Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  The other thing that would differentiate us—and it was a big one—was that we would create work for our clients, not just field offers. Everyone agreed.

  Suddenly, the revolt felt real.

  * * *

  —

  On the first Friday of 1975, I knocked off early to go skiing with Judy at Mammoth Mountain, five hours away. There were no cell phones or pagers in those days, and no one knew where we were. I needed to get away to think my future through before talking one more time with Ron.

  When we got back to our tract house Sunday evening, a note was taped to the front door. It was from Mike Rosenfeld: “Call me before you talk to anybody.” When I called, he said, “I hope you could afford that ski trip, because you’re now unemployed with the rest of us.” Before leaving town, I had applied for a credit line for our new agency at City National Bank. I listed the five partners’ names on the forms. Unfortunately, the guy who ran City National was a friend of William Morris’s CFO. The day I left town, Sam Weisbord had taken Rowland for a walk and said, “Is it true? Are you leaving?”

  Anyone else would deny it in a heartbeat. Anyone but Rowland, the straightest arrow in Southern California. After he threw us all under the bus, Weisbord called in the coconspirators one by one. We were officially fired that day, but Sam wanted to see me on Monday—for closure, I guess.

  You couldn’t call Sam Weisbord personable, but he’d given me my first break and treated me with respect. Had he told me that he was hurt and that he wanted me to stay, there’s a very good chance I’d have backed down and asked Ron to do the same. I felt no obligation to Bill and Mike and Rowland. If Sam had played it smart, he might have broken up the whole thing before it started.

  Instead, he fixed me with an arrogant stare and said, “You’ve really screwed yourself this time.” His bad eye was twitching up a storm. I said, “Look, it is what it is.” I went to my office, packed up my Rolodex, and left the building for the last time.

  * * *

  —

  We’d counted on three more months to get organized, but our future was now. We held an emergency meeting at Rowland’s house in Upper Bel Air. As a former WMA vice president, he was the logical choice to run the show. But that night he hardly said a word. Having just lost an annual paycheck of at least $250,000, he was clearly in shock.

  I had made a checklist of everything we needed to do: find an office, get stationery, get a license, come up with a logo, and so on. I was the most junior of the group, an afterthought. But as I moved down my to-do list, nobody else was chiming in. Ron was superb at managing in the moment but indifferent to administration; Bill Haber had a counterpuncher’s style; Mike Rosenfeld had no desire for added responsibility. So I kept talking, and I never stopped. Through our first few weeks in business, jobs kept falling into my lap. We all liked the name “Artists Agency” because it denoted a client-centered culture—but another agency had previously used it. So I proposed adding “Creative” to suggest both our clients’ creativity and our own. Mike and I sketched the CAA logo, and I ordered stationery.

  David Wolper, the William Morris client who produced Chico and the Man, gave us temporary office space, a room on La Cienega with two phones. (WMA pressured him to throw us out, a hint of things to come.) Two weeks later we scraped together $100,000 by putting up our homes as collateral. Ron and I paid a deposit on a bargain-bin lease in a lower-end building on Doheny and Wilshire, at the very edge of Beverly Hills. The former tenant, the landlord said, had been a wigmaker.

  CAA was a prototypical start-up. We brought in folding chairs and card tables for desks, and our wives each came in one day a week to answer the phones. We had one paid assistant—a bookkeeper—and two cars among the five of us. The Screen Actors Guild sent someone out to make sure we were for real. The guy came back a second time after the wigmaker turned out to have been an escort service.

  To launch with a statement, we had slashed our packaging commission from 10 percent to 6. It was a go-for-the-throat move to undercut William Morris and the rest (and it sounded like more of a bargain than it was—we’d still take 10 percent on the back end, in syndication, where the real money was). But we quickly realized that no one was knocking the door down to take advantage of our cut-rate commission—or for any other reason.

