Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  Mort’s Midtown Manhattan office was done in Charles Gwathmey modernism, all angles and curves and rich oak paneling. Trying not to seem overawed, I laid out our book-first strategy. I asked to call him every Thursday at 10:00 a.m. in case he had something for us.

  Mort could have set his watch by my calls. I kept at it for a year, every week, no matter where I was, before he gave us a novel called Chiefs, a police drama set in the South. The story was solid, but Mort neglected to tell us that the networks had already turned it down. Bill Haber worked round the clock to get Chiefs produced and prove we were for real. His friend and client Martin Manulis, the producer of Gunsmoke, somehow wrangled Charlton Heston, a big-enough star to get Chiefs adapted into a successful miniseries on CBS. Ecstatic, Mort started sending us manuscripts by his most commercial writers: Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steele. We went on to package pulp sensations like Mistral’s Daughter and Hollywood Wives, each of which brought the agency $50,000 to $100,000 up front and millions in syndication when they were resold to the nation’s more than six hundred independent stations.

  Scores of independent lit agencies needed a liaison to Hollywood buyers, and once Janklow began to vouch for us, CAA rapidly became that liaison. We threw parties at Elaine’s—the watering hole on New York’s East Side frequented by Truman Capote, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, and scores of agents—and won a lot of business. We offered a unique and attractive proposition: on any production that derived from the lit agents’ source material, they’d keep their full commissions on the writers’ fees. CAA would get paid by attaching actors and directors to the package.

  Soon we had eighty agents sending us novels in manuscript, to be optioned by our producers and then lateraled to our screenwriters for adaptation. After copying the scripts in bulk, we slapped on bright-red covers with the white CAA logo and planted hundreds of them, with scrawled notes and scuffmarks for a “used” look, in beauty parlors, restaurants, and doctors’ offices. Most had no chance of selling—and we didn’t leave any really important screenplays lying around—but they generated free publicity. They helped establish our brand in our race against larger but less agile firms like William Morris and International Creative Management, or ICM.

  We were making headway in our second year, but still barely breaking even. All I could think about was money, but Ron Meyer was the grasshopper to my ant. He suddenly flew off to see Richard Chamberlain on a TV-movie set in South Africa—an astronomical expense, especially when we needed Ron in L.A. We talked about it, not exactly in our indoor voices: I was the thrifty dad and he was the spendthrift son.

  The subject recurred as we walked to our cars one Saturday. “Money is the scorecard of success,” I said. “I don’t get how it seems so unimportant to you.”

  Ron said, “But money doesn’t bring you happiness. My father was broke all his life and he was the happiest guy you ever met.” He took a quarter from his pocket and held it up. “See that?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Ron flipped the quarter over a mesh-link fence onto the roof of a kiosk on the other side. I made a big show of scrambling to climb the fence to retrieve the quarter, and Ron laughed. We were both joking—but not really. That moment was us in a nutshell. Ron cared too little about money and I cared too much. I never wanted “Fuck-you money”—I wasn’t greedy in that way—but I was hell-bent on making enough so I’d never have to go back to the Valley.

  In 1977, after two and a half years in which we’d netted nothing at all, each partner was able to take $80,000 out of our profits. For Rowland, it was still less than a third of his William Morris salary, but at least the trend was in the right direction. Judy and I moved from Sherman Oaks to Brentwood, trading in our $75,000 house for one that cost $650,000. I’d wake up and think, “My God, I live in Brentwood.”

  * * *

  —

  In late 1976, opportunity had come knocking in the unlikely form of a fifty-two-year-old bon vivant named Marty Baum, an agent with his own shop and a beguiling line of blarney. He had a strong if graying list led by Peter Sellers, Rod Steiger, Carroll O’Connor, Sidney Poitier, Julie Andrews, Blake Edwards, and Joanne Woodward. Marty felt lonely and wanted to join us. We debated for months. Would Marty’s aging clients help or hurt our image? Could he share his list and adapt to our collective culture?

