent in 120 days. If I can’t, I’ll give back everything you paid me.” I was agenting him, and he knew it. He broke out laughing. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” he said. “But I’m going to hire you. You start Monday.” My salary would be $55 a week.

  I said, “I’d like to start tomorrow.” I showed up at 7:00, two hours early, to learn my way around the building. At 9:30, we received our assignments for the day. A few senior trainees snagged the plum jobs as substitute secretaries, which gave them the chance to impress an agent. The rest of us piled into company Volkswagens to make the morning mail runs to studios, networks, lawyers, and clients. There were three routes: the Valley, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills. Before the days of fax or email, all business not handled by phone was conducted via hand-delivered memos and contracts. Our bags were full and heavy.

  There were twenty mailroom trainees, which meant I had nineteen rivals for advancement. I set out to finish my route in half the allotted time. Mapping out routes with my spiral-bound Thomas Guide to the city’s roads, I played a game I called Keep On Moving. The trick was to avoid red lights. I got back to the office before noon, way ahead of the rest, for any errands my bosses needed in-house. They dispatched me to accounting or legal, where I learned the ins and outs of the byzantine company. People came to rely on me. Soon they stopped sending me outside Beverly Hills, and raised my salary to $75 a week. I was embarrassed by the low pay, embarrassed that I could take Judy out only to Mexican restaurants, which were the cheapest. You could get a five-course meal at Casa Escobar, on Pico, for $3.95: two dinners, two beers, and a tip and we were out for $16—slightly more than I was making in a twelve-hour day at William Morris. But Judy gave me the line I’d use later when I recruited people to an entry-level job at CAA: You’re investing in your life.

  I despised the mailroom but fell in love with the world it served. Working for William Morris was a means to an end—to get close to our creative clients, people who did things I could not do myself. I had no interest in being a cigar-chomping schlepper, like many of the agents there, and I was repulsed when I learned the methods of one of our agents: he’d sign aspiring actresses just to screw them, then toss the contracts. Agents in those days were functionaries, fielders of offers—they weren’t respected in the creative community, and they didn’t respect their clients all that much, either. They didn’t poach, because they weren’t aggressive. They lived by quantity of work, not quality. Two phrases you often heard were “A happy client is a working client” and—if an offer for a crappy project came in—“Sell ’em, don’t smell ’em.”

  I aspired to build my own company someday, but that was in the distant future. I figured I’d be at WMA for twenty years. The agency had a rigid caste system: the mailroom guys used VWs; young agents got reimbursed for their mileage; rising agents got Buicks; senior agents drove Cadillacs. Los Angeles had to report to the New York office, which still ran everything. And film was our prestige division. The big movie agents were on the ground floor, near the top executives; TV agents were exiled a floor above. Even as made-for-TV movies such as Brian’s Song were smashing old boundaries, there was no mingling of the worlds at WMA. Morris ruled in television, music, literary (books that became films or shows), nightclubs, theater, and Las Vegas. In film, though, CMA was killing us. Because there was no culture of poaching, we had no plan to reverse CMA’s dominance—but the fact that our flagship division was our weakest created significant internal tension.

  One day I was buttonholed by Abe Lastfogel, chairman emeritus and the living link to William Morris himself. He handed me a screenplay to bring to Warren Beatty’s apartment at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I needed help to find the secret stairway to Beatty’s penthouse, the spot where he entertained Julie Christie and many others. The outer door was open, and I peered through the screen into a simply furnished one-bedroom suite. As Warren came to the door barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, I saw a woman in the background, identity unknown. He took the script and asked me about myself. He couldn’t have been nicer. That image of a carefree man in the penthouse—shades of Cash McCall—stuck with me. Some fifteen years later, incredibly, I’d be Warren’s agent.

  Another day I was asked to drive around Sam Spiegel, the renowned producer of Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai. He was nearly seventy but still virile—his nickname, in reference to his amorous technique in the back of taxicabs, was “the Velvet Octopus.” I was doing my best to make an impression, talking a mile a minute, when Sam cut me off.

