Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  Matters came to a head in a conference call with Dick Donner. Dick had used me as a sounding board since Superman. Now, as he was transitioning between Zig and CAA, he had asked us for comments on Inside Moves, an original screenplay by Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin. As Dick and Steve and I talked through the script, I realized that something was off. Steve was parroting whatever Dick said. Forty-five minutes in, Dick asked, “What do you guys think about the scene where the nun gets raped on top of the bar? I’m worried it breaks the tone of the movie.”

  There was no such scene in Inside Moves—no nun at all, in fact. Before I could jump in, Steve said, “Dick, I agree with you a hundred percent.” Dick Donner, a total sweetheart, hung up and then took his phone off the hook. We couldn’t reach him for two days.

  Steve Roth, it turned out, did not really like to read—or, for that matter, work. He began to remind Ron and me of the rich brats in the Morris mailroom. I went to Frank Price, Columbia’s chairman and CEO, for a favor, as we had a couple of pictures in the pipeline with him, including Tootsie and Stripes. One week later Steve moved to the Columbia lot to begin work on his new production deal. We didn’t usually fire people at CAA, but we did ease them out—and into positions where they could help us.

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  The time I put in wooing Sydney Pollack was the best investment I ever made. He became my friend, my mentor, and my calling card. Two weeks after I signed him, we bought another red ad in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter for Robert Redford, as big a star as there was. The entertainment business was an infrared system. When you got hot, people gravitated toward your heat, which made you hotter. Along with Sean and Dustin, landing Sydney and Bob vaulted CAA into contender status with ICM and William Morris. In 1979, when I moved full time into film, television accounted for 90 percent of the agency’s revenue. By 1982, 60 percent of our business was in film; we rapidly became players where it counted most.

  Ron Meyer began calling me Rumpelstiltskin. “There goes Rumpelstiltskin,” he’d say, “turning shit into gold.” In the original fable, it was straw, but like any great agent, Ron improved things in the telling. In dealing with the studios, Ron and I developed an effective one-two punch. After I opened with a hard line, asking for an amount somewhere between more than we expected to get and ridiculous, execs would back-channel Ron and say, “My God, he asked for six million for Warren Beatty against ten of the gross”—meaning 10 percent. “Can you help us out?” Ron would smooth their feathers and say, “I’ll talk to him,” or “Try this.” After they called me back, I’d tell Ron where things stood for the next round. On occasion I would offer a small concession. More often I’d hold firm and close the deal where I started, but the buyers always felt better because they’d been listened to. They never seemed to get that Ron was my agent.

  Yet there wasn’t a day when I didn’t walk in the door and get hit by a rush of anxiety. What idea can I come up with today to pay the overhead? There’d be the adrenaline rush when we sent out the internal memo, “Robert Redford is now a client.” Fifteen minutes later it was, What next? In 1979, when I was thirty-three, Ted Ashley at Warner Bros. took me aside and said, “I’m going to give you some great advice.” He grinned ruefully. “And, knowing you, you’re not going to take it. But here it is: I could have worked ten percent less, and it wouldn’t have made a difference in my professional success. But I would have been a lot happier.”

  Ted was absolutely right on both counts—it was great advice, and I didn’t take it. I see now that I could have worked as much as 20 percent less, and it wouldn’t have cost me. If I’d worked even 10 percent less, across thirty years, that’s three whole extra years of life I’d have enjoyed. On the other hand, Ted himself stepped down from Warner Bros. at a relatively young age, in his late fifties, and when I saw him a few years later, I was stunned by how listless he seemed.

  I had no interest in retiring young after midlevel success. The same year that Ted gave me the advice on slowing down, he put me in a room with Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Bros., in New York. Steve was a visionary. He was tough, forceful, generous, and impossibly charming—hard as nails yet widely liked. Starting with a few parking lots, he had bought and sold his way to the very top of the media and entertainment industries.

  Ted wanted me to come to Warner, and I was flattered. But only five years into CAA I knew I wasn’t ready for a studio position. “I’m really not that interested,” I told Steve.

  “Well, what job are you interested in?” he asked.

