Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

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  Our success with Bill Murray launched CAA in comedy, particularly among Bill’s friends on Saturday Night Live. We signed Albert Brooks and Harold Ramis and, later, Chevy Chase. I met with Bernie Brillstein and said, “Let us handle your people on their film deals and we’ll make you the executive producer. We’ll get you paid and we’ll put the movies together.” Bernie agreed, as most people would when offered lots of money for no work. I started with Danny Aykroyd, the most normal abnormal guy I ever met, a straitlaced family man who was crazy about science fiction and the occult. A talented writer, he’d conceived the hit musical comedy The Blues Brothers for himself and his best friend, John Belushi.

  John was a force of nature, a throwback to the physical comedians Sid Caesar and Art Carney. As Bluto Blutarsky in Animal House, he got laughs just by raising a bushy eyebrow. Offscreen, John might throw you to the floor and lick your face like a dog, or brood for an hour and never open his mouth. Wary around strangers, and inconsolably angry deep down, like most comedians, he could also be generous and big-hearted. He was a child in a man’s body. His friends were fiercely protective of him. A number of dinners into my courtship of John, Danny finally gave me a wink and said, “John wants you to come to The Bar,” an abandoned tavern they’d turned into a clubhouse. The three of us drove into deserted, pregentrified Tribeca, where they unlocked a battered door and switched on the lights. It looked like they’d decorated the place by setting off a hand grenade. The proud proprietors broke out a bottle of scotch and poured it into grimy shot glasses. I knew it was an honor to be invited in, and hoped the scotch would act as a disinfectant.

  By the time we signed Chevy Chase, CAA dominated the comedy world. Chevy was a solid leading man; John was reinventing slapstick; Danny was the idea guy; and Bill had extraordinary range. And comic actors were ageless: Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, and George Burns had all worked into their eighties. I envisioned a long run of hilarious and highly profitable movies.

  We put together a comedy for Danny and John called Neighbors. Everyone liked the concept, based on a Thomas Berger novel—an uptight suburban man driven crazy by his antic new neighbor—and the Larry Gelbart script. As we were in production, Universal released Continental Divide, a bland romantic comedy Bernie had engineered before John signed with us. John’s fans, expecting the madman who yelled “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger!,” didn’t buy him as Spencer Tracy. Continental Divide bombed.

  Then Columbia chose a director for Neighbors, John Avildsen, who was best known for the melodramatic Rocky. Being new to movies, I wasn’t confident enough to fight it. Avildsen cast against type by making John the quiet neighbor and Danny the obnoxious, dangerous one, and then shot a slow, dark film. When Neighbors previewed, less than 2 percent of the test audience rated it “excellent,” and it, too, went on to tank.

  But John was only thirty-three. The French director Louis Malle, who’d just made Atlantic City and My Dinner with Andre, wanted to cast him as a con man and Danny as an FBI agent in a takeoff on the Abscam bribery scandal. Then there was Sweet Deception, about a winemaker who, if he took even a sip of his product, went sideways drunk. I thought it could work for John if the script got a little edgier and a lot more physical.

  Universal and Warner Bros. passed on Sweet Deception, but Michael Eisner was intrigued. We did barely any business at Paramount because Michael and his crew were so frugal. But they were adept at taking artists off of a flop or two and restoring them to their sweet spots—in John’s case, commercial comedy. At a pitch meeting with John and Michael and Jeffrey Katzenberg, Eisner’s number two, we framed the concept as “crazy winemaker,” a grown-up Bluto Blutarsky, and the executives were sold. John would get $1.85 million, a record fee for him. John knew he needed help with the screenplay and brought in Don Novello, the writer-actor who played Father Guido Sarducci on Saturday Night Live. All systems go.

  I had no real sense of John’s drug problem until he popped up at my office in late February 1982. He brought along a reworked script, maps of the fictional vineyard, sketches for set designs, and a new title, Noble Rot. John was talking a mile a minute. We’d been out on the town together, but I’d never seen him like that. He was so shaky that two guys from our mailroom had to help him to his limo.