  “Kid,” he said, between puffs on his cigar, “you looking for advice?”

  I nodded excitedly.

  “Okay, kid, here it is,” he said. Puff, puff. “When you have the chance to fuck a girl, fuck her. Don’t let her get away.”

  A lot of show business advice turned out to be about how to get laid.

  * * *

  —

  We had a file room the length of a basketball court. It was lined with steel cabinets, the hard drives of the era, all packed with seventy years’ worth of manila folders. I viewed those files as an encyclopedia of entertainment, albeit a helter-skelter one, so I helped the woman who ran the file room, Mary, with her mimeographing. And I brought her little gifts—a box of candy, a scarf. One day I said, “You know, I’d love to read some of the files.” She told me to make myself at home. Within a week she was letting me stay on after she left. Then she gave me a key.

  While other trainees waited to be told what to do and read and learn, I entered Mary’s domain each morning at 7:00 and every evening after work. For ten weeks I made my way from A to Z, through the client files and the network and studio deals. I jotted questions for Sam Sacks, the head of television legal affairs, who was charmed by my interest and lent me a tape of a talk he’d given at USC on contract law in entertainment. I played it at home and came back with more questions. He gave me nine more tapes.

  The legal office sat adjacent to the first-floor executives, and Sam Weisbord, the head of television worldwide and the top Morris executive in L.A., passed it on his way to dinner and again when he returned. He was a creature of habit. He stepped out to dine with Mr. Lastfogel—as everyone addressed him, including Sam—at 6:30 every evening. At 7:00 the senior people took off, all except Stan Kamen, the famed motion picture agent, who returned calls with a second-shift assistant until 8:00. And then the office was empty until Sam returned from dinner for another three hours to finish up.

  I planted myself at a cubicle where he could not help but notice me, spreading out my files so he’d see them. A week later, around nine p.m., came the call I’d been waiting for. “Can you do me a favor?” Sam said. It was just a clerical task, but we were the only two people in the building, and he sure wasn’t going to do it.

  My play was totally calculated and manipulative. I’m sure Sam knew exactly what I was doing. He also knew that calculation and manipulation are prerequisites for the job. So three months after starting at William Morris, I became Sam Weisbord’s guy. I worked as his after-hours assistant without being asked or paid. I never went by his office without ducking my head in to see what he might need. When his secretary took sick and went on leave, he asked me to fill in. I was a terrible secretary, but a spectacular assistant. Because I struggled with word-for-word dictation, Sam would say, “I want you to take care of so-and-so and tell him such and such,” and then I’d flesh out the letter on my own.

  Service organizations live or die by time management. I lined up the memos on Sam’s desk by priority, subjects headlined in felt pen, and after Sam scrawled his replies in the upper-right-hand corner, I hand-returned them to their senders. I kept his refrigerator stocked with carrot and celery juice, the health drinks of the day. I called brokers for tips on stocks Sam should buy
or sell. In short, I made myself indispensable. When his secretary returned, Sam asked me to retrain her according to my methods.

  Though a compulsive skirt chaser, Sam never married. He was devoted to his work and to Mr. Lastfogel, period. As the day wore on, his two devotions clashed. Agents returned calls between 5:30 and 7:00, after the clients came off the set and before they went out to eat. There was no way for Sam to finish all his calls before his dinner date. He had a bad eye that twitched when he was nervous, and by 6:10 the eye would begin to jerk and roll. He was the agent who taught me to think about creating work for the whole company—he was the only guy at William Morris who thought that way—but he just didn’t have enough time to get it all done. At 6:20, Mr. Lastfogel, all five foot four of him, would stroll into Sam’s office. He’d smile at Sam and continue into the bathroom and shut the door. Then he’d wash his hands, saunter out, and nod his head. Sam would drop whatever he was doing—he’d practically put the phone down in midsentence—and flash me a resigned look as he trailed the old man out.