  We decided to make him a full one-sixth partner and never regretted it. He gave us a big foot in the door in films; his clients, whom he generously shared or outright handed over to the rest of us, made CAA a contender. And he made us all acquainted with haute cuisine. He didn’t regret it, either; in five years, he went from $100,000 a year to $500,000.

  Marty set me up with James Clavell, the bestselling author of King Rat and Tai-Pan. Clavell’s latest opus was Shōgun, a sprawling historical novel about an English naval pilot shipwrecked in seventeenth-century Japan. The creator of these exotic tales led a simple life on Mulholland Drive. He rose each morning at 5:30, had coffee, took a walk, and was at his typewriter by 7:00. He worked till noon, when he went to lunch at Yamamoto’s in Century City. We first met at Yamamoto’s sushi bar, my initiation into eating raw fish. I liked the menu and the company so much that we met there several times a month for close to twenty years.

  James was a proper British gentleman, all double-breasted blue blazers and bone-dry humor. He was tall and imposing despite a limp that required him to use a cane, a memento of his time as a Japanese prisoner of war. After a few pieces of tuna sashimi, he asked me to read Shōgun, which had bounced around town for years. The studios were always alarmed by its length: twelve hundred pages.

  I packed the paperback on a weekend ski trip. At first I struggled to keep the dozens of characters straight and to pierce the thicket of Japanese names, but by page eighty I was hooked. When Judy got annoyed that I was responding to her only with grunts, I ripped out the first chapter and passed it over. We spent a few hours on the slopes and the rest on the couch, literally tearing through Shōgun.

  Marty and I talked the book up to the director Richard “Dickie” Attenborough, another Baum client, and then Dickie gave it to Robert Bolt, the screenwriter who wrote Lawrence of Arabia. We pitched the package of Attenborough and Bolt and Sean Connery and the book to Barry Diller and Michael Eisner at Paramount, who agreed to develop it. Dickie’s theory was that Shōgun could be squeezed into a two-and-a-half-hour film by leaving some big chunks aside for sequels. But the book was just too big to generate a tidy script. Our package fell apart.

  Like most of America during the last week of January 1977, I had spent my evenings glued to Roots, the landmark miniseries about black America. ABC aired it for twelve hours over eight consecutive nights and garnered record ratings. A hundred million viewers watched the finale, the largest television audience in history. It hit me—why couldn’t we do the same with Shōgun?

  James Clavell was horrified. He was a cinephile who’d written the screenplay for The Great Escape and directed six movies. “Television will ruin my book!” he declared.

  Only a miniseries, I insisted, could do justice to Shōgun’s scope and sweep. With the author’s extremely doubtful approval, Bill Haber and I went to Paramount to meet with Michael Eisner and Gary Nardino, who ran the studio’s television division. Gary was eager to bring the project to the networks. We began at ABC, our best buyer, but they turned us down. CBS said the same thing: “We don’t think Americans care much about Asia.”

  But Deanne Barkley, the head of TV movies at NBC, fell for James’s novel and ordered twelve hours. Her faith was tested when the new writers adopted the perspective of John Blackthorne, the British sailor trapped in the East. To make Blackthorne’s bewilderment hit home, they had the Japanese characters speak in Japanese without subtitles. It was avant-garde for prime time, but we backed the writers and Deanne backed us.

  NBC budgeted Shōgun at a lavish $22 million, which allowed it to be filmed in Japan
and to therefore look and feel like an event. Paramount stepped up and agreed to “deficit” the project, by funding any overage in the production costs (they expected to make their money back by selling syndication rights worldwide, after NBC’s first two runs of the series). We were on our way.

  Deanne and our agency disagreed just once, over who should play Blackthorne. The network wanted Richard Chamberlain, best known as a teen heartthrob in the sixties’ medical show Dr. Kildare. I thought he was light for the role, but I was proved wrong. Richard’s vulnerability made the character work. A virile, swashbuckling Blackthorne like Sean Connery wouldn’t have been as sympathetic.