  I called Bernie Brillstein, John’s father figure. “John’s having some problems, but he’s working on them,” Bernie said. I called Dan Aykroyd, who told me, “John’s got some issues and needs help.” I was troubled—who was going to get him that help?—but not frantically concerned. I hadn’t had much exposure to the eighties drug culture and the damage it could do. You’d see cocaine around the movie business, but Hollywood was tame compared to New York’s brazen club scene. And at CAA we were mostly boring workaholics who went home at night.

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  The new script for Noble Rot was a mess. John had strong comedy ideas but no sense of structure, and Don Novello was a sketch artist. After Eisner flatly told him the script wasn’t working, John called me, in a state. I was more tactful. “You’ve done some really good things here, but there are issues with it playing as a film,” I said. “Your character needs to be more sympathetic, and we need a cast-iron structural foundation to show off your talents.” John hung up on me.

  Eisner still wanted Belushi. He proposed shifting our pay-or-play contract (which locked in John’s full fee regardless of whether the movie got made) to a project based on The Joy of Sex, the bestselling manual. Bernie was all for it. I thought the idea was banal and urged our team to turn up something better.

  On March 4, the day before we had another big meeting at Paramount at 11:00 a.m., John dropped by CAA. He was jittering around, but he seemed under control. As he’d dismissed his limo, I offered to give him a ride to Morton’s, where he was having dinner. As we drove, John chattered about his latest changes to Noble Rot. He said he’d come over to CAA the next morning to “warm up” before we went to the studio—a good sign, I thought. We reached Morton’s and John opened the door. “Do you have any money?” he asked, sweetly. “I’m out of cash.” I gave him a hundred bucks, and he thanked me. “See you tomorrow!”

  When he hadn’t appeared at our offices at 10:15 the next morning, I called Bernie. John wasn’t punctual, but I knew Eisner’s schedule was tight. Bernie sent his brother-in-law to check John’s bungalow at the Chateau Marmont. We were already late for Eisner when Bernie called back.

  “John’s dead,” he said.

  “Come on.”

  “No, John’s dead.” He was too shattered to say more. It would turn out that John’s brain had basically exploded from a speedball, a mix of cocaine and heroin.

  I called Eisner: “Michael, I have to cancel the meeting.” I was barely keeping it together.

  Before I could explain, he began yelling, “How could you do this to me? Everyone’s here and ready and excited—what the hell is going on?”

  “John’s dead.”

  “Another of your agent tricks! Can’t you come up with something better than that?”

  At any other time his obtuseness would have been funny. “Michael, I’m serious,” I said. I was able to maintain an even tone only because I knew he didn’t really give a shit. “John’s dead. I don’t know how it happened, but there won’t be any meeting.”

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  In 1979, Tony Thomopoulos, the head of ABC Entertainment, called to say that Aaron Spelling, the prolific producer of such ABC hits as Charlie’s Angels and The Love Boat, was unhappy with William Morris, and that he’d told Aaron to consider CAA. (Tony took a risk for us—the other agencies would have killed him if they knew what he’d done—and when he was later forced out at ABC we got him a job at United Artists. He, in turn, took Rain Man from us when no one else wanted it, which worked out beautifully for everyone.) Ron and I met with Aaron and persuaded h
im to sign. That was huge for us, as we’d make more money from Spelling in the eighties and nineties than from any other client. We needed Bill Haber to head up the account, but he declared, “I refuse to handle Aaron Spelling!” He had half a dozen reasons why, dating back to obscure ancient history at William Morris. After Ron and I beat on Bill—What happened to one for all and all for one?—he grudgingly agreed to sit down with Aaron. In the meeting, he was charming and brilliant, a font of ideas, and soon he and Aaron were best friends. Quintessential Bill!