  After I started working for Sam, I conceived a new long-term goal: I wanted to run William Morris. To expose me to deal making, Sam had me assist a TV agent named Fred Apollo. I listened in on Fred’s calls and soon was closing deals with the networks on his behalf. After seven months at William Morris, when I was twenty-two, I was promoted to junior agent—a title so demeaning we’d do away with it at CAA. My pay doubled to $150 a week. Though my promotion came in record time, I’d missed my own deadline by three months. I felt like I had to catch up before the world got away from me.

  I was assigned to work in the music department, where my job was to place our musicians on programs such as The Carol Burnett Show and The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour and to cover their live shows. One night I went to the Forum, in Inglewood, to work a Sly and the Family Stone concert. I’d been told to introduce myself to Sly and take care of the band, then count the gate and make sure the money was right. (In the days before Ticketmaster, music groups were routinely shortchanged.) My credential looped around my neck, I wandered through the maze of tunnels under the seats, asking if anyone had seen Sly. Around ten o’clock, with the band past due onstage, I came across a husky guy with a towering Afro and a guitar around his neck—Sly. His eyes were glazed and he was nearly staggering.

  Realizing that if the show didn’t go on I’d get the blame, I took a deep breath and said, “Mr. Stewart”—his real name was Sylvester Stewart—“I’m Michael Ovitz from the William Morris Agency.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Mr. Stewart,” I said, “you’re a little late. I don’t want to press you, but there’s a curfew on the concert.” It was a neighborhood ordinance, strictly enforced. “If you want to do a long set, you probably need to get going.”

  He gazed in my general direction and said, “Awww, I’ll be there shortly. But could you check on my band? They’re in the Lakers’ locker room.”

  I wound my way through more tunnels to the locker room and opened the door. Jammed inside were about fifty men and women in various states of undress, shrouded in a fog of pot smoke.

  The nearest woman looked at me and shouted “Narc!” and everyone scattered. I could hear toilets flushing.

  I closed the door, retreated to the parking lot, and drove back to William Morris, where I typed a memo to my department head relating my encounter with the Family Stone and suggested that my services might be of better use elsewhere. The next day I was moved into TV packaging.

  * * *

  —

  In my home nobody drank. When my father took us out to dinner, he ordered Shirley Temples for Mark and me and a Seagram’s Seven and soda for himself. He nursed his cocktail before handing it to the busboy and asking for a second one he never finished. I was the same way. I’d gotten drunk once, at a frat party, and that was enough. I didn’t like the feeling of losing control.

  Tony Fantozzi was a first-floor agent with an enviable client list, from director Billy Friedkin to Carol Channing. Tall and skinny, with a big fuzzy mustache, he was extremely charming. A few weeks after I moved into TV, Tony asked me to join him for lunch with a producer named Hal Graham so he could pass off some legwork—that is, the actual work Graham needed done, such as making his deals and finding talent for his shows, all of which Tony was now above. I was thrilled.

  We met at 12:30 at the Cock ’n Bull, an English pub on Sunset Boulevard with a famous buffet. I’d been at work since 7:00 a.m., a long time without food for someone with a high metabolism. I could smell the roast beef and chicken as I stepped inside—delicious. I was desperate to get on the buffet line but deferred to Tony, who lit a cigar and ordered martinis. Half an hour passed. My tablemates’ glasses were empty; mine was four-fifths full. Tony called for another round.

  The talk became more animated. Tony ordered a third round. As people returned to the neighboring tables with heaping plates, I was feeling light-headed. Tony ordered a fourth round. When the fifth round arrived at a quarter to three, my glasses were lined up like jets at LAX. Regretful about missing out on whatever pearls were to come, embarrassed, unsure of the etiquette, I stood and offered a useful all-purpose excuse: I had a ton of work back at the office.

  After that, whenever Tony asked me out, I grabbed a sandwich and wolfed it down in my car en route. To stay vertical through the meal, I’d spill some of my drink on the carpet or pour the martini into my water and ask the waiter for a fresh water glass. My admiration for Tony grew. He might return to the office a little wobbly, but two coffees later he was full speed ahead.

