Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  Soon we represented so many executives that we could see the entire chessboard. The instant we sensed someone was unhappy we’d be thinking about where to move them, and whom to move into their place. We knew about openings before the executives themselves did. That’s how we helped move Les Moonves from Warner to run CBS, Brandon Tartikoff from NBC to Paramount, and Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner from ABC to their own production company, with a CAA-brokered guarantee for several pilots from their former employer. I would often tell our agents to watch a space: “In thirty to sixty days, something big will happen at Paramount.” If I was quietly settling Frank Mancuso’s dispute with Marty Davis about his severance pay, and Variety ran a story that Frank was going to sue Marty, I’d say “Don’t count on it.” I enjoyed seeming all-knowing, the great Oz, but the real point was to signal our agents that we were working at a level above their heads—that if they were planning to leave for a studio job, for instance, we’d know before they’d even discussed their contract.

  We drilled into everyone that they were rewarded by how the company did, and how they worked with their associates. The weakest link broke the chain; being human and fallible broke the chain. It was a tough business—Freddie Fields and the producer Ray Stark were tough sons of bitches, and you had to be just as tough, or tougher, to earn their respect. So I aimed for us to seem formidable. Regrettably, we overshot the mark and became fearsome.

  * * *

  —

  Judy and I put off having children while we built CAA. I was thirty-three in 1980, when Chris, our firstborn, arrived at Cedars Sinai. As I giddily counted fingers and toes, my priorities changed forever. Before Chris, I thought only of work. After Chris came along—followed by Kimberly in 1983 and Eric in 1986—I still worked weekends but I strove to carve out regular family time. I wanted us to raise our children the way my parents had raised Mark and me, with stable routines and rituals (and without the live-in grandmother). The big deals in Encino were Little League, backyard barbecues at sundown, and street ball with my father and my friends. How could we replicate that experience in Brentwood, with kids who grew up around limos and private planes—and with a father who was overbooked before he woke up? I didn’t want them to feel entitled or neglected.

  After considerable trial and error, Judy and I came up with a system that seemed to work, more or less. On weekdays, we’d do whatever CAA required—my lunatic daily scheduling, our evening entertaining. But on weekends we’d revert to the ’50s, with consistent parental involvement. Save for an awards show or a formal dinner, we took Chris with us in his baby basket wherever we went. He traveled to Europe and Hawaii before his first birthday, and so did Kim and Eric before theirs. The problem with this throwback arrangement was that Judy ended up being largely responsible for raising the kids. She became the one in charge of feelings and emotions—of daily life—and I was left as the planner, scripting where we should all be going.

  I repeatedly told our kids that I didn’t want them going into entertainment. For one thing, I didn’t think they’d get a fair shake, given the overhang of my reputation. For another, I privately worried that they’d never achieve as much as I had: the kids of agents who followed them into the business never seemed to live up to their fathers’ reputations.

  Each of our kids reacted to my growing public profile differently. Chris had Judy’s sensitivity and my fire; an excellent baseball player at John Thomas Dye, he expressed himself physically—I remember feeling stunned when I saw him hit a ball out of the schoolyard in sixth grade. Where did he get such easy power? But when his classmates made cracks about CAA or my success, parroting their parents, Chris would start throwing punches. That same sixth-grade year, his best friend’s father and I got called in to the school because our sons had gotten into a fight with some kids who’d pushed them down. The vice principal told us that the school didn’t tolerate violence. I said, “We agree. But what if someone is aggressive toward you first?” Calmly and methodically, point by point, we turned the discussion around until the vice principal let the matter drop. I thought, at the time, that I’d done a great job for my son.

  When Chris was fifteen, I took him out for sushi to a little hole-in-the-wall place we liked called Asakuma. I was lecturing him about art, trying to interest him in it, and he was obviously just humoring me. Growing nettled, I said, “You know, your dad and his agency represent Michael Jackson and Madonna and Bill Murray and the Smashing Pumpkins. Your dad is actually kind of cool!” He looked up from his miso soup, smiling a little, and said, “Yeah, Dad, I got it.” We both laughed. I was selling my son on me—selling him on the idea that I was contemporary and hip and that I knew exactly what he was thinking, which was totally untrue.