  Yet representing Spelling, an eight-hundred-pound gorilla who needed feeding, wasn’t always easy. We had a client named Lauren Shuler, a young producer who had put together a comedy called Mr. Mom from a script by John Hughes, another CAA client. Michael Keaton would play a husband who has to learn to do housework after he’s fired and his wife takes a job—which, in the early eighties, seemed like a hilarious concept. We’d made it a CAA package, folding in costar Teri Garr and director Stan Dragoti. Then Aaron Spelling heard about the project and demanded in. Ron was handling Keaton (who wanted Aaron in the mix) and Bill was handling Spelling, so they “should” have been the ones to talk to Lauren. But neither of them wanted the tough conversation.

  So I convened the talent and their agents and hit Lauren with what I called the hard truth. I said, “Lauren, we want to bring Aaron in as an executive producer. He can help with the financing, and he can make a heavy contribution to the script, and the truth is the film will fall apart without him, so we have little or no choice.” Knowing that her percentage on the back end would get cut almost in half, she resisted, politely, but I set up a meeting for her and Aaron. I still have the note I wrote to remind myself to convince “ASP” (Aaron Spelling Productions) that he “must do it with a smile.” He smiled, he was charming, he made shrewd story points, and he took it for granted that it was a done deal. Seeing where the power lay, Lauren graciously agreed to the arrangement we’d forced on her.

  I’ve thought about that conversation at least weekly since then, sometimes daily. Would the film have fallen apart without Aaron? No. Did he add to the film creatively? Yes, somewhat. And would it have caused CAA problems with our biggest TV client if we’d told him to butt out? Yes. By Hollywood logic the transaction shouldn’t haunt me: Lauren Shuler got a great credit as the producer of a hit movie, and she made money on it. She went on to marry our director Dick Donner, and to become the powerful producer of such films as Free Willy, X-Men, and Deadpool. We’ve seen each other many times in the decades since then—and never spoken about Mr. Mom. Maybe it didn’t bother her for long. But it was her very agreeableness about the whole extortionate process that stays with me. She was too nice. That meant that people had to be nice to us now; that we had the power to compel. No part of the transaction I muscled through was about helping talented people pursue or refine their vision. It was zero Creative Artists and 100 percent Agency.

  I had become everything I detested in the sixties when I was a bleeding-heart liberal at UCLA—the very symbol of the establishment. I had become The Man.

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  When John Belushi died, it took the heart out of our whole comedy gang. Danny was the hardest hit. He was more than John’s best friend; he was his straight man and alter ego. For a while he couldn’t even laugh, much less write. Then one day, some months later, Danny called and said, “What do you think about Bill Murray and me running around New York Saturday Night Live–style, chasing ghosts?” He’d come up with the idea earlier to revive John’s career. Now he’d reconfigured it for himself and Bill and Harold Ramis. Ivan Reitman would direct.

  Columbia snapped up the project. But the pre- and postproduction buzz on Ghostbusters was grim; people just couldn’t envision SNL mixed with the supernatural. At the film’s premiere, a black-tie fund-raiser for St. John’s Hospital that Judy and I chaired, no one laughed. I already knew that you can’t judge a comedy played to a tiny audience; now I learned that you can’t show a comedy to a charity audience, as they’re usually there under duress. On his way out of the theater, Warner Bros. CEO Bob Daly patted me on the back consolingly: “Don’t worry—you’ll get ’em next time.”

  He’d now deny that under oath. Because under Ivan’s direction, the ghostbusters struck audiences as enjoyably workaday and nonchalant, like funny plumbers. Danny and Harold saved the best lines for Bill, who nailed them. In the mayor’s-office scene, Bill predicts that the demon times to come will feature “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!”—unless, he tells the mayor with his most winning smile, he gives the ghostbusters free rein. And in that case, “Lenny . . .”—his picture-this expression is priceless—“you will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters.” Danny’s unselfish feeling for Bill was touching. I think he hoped Bill would be his new partner, but Bill was too mercurial to team with anyone for long. He made a bunch of great movies with Harold Ramis, culminating with Groundhog Day—and then Bill didn’t speak to Harold for years. They reconciled only shortly before Harold’s death.