  “Yours. I want to learn everything I can, and then someday I’d like to have your job.”

  He laughed. “That’s the answer I was hoping for,” he said. Instead of feeling threatened or offended, he found my ambition refreshing—the sign of a true leader. I took note of that quality, and tried to mirror Steve’s best aspects at CAA.

  It was hard to feel as relaxed as Steve seemed, though. Even when I’d visit an art gallery, and find myself blessedly unreachable, in those days before cell phones, I’d feel a stabbing anxiety in my gut because I knew twenty-five people were trying to reach me. Your clients burn through your energy, your expertise, your joy. For every Dusty Hoffman with a wife and five great kids, there are a hundred more who have only an all-consuming need for attention. If you’re that kind of emotional gypsy, then the Sunday brunches at the Scientology building begin to look pretty good.

  When Ron and I were in New York, one weekend in 1979, I suggested we take a walk in Central Park. I told him, softly but firmly, that the ownership structure of our company was way off. Rowland wasn’t bringing in any income, and Mike, who’d always hoped that CAA would be a boutique agency, was clearly sidling toward the exit. I said that if I didn’t get more than the 16.67 percent that each of the six partners owned, I’d have to consider other options. I knew Ron wouldn’t want to jeopardize what we’d built. He often acted as my agent with the others, breaking tough news to them (or from them to me). He enjoyed being the Ovitz whisperer, so I was confident he’d deliver on my ask. And, indeed, when he spoke with the others, they took the obvious point that I had clearly become the firm’s leader. I replaced Rowland as the firm’s president, and got a larger allocation of shares. In 1982, Mike would retire and we’d buy out his shares for $750,000.

  Professionally, mission accomplished. Emotionally, though, I had just hit the self-destruct button—only it would take sixteen years to go off. Bill Haber never forgave me; he would later say, “Agreeing to give to Michael some of my own shares is the only professional regret I have in my life.”

  Even worse, I never suggested to Ron that his stake also be increased—I wasn’t emotionally aware enough to realize that he’d feel slighted if I moved up and he didn’t. Ron wanted Bill’s shares, and he wanted him gone.

  The problem was that Bill was a magnificent head of television. Like Howard West, he could look at a raw idea and turn it into a TV show. He gave better notes on scripts than many a producer or network exec. But Bill wasn’t good with younger agents: he was always giving them pop quizzes, asking, “What show has an opening for such-and-such director?” And even in the early days he’d take long weekends—later, they would turn into long weekends at his Paris home or his château in the Loire Valley. What’s more, several times a year some minor issue would make him send us an overwrought letter of resignation announcing that he was going to go work with blind children or help save the bats from extinction. Bill just wanted to be heard and respected—to be courted a little—but Ron yearned to call his bluff.

  We had poached Lee Gabler from ICM to be Bill’s number two, in case Bill made good on his next threat to leave. Ron looked at Lee and saw Bill’s replacement, but I didn’t want to mess with our success. I wanted everything to stay the same, except that I’d get more. What I should have done for Ron was give him some of my own allocation of shares, and then figure out how to handle Bill. To really be his blood brot
her, I should have behaved as his agent.

  Bill never had an inkling of Ron’s animus. I was amazed at how well Ron hid his true feelings from someone he saw every day.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE SECOND VALLEY

  CAA had four commandments: (1) Never lie to your clients or colleagues. (2) Return every call by end of day (or at least have your assistant buy you a day’s grace). (3) Follow up and don’t leave people guessing. Every desk phone at CAA bore the message COMMUNICATE. After our Fred Specktor heard me use that word in every speech I gave, he stuck the plaques on Ron’s phone and mine—and when we admired them, he stuck them on everyone’s phone. It was our version of IBM’s famous imperative to THINK.

  The last commandment, and the hardest one to follow, was (4) Never bad-mouth the competition. Gossip was a tool of the trade. Other agencies routinely disparaged soon-to-be-released films by directors they hoped to sign. The performances stink. The studio’s pulling back on publicity. It won’t make a dime. The worse the buzz and the weaker the box office, the more open a director might be to changing representation. But if you were confident about your own work, why snipe? Why tear down someone you’re hoping to be in business with? We built our company around positive thinking. We had no hierarchy, no titles, no reporting lines, no nameplates. We killed ourselves to take everyone’s point of view in meetings, to make everyone feel empowered.