  I was furious when Chris transferred his sophomore year from Brown University to UCLA, where his girlfriend was. My dream was that he’d get the Ivy League education I never did. He didn’t have a dream—he had a girlfriend. I begged him not to go to UCLA; then I begged him not to go to film school afterward; then I begged him not to go to business school; then I begged him not to take a job as an exec at Paramount—the entertainment business, after all my warnings! I lost every argument. He had inherited my hardheadedness.

  Kim was the most like me—inquisitive and no-nonsense and highly opinionated—except that she was female and an excellent horseback rider. She was entranced by fashion from an early age: when she was nine we found tear sheets from all the women’s magazines buried in her closet, alongside her sketches for her own clothing line. She turned her back on all the entertainment-world hoopla, the movie stars over for dinner. When she was at NYU, later, she walked into the dorm one day and the security guard said, “Hey, did you see your dad was in the paper again?”—a reference to a front-page New York Times story about CAA and our work for MGM. Kim didn’t say a word, but that afternoon she applied to transfer to Brown. She needed to find her own way, a trait I recognized and admired, even as it left me feeling forlorn. Was I driving her away?

  When she was at Brown, I came to the campus to interview Martin Scorsese about creativity, and afterward, at a table with the school’s trustees, I did what I always do—asked questions of everyone, getting them talking about themselves so they’d give me a clue or two that would enable me to pretend I knew of them, even if I hadn’t the faintest idea who they were. Kim, who was at my table, watched these exchanges carefully. Afterward, she told me, “That was a great lesson—how you made everyone feel comfortable and important, while you were learning everything you needed.”

  Eric, our youngest, required the least maintenance. He used verbal judo to deflect any reference to what I did, and always seemed warm and self-confident. He had a quiet forcefulness. But he hated his school, Harvard-Westlake, and in tenth grade he came to me and insisted that we visit some boarding schools in the East, far, far away. He ended up at a school in Connecticut, and then at Northwestern University. He never liked CAA or the powerful, warping force field of the entertainment world, and was much happier thousands of miles from it. Where I always worked hard to seem unruffled by life, Eric was genuinely unruffled by it. I admired that about him—how did he end up so relaxed?

  My kids all turned out well, but looking back I can see that my occasional impulse to treat them as clients was a really dumb idea. It was almost impossible for me to turn off my agenting impulses: “Here are your strengths, but here’s what you could do better. Come here with me, meet these people, and that will set you up to do X and Y.” I worked on my clients during the week, and my kids on the weekend.

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  —

  We decided that another royal road to talent lay through comedy. The focus of our efforts was Saturday Night Live, where producer Lorne Michaels had assembled the crackerjack Not Ready for Prime Time Players: Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, and (in season two) Bill Murray. After the show’s debut, in 1975, its stars became the Beatles of television. They could l
ift CAA to a new level if we could sign them. Unfortunately, a manager-producer named Bernie Brillstein represented Lorne and had dibs on most of the show’s cast, including Aykroyd and Belushi. Chevy Chase, SNL’s first breakout star, had his own manager and agent. Bill Murray, a free spirit, had no one, but we didn’t yet represent anyone he trusted who’d vouch for us. So we stayed patient, waiting.

  In June 1979, Michael Eisner invited me to a Paramount screening of Meatballs, a low-budget summer-camp farce with Bill Murray in his first lead role. The director was a Canadian named Ivan Reitman. Meatballs was the funniest thing I’d seen since Animal House, the fraternity farce Ivan had produced the year before. I introduced myself to Ivan and set a meeting through his lawyer, Tom Pollock. Ivan was a very desirable commercial talent: Animal House and Meatballs earned their budgets back thirty times over because he knew what audiences wanted. At our meeting, though, he immediately asked, “What can you do that I can’t do for myself? I find my own material, and I don’t need anybody to get me work.” All my talk of strategy and positioning, all my promises of synergies with our team and other clients, seemed to fall on deaf ears. Afterward I told Tom, “Too bad—but thanks, anyway.”

