Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  Stand by Me was a dark little drama about four adolescent boys (including a then-unknown River Phoenix) who discover a body outside their small town. Norman Lear financed the movie for director Rob Reiner, his protégé since All in the Family, and they came to us after several distributors turned them down. Unless their luck changed, Norman was out $10 million and nobody would see Rob’s film.

  Though we’d had nothing to do with Stand by Me, we felt an obligation to Rob, a CAA client, and to Norman, a good friend. We set up screenings with every studio and distributor who hadn’t passed. To keep tabs, we had a mailroom trainee deliver the print and stay to see if people actually watched. His reports were revealing. The head of distribution at Fox told me he “didn’t much care” for the movie—having slept through two thirds of it. Another executive gabbed on the phone throughout the eighty-nine-minute run time.

  As a last resort, I called Frank Price. “I know you want these big films from us,” I said, “and I make sure you get first crack at them. Now we’ve got a situation with one of our most important clients and a movie we think is terrific. You have the leverage to get it out there. We need this as a straight-out favor.” I pressured Frank until it strained our relationship, and he finally gave in; Columbia paid Norman his investment and approved a decent ad budget. Stand by Me went on to gross more than $50 million. It was nominated for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars and best picture and best director at the Golden Globes. Variety ran a fascinating story on why everyone else had passed. The Fox executive said he was dying to buy this marvelous movie but could not come to terms with CAA. The phone yakker said the same.

  If you believe what you read in the trades, the studios never make a mistake.

  * * *

  —

  We were lucky to work in a golden age of commercial film. People went to the local multiplex three times a month, piracy had yet to explode, and cable was in its infancy. With so many movies being made, and with our increasing share of the talent, by the early 1980s, CAA was poised for an explosive run. We’d grown big enough to package movies with multiple clients, a common practice in television but an uncommon one in film. Top agents like Charlie Feldman and Lew Wasserman (and later Sam Cohn) had sometimes paired a filmmaker with an actor and then checked whether a studio had something for them. But CAA was the first to orchestrate the entire development process. We took an idea (a yet-to-be-published bestseller, a magazine article, a news story), turned it into a script, and shoehorned as many artists into the project as we could. The primary difference with assembling a television show was that we didn’t take a packaging fee for films we put together, just our usual commission on our clients’ fees.

  In the beginning we had been story-centric of necessity. Now we had our share of big names, but the material still came first. We sat with writers and floated screenplay concepts for our directors and actors, mixing and matching as we went. We had a story department, a book department, and a development department, and we held a packaging meeting every week to stay in touch with the studios’ needs. Rather than pitch a ten-page treatment to a studio for $10,000, we’d tell our writers to flesh out a first draft. Then we’d attach a name director and one or more actors and sell the option for $250,000. Nothing went out unattached. If the movie got made, the writer earned $1 million for a few extra weeks’ work. Meanwhile, our CAA directors were talking several times a day with their multiple CAA agents, which led organically to the directors’ casting more CAA actors. The process fattened our commissions and spared the studios the headaches and expense of development—though they had to pay a premium for our talent. It was win-win-win.

  The power of team agenting really struck me—“Hey, this is working!”—on The Natural, which came out in 1984. Amy Grossman, one of our literary agents, represented the screenwriter Roger Towne (Robert’s brother), who’d written a script based on Bernard Malamud’s novel about a hard-luck baseball player. Amy had heard in one of our staff meetings that we were looking for a movie for Barry Levinson and Robert Redford to do together, so she brought the script to Rosalie Swedlin, who was on Barry’s team. Then they both brought it to me on a Friday, when anyone could pitch me a project. After reading it over the weekend, I immediately called Barry, had him read it, and then flew with him to Sundance to meet Bob. Within a week both of them had committed to the film.