  * * *

  —

  Our first big problem was that Jack Weston and Kelly Lange wound up staying at WMA. The agency’s Norman Brokaw convinced Kelly that he was going to make her a giant personality. We’d have done the same thing in his place—we did do it many times later. But it was a devastating blow; the other clients we had wouldn’t bring in enough to support us. For years, we used the story of Jack Weston and Kelly Lange not following us, after they’d sworn up and down that they would, to teach our young agents. “Don’t ever think that what is, is—because it isn’t. Never count on anybody or anything.”

  Our second big problem arrived by messenger a few weeks in: an envelope addressed to me from Leon Kaplan of Kaplan, Livingston, Goodwin, Berkowitz & Selvin, the mammoth law firm that represented Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox and almost everyone who was anyone in the entertainment business. Their letterhead listed seventy-two attorneys and made it feel like a whole country was declaring war on you. Kaplan informed me that his client, Freddie Fields, controlled the rights to both “Artists Agency” and “Creative Management Associates,” Freddie’s previous firms. We were therefore infringing by using “Creative Artists Agency” and must immediately cease and desist.

  I reread the letter. I was puzzled about why he’d singled me out, rather than writing to the partnership, but I figured I’d have to devise our response. I knew Sam Weisbord and Leon Kaplan were close, and that Kaplan’s firm had represented the Morris agency forever. I also knew that Kaplan did not represent CMA. And I knew that Freddie Fields had recently cashed out of CMA to become a movie producer and a client of Kaplan’s. I connected the dots. Alarmed by our package-fee discount, William Morris had deputized Fields to harass us into relinquishing our name and starting over, a mortal blow to an infant company.

  This was serious trouble. If we slugged it out in court, the fees would suck us under fast. Ron and I had just run into a young WMA agent at a party. “You know what the betting is back at the office?” he said. “That you’ll be out of business in six months and working as casting agents.”

  My one play, a long shot, was to intimidate my old boss. From working for Sam, I knew the Department of Justice was probing William Morris for monopolistic practices in their TV work—the conflicts of interest that we lived with daily. The rumor was that Lew Wasserman had tipped off the department because he was annoyed at having to pay WMA’s package commissions. Nothing was likely to come of it, but the agency’s leaders remained apprehensive.

  I told my partners my plan, and, very anxiously, they finally agreed. They thought it was a lousy idea—but no one had a better one. I drained a glass of water and cleared my throat. I needed to believe in what I was about to say, and my voice absolutely could not crack. I rang Leon Kaplan. He sounded arrogant, and why not? He pegged CAA as weak, broke, and defenseless.

  “Mr. Kaplan,” I said, “we haven’t met, but I know who you represent. I think you’re trying to put us out of business. I think it’s inappropriate and unfair, and it could be really interesting if this went to the Justice Department in the middle of their antitrust investigation.” My tone was firm but matter-of-fact. I went on, “You can rip up this letter and we can all be friends and forget about it. Or you can pursue it and I will call a pal of mine who happens to work at Justice, and I’ll ask him to throw this into the hopper, and we’ll see how it all sorts out.”

  Dead silence. Then Kaplan said, “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’m suggesting you send me a handwritten letter within the next two hours withdrawing the first letter. Or tomorrow morning I’ll call my friend.” Then I thanked
him and hung up. I gave no thought to the repercussions—or to the fact that I was bluffing, because we’d be out of business before the feds could get around to dealing with the call I’d never make anyway to a friend I didn’t have. I played my hand as calmly as I could and waited for the outcome. Only after I’d hung up did I realize my hands were shaking.

  Time crawled by. Fifteen minutes before the deadline a messenger arrived with a new letter from Kaplan. In the space of an afternoon he’d moved from cease and desist to cease-fire.

  That day forged our siege mentality. To defend our tiny position, we unleashed hell on anyone who crossed us. For starters, we refused to take on any client who used Kaplan, Livingston, and within five years the firm was defunct. I’m not saying we did them in, but we did help nudge them toward the edge. Our counterassault on William Morris took longer to deploy but proved nearly as effective. And a few years later, when Jack Weston told a friend of Ron’s that he wanted to come to CAA, Ron replied, “Tell him he can go fuck himself. Not if he was the last client on earth.” One of the strongest bonds Ron and I shared was a belief that any betrayal must be avenged.