  CAA had no formal business hours. If the partners’ cars were in the garage at 8:00 in the morning, so were everybody else’s. When I made my evening rounds at 7:00, 80 percent of our people were at their desks. The work was the thing. We even had a no-fly-by-day rule: if you flew to New York, you took the red-eye so you didn’t waste a workday in the air. Ron and I would park our cars in the number one and number two spots and leave them there when we walked to business dinners, before coming back to retrieve them. We worked insanely hard, but we fostered the illusion of working impossibly hard. I believed momentum was everything—once a company relaxed, it was done for.

  The lack of hierarchy was a myth, of course, a management tool. Nothing happened that Ron and Bill and I didn’t want to have happen. We were democratic dictators. I thought of creating our corporate culture as akin to making a giant pointillist painting, dabbing in a million dots that, when you stood back, came into focus as a coherent picture. Each dot was a detail. For instance, we took great pains in our hiring: everyone we brought on had been interviewed by the whole company first, so we had across the board buy-in. And I wrote memos to everyone about everything: the advantages of Pan Am over Continental for flights to New York; the imperative need to look for “any post–1900 female biographical characters that have not been covered in the media” for our client Sally Field to play; specifications for the cake for Marty Scorsese’s fiftieth birthday party (“Marty likes chocolate and is not averse to coconut”); even how to get Zegna suits at cost plus $200 so we’d all look sharp (“If you are interested, I will set up an appointment for my oldest friend Steve Stearns to come into the office with all of the fabrics for the fall line. If you are not interested, I do not care.”). Sending out ten or more such memos every day, getting every detail just so, was extraordinarily time-consuming. But time was our nest egg.

  Our corporate culture was American team sports boosterism mixed with Spartan military tactics mixed with Asian philosophy, all overlaid by the communitarian spirit of the Three Musketeers. That culture was a collective endeavor, and one that hundreds of people shaped and defined over the years. But among the partners I gave the most thought to what it should be. I scraped from an eclectic variety of sources, a businessman’s version of Picasso’s method. From law firms, I took our phraseology—Ron was a partner, and so were the people in the mailroom—and also the paramount importance of confidentiality. Our collaborative approach came from the way Magic Johnson ran his fast break with the Lakers. He’d drive it up the middle, have an open shot, and pass it up to feed an unguarded teammate. Who wouldn’t kill to play with that point guard? At staff meetings and retreats, I began to talk about the philosophy of the Chinese general and military strategist Sun Tzu, whose The Art of War I’d read in college. We took his ideas on loyalty, on teamwork, and on how having complete information was the key to decision making. The book also resonated with me because it prioritized strength and toughness. Ron and Bill thought my emphasis on Sun Tzu was crazy, until they realized that it worked—that our team bought in. In truth, though, the Chinese general was always a bit of a prop. It wasn’t so much what he said that inspired CAA, as the idea that we, a five-year-old company, were adhering to a philosophy from 2,500 years earlier. It gave us instant roots.

  I was obsessed with the Spartan phalanx, the idea that you were only as strong as the colleague on your left. We’d go to meetings as a group, we’d go to screenings as a group, walking down the aisles together half an hour early, ten or fifteen strong, a show of power. I drove our people hard to sign at least two clients a week, and after we got up and running, our signing machinery was a thing of beauty. Let’s say you were a promising screenwriter and I met you at a dinner at Morton’s. I’d call you the next day for a quick chat—not about wanting to represent you, but about the virtues of your work (which three of our literary agents would have briefed me on). I’d casually toss in the names of a few well-known actors and directors who’d be a perfect fit with your sensibility. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you’d want to talk some more, and I’d suggest lunch or a drink. There we’d talk further about your work and your hopes and dreams. The killer move, as you got up from the table or were handing your parking ticket to the valet, was to say, “Why don’t you come in and meet our crew?”