  The Natural also clarified the advantages of packaging a movie completely, down to the character actors. We already represented Bob and Barry, and Bob’s costar, Glenn Close, signed with us during the filming, but putting our clients Wilford Brimley and Kim Basinger into the film made it a different proposition. If we filled a movie with clients, and only with clients, we could present the whole package to the studios, giving them nothing to do except say yes or no. This was a crucial shift: we began to view studios as little more than banks and distribution vehicles—they’d finance the movies and get them into the theater, but the films were essentially ours. On Rain Man, a total CAA package, we even designed the marketing campaign. By shaping the package to win approval from the studio, we saved our clients from rejection anxiety. And by gathering all the conflicts we could under our roof, we’d have more knowledge, more leverage to get better salaries, and we could sort out whether a movie would be better suited to Ivan Reitman or Harold Ramis, to Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg. Most of our actor conflicts were resolved simply and swiftly: by the director’s preference.

  In a humming economy, with cash there for the asking, what could stand in our way? Our numbers guru, Sandy Climan, refined our profit projections until they rivaled those of the studios. No longer were we bargaining blind. Our data allowed us to dictate our clients’ fees, including shares of first-dollar gross no one else was getting. When Mike Nichols came to us from ICM, his salary increased overnight from $2 million to $5 million. He called to ask how I’d done it, and I said, “That is our minimum price for a superstar director, and you are a superstar director.” We needed all our top directors to have that leverage, so we needed to have all the top directors. The buyers’ historical advantage was their stranglehold on distribution. At our apex, CAA matched this advantage with a near monopoly on keystone talent: we had forty-five of the fifty top-grossing directors. So we could tell the studios to take our package or leave it. They didn’t pass too often.

  I wouldn’t claim that our movies were better than the studios’ other films. We had our share of what we called shitburgers. In 1984, we packaged Sly Stallone and Dolly Parton in Rhinestone. In 1991, I put together a glittering package of Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, Julia Roberts, and Steven Spielberg in Hook, a sequel to the Peter Pan story. Great on paper; dead on-screen. Even our best packages, Rain Man and Tootsie and Gandhi and Ghostbusters, weren’t high art—but they were artfully made and deeply satisfying. Our clients Ismail Merchant and James Ivory were born to do small, tasteful projects such as A Room with a View, but that model didn’t work for bigger-budget films. We weren’t in a creative medium; we were in a commercially creative medium. Our clients often glossed over that distinction so they could view themselves as artists rather than as talent for hire, but I always kept it in mind.

  Yet I would argue that our movies were just as good as the ones the studios assembled, and that we were a more efficient assembly mechanism. We were better controllers than the studios, I believe, because we put the artists first. We had to, because in an important sense we had more at stake on every package than the studio did. All it could lose on a bomb was a lot of money, but we could lose a group of top clients. So we worked hard to assemble packages geared to clients’ talents and needs, and to build their careers thoughtfully. In case after case, people’s work took a leap after signing with us, from Barry Levinson to Sydney Pollack to Paul Newman. Our assault on the status quo made us less than popular with execs. But we worked for our clients. When a studio head reeled from sticker shock, we’d say, “We’d love you to have the movie, and it fits
beautifully into your summer schedule. But it’s up to you.”

  The first big step in our transformation into a quasi studio came on a romantic comedy about an actor who pretends to be a woman to land a role in a soap opera. The Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels character reminded Dustin Hoffman of his youth, when he and Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall roomed together in New York and none of them could find work. He pulled in his friend Murray Schisgal to revise the script, and he gave the movie a new title, Tootsie—his mother’s nickname for Dustin when he was small.

  When Tootsie reached us, it had a second-tier filmmaker attached whom we didn’t think was right. Frank Price at Columbia suggested Hal Ashby, the gifted auteur who’d made Shampoo and Coming Home and Being There. Hal’s latest movie had tanked, and I’d heard stories of drug use and strange behavior. Still, I admired his work and took an open mind to our meeting at a Westwood hotel. Hal was on his game, and it looked like we had our director. But after the valet returned with my car and I was preparing to get in and roll away with Dustin and his wife, Lisa, Hal strolled over. He opened a gold cigarette case, grinning rakishly, and offered it to Dustin. Inside were a dozen joints.