  Ghostbusters became the second-biggest film of the year, grossing more than $295 million worldwide, behind only Beverly Hills Cop. As our clients collectively got 30 percent of the gross, CAA got 3 percent of the gross; over the years, as TV and VHS revenues came in, we’d make more than $30 million from that film alone. The town had already taken notice that we got the new studio TriStar off to a flying start by teeing up its first two films: the fully packaged The Natural, and Places in the Heart, with our clients Sally Field and director Bob Benton. (It didn’t hurt that TriStar was run by my old lawyer friend Gary Hendler, or that Hendler installed our client Sydney Pollack as the studio’s “creative consultant.” Favors come back around.) But Ghostbusters gave us real leverage. Early on, we’d always let the studio or network make the first offer—we didn’t want to negotiate against ourselves, starting lower than they were willing to go. But by 1988 or so, we had so much clout that we were setting the price. We weren’t negotiating anymore, we were just telling Warner Bros., say, “I have a package of A, B, and C, and it costs X—you have twenty-four hours.” If Warner Bros. hesitated, I’d already have Fox lined up, having told them, “You’re in second position, but I have to know now: Do you want it?”

  After Ghostbusters hit, I got a call from the agent who represented an actor named David Margulies, who’d played the mayor. The agent, a nice-enough-sounding guy at a small agency, wondered ingenuously if the studio, or my clients, would want to share a little of their largesse with David, given how much there was to go around. In my position, most agents would have said, “Hey, valid question, let me look into it,” then called back the next day, after not looking into it, to say, “Gee, sorry, I couldn’t get to first base with Columbia, or with the business managers for our clients here.” Taking that extra beat would have placated Margulies’s agent. Ron Meyer would have kept the guy on the phone for an hour and made a friend for life. But for the sake of brevity I’d adopted the habit of acting like a principal myself, like the guy who decided rather than the guy who pressured other people into deciding. So I said, “You’ve got to be kidding. Your client played his part, and he got paid! He was part of an ensemble beneath the stars—and no one in the world knows his name.” I was brutal to this guy, who was in the same position I’d been in a few years earlier. I replayed the call in my head afterward, because it gnawed at me, and I had two takeaways. One, I was in danger of becoming a total asshole. And two, I really did want to be a principal someday.

  In the early eighties, I’d begun collecting relationships. For instance, I reached out to Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard Frères banker who had almost single-handedly rescued New York City from bankruptcy in the seventies, and who was on the board of MCA and had Lew Wasserman’s ear. I called and asked to see him, saying, “I need no more than ten minutes of your time.” On my next trip to New York, I went to his office, shook hands, and placed my watch on his desk.
Then I said, “I’d love to talk to you about how you saved New York, and also how you advise Lew—to learn from the Dean. And I’d love to be helpful to you in L.A. in any way I can.” All to get him talking and to show that I knew what he’d done and that I admired it and wanted to learn from it. After ten minutes, I said, “Thanks so much,” and stood to pick up my watch. Felix—and everyone else I used this stratagem on—asked me to sit back down. In this way I got to know Herb Allen, the head of Allen & Co., and Bob Greenhill at Morgan Stanley, and I’d always drop in on them when I was in New York—as well as on Mort Janklow and fifteen other book agents, a number of figures in the art world, and our clients Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Al Pacino, Sidney Lumet, Bob De Niro, and Marty Scorsese.

  The relationships outside entertainment would prove useful to CAA in the plans I was beginning to develop. They’d be our bridges to a wider world.

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  There were plans for an animated TV spin-off of Ghostbusters, and the studio was pressing for a sequel—lots of deals to discuss. After Meatballs and Stripes, Murray’s third straight winner had made him a box-office star. Because Danny was so business-oriented, I set up a “board of directors” for the Ghostbusters property, encompassing the two of us as well as Ivan, Harold, Bill, and Ray Kurtzman, CAA’s top lawyer. I sent a memo to them all in April of 1987, hand delivered in a big envelope, addressing them as the “Board of Directors,” and telling them that we had to talk about a sequel, and that “it is imperative that we do this meeting in L.A. in the next two weeks.” It wasn’t really imperative, but they needed guidance and structure, so I created a protocol and a sense of urgency. We kept minutes and followed Robert’s Rules as well as you could with a pack of anarchists.