  Tom said, “Ivan really liked you.”

  “Right.”

  “No, really!”

  It turned out that Ivan was as good as I was at keeping his feelings hidden. After CAA signed him, we had someone to vouch for us with Bill Murray. Ron, our best closer, met with Bill in New York. But for some reason they didn’t click; Bill was one of the few who remained uncharmed, unseduced. “We just kept walking around,” Ron told me. “Why don’t you take a shot?”

  On my next trip to New York, I called Bill and said, “Where would you like to meet?”

  He said, “Grant’s Tomb at 11:00,” and hung up.

  It took me two cabbies to get dropped near a pillared mausoleum in Riverside Park. Bill was waiting there. Without saying much, he took off walking, destination unknown. I tagged along. It was clear he didn’t want to be sold, he just wanted to see what I was like. So for seven hours we hiked through the city, with breaks for lunch and dinner. We talked about the Yankees and Bill’s hometown football team, the Bears, about children and humor and life.

  As Bill was assessing me, I was assessing him, and realizing that his fans had misread him. He didn’t want to be a comedian; he wanted to be a great actor. Left to his own devices, he might have stuck to character roles in small quirky films. He was a free spirit who tried to make daily life into a movie scene, with the crucial difference that there was no script, so anything could happen. That afternoon he ordered a cup of coffee at a diner and said, “Good party,” totally deadpan, and the server cracked up. Even crossing the street became an exercise in improv theater.

  I was hardly Mr. Spontaneity, but I really warmed to Bill’s random acts of curiosity, and for some reason he warmed to me, even after we started talking business about six hours in. Of all my clients, I was always most comfortable with the people in comedy, starting with Barry Levinson, and continuing with Robin Williams, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and David Letterman. Perhaps it was because, like me, they were totally self-made and lived entirely by their wits. And of all of them, I was the most deeply, instantly comfortable with Bill Murray. He was extremely bright, startlingly well read, remarkably easy to talk to, and genuinely sympathetic.

  I knew that commercial would be a dirty word to Bill, but I told him it was also a magic word. “Look,” I said, “you need a couple of heavy-duty commercial movies first, to establish yourself in the marketplace, and then you can make anything you want.” We followed that plan for fifteen years, setting up hits like Stripes and Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day while allowing Bill time to make personal films like Mad Dog and Glory. Sometimes we knocked heads. The Razor’s Edge, based on Bill’s favorite Somerset Maugham novel, had to be rammed down Columbia’s throat. It was a complete downer, and I believed Bill’s fans would be nonplussed. Bill was too young to be doing brilliant but esoteric work; there was plenty of time for him to get there, transitioning his audience slowly. But there comes a point where an agent must bow to a client’s wishes, if he wants to remain that client’s agent.

  Ron told me I’d fallen in love with Bill—and he was right. Over the years, I helped talk Bill through two divorces, but he also became one of the very few clients I could unload my problems on. We usually hung out in Manhattan, meeting at a spot he chose at the last minute. Because he didn’t like driving, we’d walk, me in a suit and Bill in some outfit like plaid shorts and a purple shirt. We’d stop at two or three restaurants for a drink so he could gauge the vibe before he chose one and settled in. He knew every doorman and maître d’ by name, and tables always materialized. Once we joined a five-deep crowd outside a tiny place on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Bill flagged down the owner and ordered wine for everyone waiting on the sidewalk. By the time they squeezed a table for us into the middle of the restaurant, people were having too much fun to care that we’d cut the line.

  Around this time my son Chris, who was six, exhibited some worrisome neurological symptoms, and I took him to a specialist at Yale for tests. I was feeling anxious and low when Bill surprised me by showing up at my ratty New Haven hotel. He stayed for two days until the worst was ruled out. His compassion didn’t stop with his friends. He passed out tens and twenties to homeless people as we walked and often knew their names. But he was nobody’s patsy. On the Upper West Side once, after we passed a man with a cup, Bill turned to yell, “Don’t you fucking try to steal money from people who need it!”