  I could feel Lisa bristling. “No, thank you,” Dustin said.

  As we pulled out, I said, “I love Hal Ashby, but we can’t have him do this movie.” The Hoffmans agreed. Why put Dustin, who had worked hard to leave pot behind him, in harm’s way on a location shoot?

  I called Frank Price. “As much as we’d like to, we can’t go ahead with Hal.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s too much ancillary risk between him and Dustin.” This was how we talked at such moments, using euphemisms the studio could pass on to the talent’s representatives if necessary. Frank, well versed in such diplomacy, simply said, “Got it.”

  Columbia hired Larry Gelbart, who’d produced M*A*S*H for TV, for another rewrite. He came up with some superb bits, but we still needed a strong director to splice the various drafts together and find the deeper story. All we really had was a guy in a dress; we didn’t know what he was doing or why he was doing it. I told Dustin, “You’re going to think I’m crazy because the guy I’m suggesting has never done a comedy. He barely smiles. He is as heavy-handed a human being as you’ll meet.”

  “Great pitch,” Dustin said. “So?”

  “I’m thinking you need someone who understands story and can get you a script. I’m thinking you need Sydney Pollack.” I waited for Dustin to calm down. “At least you should meet him.” So what if our director had no sense of humor? Dustin had plenty for both of them. Rock-steady Sydney could keep Tootsie’s radical concept from plunging off the rails.

  And so it began. I invited Sydney to a dinner at my home and sat him next to Dustin. For three hours they talked about Tootsie like no one else was in the room. Sydney called the next morning and said, “There’s no way I’m gonna do this.”

  “I understand completely,” I said. “I didn’t expect you to, though I think you should.” Then I told him, “Look, put in five days on the script with Larry Gelbart and Dustin. They need your help.” Sydney loved solving other people’s problems. He agreed to hole up at Dustin’s place in Malibu. Sparks flew. The script got better. At week’s end he called and said, “I’m still passing.”

  Judy and I took Sydney and his wife, Claire Griswold, to dinner at the Palm. We ordered wine and the mandatory oversized steaks and lobsters. We ordered more wine. Sydney kept saying he wouldn’t do Tootsie under any conditions. But I knew that Claire was remodeling their home in Pacific Palisades. I said to her, “Tell me what you need.”

  “Well,” she said, “I need a brick driveway, but it’s expensive.”

  “You got it. What else?”

  “Let me see. . . . We’re building a guesthouse. And we could use a new screening room.”

  “Done!” I said. It was my left-handed way of telling Sydney, Just do this and take the money. “So, Syd,” I said as we left, “I guess we’re going to do the movie.”

  And he said, “Why is that?”

  “Because Claire needs a driveway.”

  “I’ll think about it.” I knew I had him.

  Michael Dorsey was so hardheaded that nobody could work with him; playing a tomato in a commercial, he refused to follow the script and sit down because it was “illogical.” To my chagrin, art imitated life. I flew to New York sixteen times in a twenty-two-week shoot because Sydney and Dustin could not get along. In Sydney’s suite at the Sherry-Netherland, I found the floor piled with pages from seven writers and our director struggling to weave them into a coherent script. He was on a high-protein Pritikin diet, and as he made rib sauce in his kitchenette, he vented at me. Dustin was driving him berserk, he said, and it was all my fault. The shoot was so tense he’d had an arrhythmia. I doubted Sydney would quit the film, but I began to wonder if he’d survive it.

  Yet the two were well matched. Dustin needed a manual transmission for his high-revving engine, someone who could say, Stop here, this is good, no further. When he worked with less assured directors, he rolled over them. Where Dustin was impetuous and demonstrative, Sydney was conservative and self-contained. Where Dustin was a born improviser, Sydney liked to follow the script. The film worked so well because the two principals fought every step of the way.