  One day Tony said, “I need you to help me with some daytime television guys.” It was a strange request because William Morris had little to do with “day parts,” as we called them, except for one or two ancient soap operas that ran themselves. But the brass had asked Tony to rehabilitate Jack Barry and Dan Enright, the producing team from the quiz-show-rigging scandal of the late 1950s. “They’re having a horrific time getting back on the air,” he said.

  As I was just a kid when the scandal broke, I was dumb enough to see this as my big break. I had no idea how thoroughly Jack and Dan had been tainted. My Barry-Enright presentations kept getting turned down, not once or twice but eight or ten times. Perplexed, I nagged my superiors to contact the network execs who weren’t taking my calls. They didn’t want to get involved, but they couldn’t blow off Sam Weisbord’s protégé. It took us nearly two years to get a show called Break the Bank on CBS, with Jack not only producing it but serving as the host.

  Agenting was a commodity business. If you didn’t sign clients, no matter what you contributed elsewhere, you were dead wood. I started by going after people no one else cared about—soap opera and game show producers and, especially, serial writers. Daytime wasn’t glamorous, but it was lucrative. I noticed that projects grew out of ideas and that ideas came from writers. I had a special respect for the people who created new worlds from thin air. One Saturday night, Judy and I were in bed watching Lohman and Barkley, a local TV variety show. It featured a skit with a roller-skating rabbi, a lanky guy who had fake payess (the Orthodox sidelocks) down to the floor. He had us roaring.

  My first call Monday morning was to the show’s office. I reached the guy who played the rabbi and said, “I’m Michael Ovitz with the William Morris Agency, and I think you’re hysterical. I would love to meet with you.” That’s how a TV writer named Barry Levinson became my first client. It wasn’t long before I got him hired on The Tim Conway Show—about as much as I could do, in those days.

  Yet I was already meeting the up-and-comers who would later run the business. One day I ran into Michael Eisner on the set of one of our game show pilots. He headed up daytime at ABC. I asked him how he liked the show, and he noncommittally said, “Well, my wife liked it.” So I sent roses to Jane Eisner, with a card. Michael called me and said, “Do not agent my wife!” He was kind of angry about it—but that sort of st
unt got my name out there, and Eisner and I soon became friends. I’ve always had a weakness for smart people, and Michael was a smart, Eastern-educated guy who’d grown up on Park Avenue—exactly where I wished I had. He had staff to take care of all of his needs at home, and he was New York pale and he toggled between boyishly awkward and slick and smiling and he was even more manipulative than I was—and I fell for the whole package. After we started doing a lot of business together, Judy and Jane grew extremely close. In later years, our families would vacation as one big group in Aspen and Hawaii. Michael and I even had the same internist. When one of the Eisner boys disappeared one evening, as a teenager, Judy and I were at a Madonna concert with the Eisners, and Michael and I left and drove around town looking for him—finally locating him, naturally enough, at a party.

  My next mentor at WMA was Howard West, a senior television packager. His job was to assemble the right mix of Morris clients (writers, directors, performers) and sell the loaded project to a network. Howard could mold the fuzziest concept into a viable TV show, such as The Jim Nabors Show or Laugh-In. The agency charged 10 percent of the cost of every show it assembled (half up front, and half deferred until the show went into profit), so if a show cost $1 million an episode, we’d make $100,000 every week. It was a much quicker way to cash in than simply representing individual clients.

  Howard did the deals with the network, and I’d do the deals on behalf of the production company or the lead actor. Sometimes WMA represented both sides, as it did on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, when we represented the producers and also Glen Campbell and Jerry Reed, whom the producers were paying. So I’d be negotiating against William Morris agents for my clients, and for my own fees. Those were the toughest deals of all to strike. But the experience would later give me the idea to represent all sides of the deal at CAA, working out any conflicts internally and raking in all the fees.