  A few days later, when you drove in, one of our parking concierges (who’d been given a photo of you) would open your car door, greet you with a big smile, and say, “Mr./Ms. X, great to see you. Really hope you join the family!” or “Hope you have a great meeting!” (They switched up the patter to keep from going stale.) An assistant would escort you to the conference room, where five to ten poised, well-dressed agents would be waiting. They’d already have had a premeeting to script the ideas we’d be presenting, and now, for an hour, they’d pepper you with notions for developing your books and screenplays and shower you with the names of our clients who were eager to be in your films. At the end, we’d finally say, “We want to represent you.” It was hard to resist. If you raised a serious issue—“I’d love to, guys, but I just signed with ICM for two years”—we’d always say, “Not a problem, we’ll deal with it.” We’d let ICM commission you for those two years as we packaged your work with our other clients, playing the long game.

  Clients would often have five of our agents in their lives. Robert Redford, for instance, had Tina Nides as his literary agent, Sandy Climan providing strategy, David O’Connor as his daily point person, Jay Moloney routinely involved as my assistant, and me available when necessary. Usually clients would gradually gravitate to one agent for most conversations—though if that relationship soured, we had multiple backups ready to step in. Our point of differentiation was that a client got regular phone calls from not one but several agents—all coordinated among the client’s team with the interoffice memos we called buck slips. You just can’t beat five with one. All of our agents really did represent all of our clients. (Of course, this sometimes led to individual CAA agents feeling individually responsible for a given client’s success, and claiming solo credit later. That wasn’t how it was supposed to work—but it was an uptown problem.)

  We told our agents that they were never not on stage, seven days and seven nights a week. There was no explicit dress code, but you knew you had to dress the way we did, and keep your private life as well as your business private. When we hired Rick Nicita from William Morris, he asked if he had to wear a suit; in those days you’d see other agencies’ agents wearing corduroy blazers, and even an occasional suede elbow patch. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t
want to do,” I said evenly. Rick showed up in a suit. Only the music division dressed down—formality didn’t play with their artists.

  We had group meetings every day, and sometimes twice a day, to ensure that we were all on song. I also did rounds twice a day, like a doctor, carrying a sheaf of papers so it looked like I was going into a meeting—when actually I was gauging the general mood and taking note of anyone who seemed out of sorts. I viewed our people as my children, and for the first ten years I’d call every employee who didn’t show up at work to make sure they were okay and to see if they needed anything, from chicken soup to a good divorce lawyer. I did it out of concern, but I also wanted them to know I was keeping a watchful eye. Our idea was to make everyone feel that our building was a comfort zone—and to balance that with a little anxiety should they step outside the building. We wanted the “Don’t cross those guys!” message to be as obvious as a flashing sign at the border.

  Yet our MO was to be attentive, polite, and well informed. I wanted worldliness to be one of a CAA agent’s defining qualities—Be able to talk knowledgeably about what your clients love. This will encompass pretty much everything. I insisted that our agents have a reading list: one national newspaper, one international newsmagazine, and one special-interest magazine, such as Golf Digest. I had two hundred magazine subscriptions, and I’d skim the magazines as I was on the phone, everything from Redbook to Road & Track. I got a lot of flak about all this homework, but I remember feeling vindicated when Mike Menchel, a twenty-six-year-old agent, came with me to Aspen for the opening of a play Robin Williams was in. Mike walked up to Jack Nicholson and offered him a light, then chatted with him about golf and the Lakers—two of Jack’s favorite topics.

  I told our staff we should know about every news story days or weeks before it was in Variety. The trick was to find the hidden mother lodes of information, and to do that we had to exploit a niche the rest had overlooked. Ron and Bill and I began by handling studio executives’ own employment contracts, as we’d long done for TV execs. We took no fees for this; we were after something more valuable—an inside track. The vice presidents we handled would give us tips and take a second look at our clients. Then we shared those tips with the most powerful people in town. In the preemail era, when people were flooded by phone messages, which calls did they return first? CAA’s, on the chance they might learn something useful.