  Shōgun’s first night, a three-hour installment in September 1980, told us we had a hit. Viewers loved the romance, the loyalties, and the betrayals—the Asian soap opera of it all—and they made it one of the highest-rated programs in NBC’s history. (It remains the second-most-watched miniseries, after Roots.) Shōgun triggered a run of bestseller adaptations and helped set off the American craze for sushi. Never again would a network claim its viewers were indifferent to Asia.

  James was gratified by the show’s fidelity to his novel. He liked it even better when more than three million Shōgun paperbacks sold within a week of the last installment. He especially got a kick out of the “bumper” credits we’d negotiated. At each commercial break, the screen read “James Clavell’s Shōgun.” When the show returned, viewers saw a second card: “James Clavell’s Shōgun continues.” It was one of our earliest efforts to brand our clients.

  A week after Shōgun concluded, James called and asked to see me the next day. “The usual place?” I said.

  “No, I want to meet at the McDonald’s on Ventura Boulevard, off Van Nuys.”

  “What?”

  He started laughing. “Be there at 8:30 tomorrow morning.”

  I walked into the McDonald’s in one of my better blue suits and found myself underdressed. There was James at a booth in his blazer, ascot, and creased gray slacks, his cane at his side. Before him were two trays. Each held a cup of coffee and an Egg McMuffin.

  I sat down and he handed over an envelope. I sliced it open and found a check with a dizzying number of zeroes made out to Creative Artists Agency. James had persuaded Paramount to allow him to deliver our $1 million package commission. It was by far the biggest payday we’d ever had—nearly $3 million in today’s money.

  Shōgun had languished at William Morris for three years. CAA got it made. Never mind that the deal almost fell apart twenty times; deals always almost fall apart twenty times. That was the first time we took a client’s far-fetched dream and made it come true.

  * * *

  —

  In 1978, Andrea Eastman, an ICM agent I respected, told me, “You guys should be in the movie business. The way you work would be a breath of fresh air.” Ron and I had been discussing that possibility, and Andrea’s remark made us revisit the matter. But first, we wondered, why had she said that? Agents always had an agenda; there were no genuine compliments or candid suggestions. Was she trying to get us to stop focusing on TV, where we were starting to kill it? Was ICM planning a raid on our television talent? What was her nefarious plan? It turned out, astonishingly, that Andrea was just being honest and generous.

  Ron told me, “We should split this up. You do movies, and I’ll straddle movies, doing film actors and TV.” We were going after ICM, which had all the stars except those represented by Stan Kamen at WMA. In those days, the focus of representation was the social life: ICM’s Sue Mengers would sign you, then invite you to the cocaine parties at her house in Beverly Hills. She’d also gossip about you—she called her stars “sparklies”—to her other clients. We built our business as her opposite: we’d take tables in the back of restaurants, where we couldn’t be overheard, lean in, and present ourselves as very square. “You won’t have a big social life with us,” I’d say. “We’re here to make you independent in every direction, to strategize for you. So what are your dreams?” We didn’t bad-mouth Sue, or anyone else, but the unspoken message of our presentation was “Can any other agency deliver ten people who’ve already had a premeeting about how to move your career ahead?” Later on, before every meeting we took with our clients, I’d send a memo out to everyone in the company even faintly or potentially involved in his or her work, trawling for ideas, and we always had a minimum of five people in the room.

  Hollywood was an archipelago of talent, thousands of separate islands—but directors and stars were the keystone islands. We needed to build bridges and connect the islands to make packages, which would turn us into a kind of studio. To get actors, we needed directors, because directors had the stars in their pockets: Sydney Pollack had Redford and Martin Scorsese had De Niro. I wrote a list of the directors I wanted and thought I could conceivably get, many of them in comedy, which wasn’t taken seriously in the agency world. (Though Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau had made a fortune for WMA, agents there never treated them accordingly.) My directors list included Steve Gordon, Albert Brooks, Ivan Reitman, Sydney Pollack, and—here I was dreaming, though the dream would eventually come to pass—Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick.