  For the rest of my time at CAA, I was a great friend and ally but an implacable foe. When you’re twenty-eight years old and you’ve quit your job and there’s no going back, and then the industry leader tries to smother your baby in its cradle, you steel up pretty fast. Kaplan’s letter taught us to play hardball, and hardball we would play for the next twenty years.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FROM ZERO TO ONE MILLION

  Needing clients fast to pay our rent, we focused on TV writers and actors, two reliable sources of income. In TV, the talent got paid every Thursday, so the agents did, too. For six months we met with prospects by the hour, from 8:00 in the morning till 10:00 at night, when we’d collapse with a delivery pizza. It was close to midnight on a grueling Friday when we got a call from the actor Jack Cassidy, one of our first new clients. He was a heavy drinker who had once startled his neighbors by watering his lawn naked. Clearly blitzed, Jack started in like it was a normal business hour. We rolled with it, having lost all normal frame of reference—every waking hour was a working hour.

  Our top client was Chad Everett, who played Dr. Joe Gannon in CBS’s long-running Medical Center. When a TV movie script came in with a $100,000 offer for Chad, it was a godsend. The $10,000 commission would float us for another month. But after we all read the script and assembled to call Chad (we did everything together then, to showcase our esprit de corps), there were five long faces around the conference table: the movie was crap. Chad was Bill Haber’s contact and Bill led off on speakerphone to warn against the project, but we all chimed in, unanimously recommending a pass.

  It would have been easy to tell Chad to take his $90,000 and run. No one would have slammed us for putting him in a bad TV movie. But we killed the offer without a second thought—and that moment established our business bona fides. We were not going to be flesh peddlers. We would put our clients’ long-term interests first.

  We were able to stick to our ethical guns in part because I had sold a pair of game shows, Give-N-Take and Rhyme and Reason. (Judy worked as a model on Give-N-Take and another game show, and she booked jobs at Bullock’s Department store and worked in the lounge at Pacific Southwest Airlines—for a while, she was paying all our bills.) That fall, NBC took The Rich Little Show, our first prime-time package. I still have the telex they sent to let us know. Buyers liked new agencies: the more sellers undercutting one another, the more leverage for them. In those days buyers ran roughshod. If one agent balked at a studio’s terms, there was always another, more desperate agency that represented a client who’d serve equally well. Our goal—which seemed amazingly distant—was to flip the power equation by amassing so much talent the buyers couldn’t go around us.

  After nine months, we had 135 clients, and most of them had their best years in front of them (Anne Archer, Larry Hagman) or behind them (Hope Lange, Totie Fields). We didn’t have expense accounts; we paid for everything ourselves and deducted it from our individual taxes. Early on, Rowland arranged a dinner for a couple of hot writers, Joe Bologna and Renée Taylor, at a fancy restaurant in Century City. We really wanted them, and we really wanted to show how all for one we were, so we brought our wives. Knowing that dinner for twelve was going to cost a fortune, we nervously reminded each other, “They picked the place, so let’s hope they pick up the check. Don’t reach for it!” As Joe was a regular there, we hoped the waiter would bring it to him. He did, but Joe just ignored it, puffing a big cigar. The check sat there, glowing ominously. Finally Rowland’s wife, Diane, took it and gave it to Rowland. We were all horrified—I think that was the beginning of the end of their marriage. Rowland slipped the check to Mike under the table, but he didn’t have a credit card, either. I was the only one who did, so I picked it up: $2,000 that we didn’t have. Joe and Renée did sign with us, without ever having any idea how close they came to putting us out of business.