  The man said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Murray, I’m really sorry.”

  A few yards on, I asked, “What was that about?”

  “He had two-hundred-dollar sneakers and a clean cup, and he’s panhandling! I won’t tolerate that. There are too many people on the street who really need it.”

  When I signed him, Bill was at work on Where the Buffalo Roam, a film about the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who’d written Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. After one of my late planes to New York, I headed to the Sherry-Netherland and downed two Sleep-eze and a shot of scotch. I hadn’t slept the night before and was soon dead to the world . . . until I popped awake, heart pounding. The clock said 2:00 a.m., and my room door was open. Two men were silhouetted in the doorway.

  A jauntily familiar voice said, “How you doing?” With charm and a twenty-dollar bill, Bill had cajoled an attendant into unlocking my door. “Let’s go,” he said. I pulled on my clothes and staggered out with Bill and his companion, a thin, balding guy in his midforties. I registered his pasty complexion and the sunglasses, which not many people wore indoors in the middle of the night—Hunter S. Thompson. As we barhopped through lower Manhattan, Hunter downed a prodigious amount of booze, expounded on contemporary literature and deer hunting, and proved to be bleakly funny, unremittingly intense, and deeply insane. The sun was up when I stumbled back to my hotel to shower, shave, and prep for my 8:00 a.m. meeting.

  By then I’d grown close to Ivan Reitman. When Ivan pitched Cheech and Chong Join the Army to Paramount, Michael Eisner couldn’t stop gushing. Ivan believed he had a guarantee to produce and direct three movies. But in a subsequent meeting, I realized that Michael was reneging. He indicated that Barry Diller had overruled him. The studio was now offering a basic development deal with no obligation beyond Ivan’s first film.

  Ivan at my side, I marched from Michael’s office to a pay phone in the Paramount parking lot and called Frank Price at Columbia. A former television writer, Frank was the rare studio chief who could read a screenplay and give you surgical notes to improve it. He brought TV-style discipline to the movie business, giving you a prompt yes or no. Within five minutes, Frank and I had a verbal agreement to make Ivan’s army project. He also wanted the two other films (one of which became Ghostbusters) as soon as we had working concepts. It was a much better deal for Ivan.
I immediately told Michael that I’d sold the movie to Columbia—we had to demonstrate that if you broke a promise to a CAA client, there would be consequences. For once, Eisner didn’t try to guilt me; he was just rueful that Barry had countermanded him.

  I brought in Bill Murray to replace Cheech and Chong, and Ivan overhauled the script to reflect his new star; Bill’s humor didn’t need marijuana to lift off. Most of the rewriting was done by Harold Ramis, the Second City alumnus who cowrote Meatballs and who would costar opposite Murray in Stripes. Lead actors usually arrive on the set a week or two early to rehearse, but Bill was incommunicado until the night before shooting. (He once disappeared entirely for two weeks before calling me collect from the Taj Mahal.) When Bill finally surfaced, he had yet to meet with Ivan, and I’d lay odds he had not read the script. But he showed up in makeup the first morning, on time and ready to go. If Bill liked the concept and had faith in the director, he didn’t sweat the details. He ad-libbed his way through Stripes, and the loose, shaggy movie became a hilarious hit.

  Frank Price had an exceptional feel for how a vague concept could become a commercial film. Another example was the Karate Kid franchise. I had met the producer, Jerry Weintraub, when I was twenty-three and he was booking Elvis Presley concerts through William Morris. Jerry’s original idea was inspired by a feel-good local TV story about an eleven-year-old black belt, the youngest in the country. Jerry signed the kid to a management contract and asked me to help build a movie around him. Frank liked the idea but thought the boy was too young. Make the hero a few years older, he said, and we could add a credible love interest and broaden our audience. The studio cast Ralph Macchio, then twenty-two and neither well known nor physically imposing. But as high school senior Daniel LaRusso, Ralph became a bubble-gum sensation. The studio made two sequels.