  I was beginning to believe that I could converse with those guys, because when we launched CAA, I had started a private project (one that took me ten years) of watching every film that had won one of the five big-category Oscars. I discovered why Gone with the Wind had passed the test of time and How Green Was My Valley hadn’t; I learned the relationship between vision and craft. At the same time, I was boning up on the deal structure of movies and on which actors and directors had currency. Film had its own language, and I needed to be bilingual.

  But to get to the directors, there was a further step: we needed writers and their material. Directors wanted great material a lot more than they wanted to chat with me about the opening crane shot in Touch of Evil. The easiest way to make some headway through this obstacle course was to turn our television writers into movie writers and directors. I encouraged Barry Levinson to write a screenplay based on his youth in Baltimore, and he came up with Diner, his debut as a film director.

  The second easiest way was to turn other agencies’ television writers into movie writers and directors. We wooed Steve Gordon, a TV writer with a screenplay about a millionaire alcoholic with a romantic dilemma. Steve’s agents at ICM couldn’t or wouldn’t sell it. I sent the script to United Artists, which ordered the movie with Steve attached to direct. After Arthur became a surprise hit, Steve signed with us. We’d poach by assumption: behave as if we were the client’s agent already, make their dream happen, and then they’d sign. Tragically, the following year, weeks after we had attached Steve to a comedy with Robert Redford, he had a fatal heart attack at forty-four. I was close to Steve, and his death stunned me. But I’m now astonished when I realize how quickly I put it behind me and got back to work building CAA. It took half a day. Don’t look back; someone was definitely going to be gaining on us.

  To get to writers, you often had to get to the executives they trusted. Marty Baum introduced me to Ted Ashley, the dashing ex-agent who’d become the chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Ted was the guy in our business; early in my career I’d visited his penthouse at the Sherry-Netherland and marveled at a Rothko on the wall. Then he took me to La Côte Basque, where I watched in awe as he slid the maître d’ a hundred-dollar bill.

  Now, a few years later, Ted had heard that I was one of the rising new breed, along with Barry Diller, David Geffen, Michael Eisner, and Terry Semel, so he put me together with John Calley, Warner’s cultured, soft-spoken production head. John had an artist’s eye and ear. Directors loved him, and he was especially tight with Sydney Pollack and Mike Nichols and Clint Eastwood. When I learned that John was a speed-reader, I began shipping him three or four Mort Janklow specials per week. Most had no future on the screen, but John finished every one. I sent him piles of scripts, whatever I could lay my hands o
n. John appreciated the attention and guided his friend Bob Towne, the community’s most prestigious screenwriter, to CAA. It was one of the great favors of my life. Towne, who wrote such legendary scripts as Shampoo and Chinatown, was friends with other A-listers like Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. Having him as a client gave me instant credibility: now I could make bold plans about whom to go after next.

  No good deed in Hollywood goes unpunished. A few years later I met with Calley on Towne’s deal for Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, a hot property. While his associates were based in Warner’s administration building, John worked out of a bungalow nearby. He met me at his door in a cardigan and Hush Puppies and welcomed me inside. Logs crackled in the fireplace, and Mozart wafted from the stereo.

  “John,” I said, “I’m trying to make a deal for Bob, but Frank Wells”—the studio’s president—“is killing me, and I can’t get it done. I don’t know what to do.” We had asked for gross-profit participation, but Wells was offering only net. Gross was our holy grail, because the box-office receipts established how much the studio owed your client; net was nearly worthless, as studios took so many deductions in their accounting that they somehow never showed any profits. As one of David Mamet’s characters says in his play Speed-the-Plow, “Two things I’ve learned, twenty-five years in the entertainment industry. . . . The first one is: there is no net.” (A beat later, he adds, “And I forget the second one.”)

  “That goddamned Wells!” John exclaimed. “What an asshole! He’s too tough on the artists we love and need. You walk over there. I’m going to call him right now.”

  I said, “John, I can’t thank you enough. This is unbelievable.”

  “No, no, not at all!”

  As I walked out, I passed John’s open window. He was on the phone with his back to me. “Frank,” I heard him say, “Ovitz is on his way over. Kill him.”