  To help Tootsie at the box office, I asked Bill Murray, fresh off Stripes, to take a part that wasn’t in the screenplay. For maximum impact, I suggested we write him in for a cameo with no billing and let him pop up on-screen. Eager to stretch into “serious” acting, Bill was all for it. Dustin said, “Let him be my roommate,” which led to Bill’s role as Jeff Slater, the wacko playwright. He would get a tiny fee and one point of the gross, which worked out great for him.

  I escorted Bill to the vacant TV studio the producers had rented in Hell’s Kitchen. They were shooting the reveal scene, where Dorothy Michaels shows herself to be a man. As we entered the glassed-in control booth, Dustin was shouting, “Well, I ain’t fuckin’ Robert Redford!” The veins in Sydney’s neck bulged as he erupted in turn. Bill and I began backing out of the booth, but Dustin angled over and blocked the door: no exit.

  I broke in. “Guys, I’d like you to meet Bill Murray.”

  Sydney glowered at Dustin. “Are you done?”

  And Dustin said, “Well, no, I’m not!”

  As we escaped, Bill murmured, “I don’t know if this is such a good idea.”

  A day or two later, though, Bill was back in blue jeans and an old T-shirt. He said hello to Sydney and glanced around the stylish apartment where he and Dustin would ad-lib their scene. Then he began pulling books off the shelves, scratching up the furniture, piling the sink with dishes, and ripping up couch cushions with a butcher’s knife. The crew froze—as I’d learned at Universal, no one messed with a hot set—as Bill tore the place apart.

  When Dustin walked in, Bill turned to him and said, “Now this looks like the kind of rat hole you and I would live in.” He was right. We needed more chaos, Bill’s forte.

  * * *

  —

  When the twenty of us who’d put the film together screened it at Warner, I almost burst with pride at how extraordinarily well it had turned out. We were all silent afterward, but I could feel Sydney and Dustin kvelling, too. They weren’t speaking to each other—the war had continued in editing—but we all knew it was going to be a monster hit. I was so high on adrenaline I felt like I’d drunk ten espressos. That feeling of success, of having assembled the elements of a huge puzzle that everyone was going to love, was so exhilarating that it felt scary. It felt like a life killer. Because all I wanted, right then, was another hit of that feeling, and I knew I’d do anything to get it.

  We had our industry screening at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, in front of the same people who’d told me I was a fool to give a comedy to Sydney. I knew we were home free early on, when Bill Murray app
eared and the audience hooted with glee. Tootsie was paced so well that each scene drew the hoped-for response. We were playing to a very tough crowd—industry audiences always want everyone else’s films to fail—but they loved Bill and Dustin and Charles Durning and Jessica Lange and Teri Garr. They loved the romance between Dustin and Jessica and the reveal scene. And they really loved the screaming matches between Michael Dorsey and his long-suffering CAA agent, George Fields, played by none other than Sydney Pollack.

  Though Sydney had cut his teeth as a TV actor in Playhouse 90 and Ben Casey, he’d never had a real part in a film. He wanted Dabney Coleman for George Fields, but Dustin insisted that Sydney was the only one who could do it justice. Sydney demurred. Dustin sent him roses. Sydney kept resisting and Dustin kept badgering until I intervened and brought him around. He was drained by the double duty, but he made a pitch-perfect agent. He played it so grimly, so “Oh, my God, what now?,” that you couldn’t help grinning when you saw him. Sydney’s on-screen fights with Dustin had an easy rhythm born of long, hard practice.

  Tootsie grossed $177 million in North America, the second biggest movie of the year behind E.T. Sydney had his blockbuster. The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, a rare haul for a comedy (though it ran into an Oscar buzz saw called Gandhi—another CAA package—and only Jessica Lange won, for Best Supporting Actress). The film is now a comedy classic. Dustin was big enough to forgive my rash no-fee promise and pay us our full commission. And I even talked Columbia into picking up the tab for Claire Pollack’s driveway.