  Broke as we were, we had to fake it till we could make it. At La Scala, a Beverly Hills bistro that was the place to be seen, I showed Tony, the maître d’, a hundred-dollar bill. Then I ripped it in two and gave him half. “My wife and I will be in for dinner tonight,” I said, “and I want you to give us the first booth on the right and treat us really, really well. If you do that, you’ll get the other half of this bill—and many more to come.” A hundred bucks bought some remarkable service in 1975, and CAA went on to do many big business dinners at La Scala. We tipped lavishly and were hailed like the second coming of Darryl Zanuck. Then I took out a car loan and bought five Jaguars for $15,000 a pop (but only $1,500 each down). We ordered CAA license plates, followed by a hyphen and the partner’s initials. The cars were a rank extravagance for a company that would file zeroes on its tax returns its first three years. But in a city of fantasy, a big show was essential.

  Though we had started to make a small mark in television, we had trouble persuading film stars to take us seriously. Sue Mengers, the biggest movie agent in town, mocked us as “the TV boys.” She was being mean, but she was right—that was all we had. I’m still stung by the memory of a lunch Mike and I had at The Smoke House with Thom Mount, the “baby mogul” who became president of Universal Pictures at twenty-eight. He was the Irving Thalberg of our time, albeit briefly. We needed the anointment of his recognition, and we talked a great game. Then Thom asked to see our client list. I didn’t want to show it to him because it began and ended with Ernest Borgnine in film and Chad Everett in television. He insisted. As he looked at it with amused disappointment, I nodded at Mike and we left without eating. I hated being pigeonholed as inferior.

  We all took a meeting with Jacqueline Bisset at her house, and my partners gave the Agenting 101 pitch: You’re a great actress; you should be doing more; you should have bigger roles, Oscar-winning roles. New agencies sell their youth and energy—“I’ll kill for you!”—because that’s all they have. Seeing her skeptical expression, I jumped in and said, “Take off your actress hat for a moment and pretend that you’re a small corporation. You’re now JB, Inc., and your revenue is X million a year. What can you do to increase your bottom line, and control the direction of your future growth? You need to take control of your projects, get involved in developing them.” I believed that nobody wants to be treated as just what they are. Everyone wants to feel encouraged to become even more than they are—to become the best version of themselves.

  Afterward, in the car heading down the hill, we quarreled. Mike said, “You can’t look at her like she’s a corporation—she’s an actress.” I said, “I don’t agree. We have to differentiate ourselves from the other agencies, and this is a great way to do it.” Bisset’s lawyer called and said she wanted another meeting—only just with me. I met with her again, but she decided to go with another agency. That was okay. As we got bigger, she got smaller.

  Mike was very close to Rick Ray of Adams
, Ray & Rosenberg, a prestigious television literary agency that represented four hundred writers. A year or so after CAA opened, Rick proposed that we join forces. The two firms met in our cramped conference room to seal the deal. Together, Lee Rosenberg declared, we’d be “the best television agency in the business. Even if we never represent movie stars like Robert Redford.”

  Ron and I traded glances. “I plan on representing movie stars,” Ron said.

  Lee said, “You’ll never get them, they’re locked up by the big boys.”

  “We’re going to represent all of them,” I said. I suddenly knew we were going to try to get as near to the whole market as it was possible to get, to crush all comers. Our plan had been to wait five years before branching out to movies, but I was never good at waiting.

  Ron looked at me and nodded. I stood up, and then Ron stood up, and then Bill stood up, and the meeting and the merger were over. Mike was crushed—he was really close to Rick and had dreamed of working with him. That was the moment we realized Mike might not be with us for the long haul. I looked at Ron and Bill and said, “We’ve got our whole lives ahead of us. We’ll get the stars.” I was twenty-nine; Ron, thirty-one; Bill, thirty-three.

  * * *

  —

  The Jacqueline Bisset meeting convinced me that the way forward was to sell our clients on our reach. We’d give them more info than anybody; they’d see every script and even get hot books in manuscript—preferential treatment befitting the CEO of his or her own corporation. We’d break into film by taking books and scripts and treatments to prospective clients—we’d bring the mountain to Muhammad. When New York magazine touted Mort Janklow as the hottest literary agent, I rang him up. It took me ten days to get him on the phone to ask if I could come see him. I flew to New York at a cost that made my stomach twitch.