Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  By our second board meeting, Coca-Cola, which owned Columbia, had replaced Frank Price as chairman with David Puttnam, an upper-crust Englishman. Puttnam viewed American studio executives as overspending morons, American directors as clumsy rubes, and American actors as ill-behaved adolescents. After he denounced Bill Murray on the front page of Variety as a “taker” and the poster child for Hollywood selfishness, I immediately counterattacked to defend my client (as well as CAA, as Puttnam was taking an indirect shot at our pricing). I called Dick Gallop, Columbia’s CEO, and Herb Allen, the most influential board member at Coca-Cola, and I told them Bill Murray was Columbia’s biggest star and had attended every single press and PR event he was asked to do, and that Bill was the most unselfish man I knew. I mentioned just a few of Bill’s many acts of generosity. Then I said that this attack was beyond unacceptable to me and to everyone who knew Bill, most of whom were also clients of CAA.

  “What can we do to fix this?” Dick asked.

  “Short of getting rid of David Puttnam, I can’t think of anything,” I said. “Bill is beside himself. Our response will not be direct—we have too much respect for you both to attack you in the media—but it will be consequential.” Columbia owned the Ghostbusters franchise, but no one could stop us from sitting on it. At that second board meeting I moved that we shut all projects down—seconded, carried. Only after Puttnam was fired, after just sixteen months in the job, did Ivan and company begin making plans to return to work. That’s why there was a five-year gap between the first movie and the sequel.

  In the interim, Ivan Reitman led us to a new economic model. For his 1988 film Twins, neither Ivan nor the stars, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, made a penny up front. Instead, they took healthy percentages of the gross. When the movie earned more than $200 million worldwide, it was a bonanza all around. From Meatballs and Stripes through Dave and Junior, Ivan was extraordinarily consistent in a hit-and-miss genre. And the wait for Ghostbusters II had only made the studio more eager: we were able to negotiate Ivan, Bill, Harold, and Danny big up-front fees and 30 percent of the gross, rising to 35 percent once the film had earned two and a half times its negative cost (the point at which the studio covered its expenses).

  The movie had a blowout preview in Seattle. The approval rating was in the nineties—Columbia wouldn’t ask Ivan to change a thing. On the plane back to Los Angeles, he flipped through the viewer comments that directors used as the basis for further editing or possible reshoots. They made for pleasant reading. Then he set the cards aside and said, “It’s not crisp enough.” He showed me a page of notes on the cuts he planned. Most directors are wedded to every frame, but Ivan wanted faster and funnier and left blood on the floor to get there. On Ghostbusters II he trimmed another five minutes. The film grossed $215 million around the world, and further demonstrated our thesis that when CAA called the shots, everybody made out well.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  P.L.

  When I was in college, no actor was bigger than Paul Newman. He epitomized cool.

  Paul always had top-shelf representation, from Lew Wasserman in the 1950s to Freddie Fields at CMA after that. The sixties and early seventies were great years for Paul: Hud, Harper, Hombre, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting. After CMA sold to Marvin Josephson in the merger that created ICM, in 1975, Paul chose to manage himself. And he struggled. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, an antiheroic western from Robert Altman, did poorly. Slap Shot was a cult phenomenon that made no money. Paul returned to Altman for Quintet, a total failure. A volcano disaster film called When Time Ran Out . . . grossed less than $4 million. A big star could withstand two straight duds, maybe three. But four was definitive. Paul’s last commercial success had been The Towering Inferno, an ensemble piece, and by 1980 that was six years ago.

  And in 1978 his only son, Scott, had died of an overdose, taking the heart out of him.

  Joanne Woodward, Paul’s wife of more than twenty years, had become a client when Marty Baum joined us, and she asked Mike Rosenfeld and me to meet her at Yamamoto’s in Century City. I had always found her intimidating: she was polite enough, but something in her manner suggested she had judged me and found me wanting. At this meeting she wanted advice: Paul was in a funk; could we help? When I followed up a few days later at their home in the flats of Beverly Hills, I found Paul to be quiet and self-deprecating. He talked about what he wanted to do—more movies with Bob Altman, for example. Fine, I said, as long as he also did projects with mainstream appeal. Fort Apache, The Bronx, his current film, was a step in the right direction. (At the agency, our rule of thumb was two commercial films for every noncommercial one.) We needed to develop material for Paul rather than taking what the studios dished out, which by then was leftovers. Choosing my words carefully, I said, “I want to put together some movies that people want to see and that you can be proud of.” He nodded, hopefully.

  A few weeks later, he invited me to meet him for lunch in New York, where he was shooting Fort Apache. I took the red-eye and got in at 5:30 in the morning. After showering, shaving, and changing, I met him at a booth at the Grand Central Oyster Bar for an 11:30 lunch. Paul ordered four dozen littleneck clams and began scarfing them down. He loved eating clams, talking about clams, exploring every nook and cranny of the vast and fascinating culture of clams. I happen to hate clams. But if Paul Newman loved clams, then I loved clams. In full chameleon mode, I mimed tossing some back and then slurping up the liquor, the liquid residue in the shell—when in fact I was dumping the whole mess beneath the table. An hour later, after a good chat, we shook hands and parted. I raced to the nearest deli and got myself a nice, safe tuna salad sandwich.

  The agency found Paul a script about an honorable liquor salesman and a reckless reporter—a natural for him, as he felt abused by the media, which had attacked Fort Apache as racist for the way it portrayed the South Bronx. I brought the script for Absence of Malice to Sydney Pollack. The lead character was the Italian American son of a deceased mob boss, and Sydney wanted Al Pacino (who was not yet with CAA) to star, but I pushed Paul to the head of the line. A great actor like Paul didn’t need fixing; he just needed a change of pace away from Bob Altman, who had made only one real hit, toward Sydney Pollack, a commercial director with credibility who would push Paul as an actor.

  To encourage Paul and Sydney to commit, I persuaded them to spend a day revising the screenplay, which had been developed by Paul’s pal George Roy Hill, who’d directed him in Butch Cassidy and The Sting. Sydney went over to Paul’s house in Beverly Hills and they spent more than ten hours at Paul’s dining room table making changes on every page—with me sitting there, soaking up an extraordinary education in how a star and a director can home in on their mutual sweet spot. They transformed the main character so he was less Italian and more American, and built in the ironclad three-act structure that Sydney demanded. Sydney excelled at development and Paul was a director in his own right—but the meeting was as much about chemistry as structure. They hit it off right away: two guys’ guys who loved small planes and fast cars. My only contribution that day was to suggest Sally Field, a client of ours who’d been my high school classmate, as the journalist who investigates—and of course falls for—Paul’s character.

  A few weeks later, Sydney chartered a Learjet 35 to fly us to Sears Point in northern California, where Paul was test-driving his race cars. On the way home, after a few drinks, Paul yelled to the young pilot, “Hey, can you do a barrel roll?” Which was illegal for a charter and appalling to me.

  “You know better, Paul,” Sydney said sternly. “He can’t do that.” Returning to my beer, I missed Sydney giving the pilot a wink. The next thing I knew, I was staring at my upside-down glass. As Paul and Sydney cracked up, I visualized the headline: PAUL NEWMAN, SYDNEY POLLACK AND FRIEND DEAD IN CRASH.

  Sydney screened his rough cut of Absence of Malice at Columbia for a group of us, including his star
s and some Columbia execs. Rough cuts are tricky: without final music, or the buoying response from a full theater, it’s tough to envisage how the finished film will play. Famously, after Spielberg screened his rough cut of Jaws for Universal, the studio said it wouldn’t release it. As we walked out, Sydney glanced anxiously at me, and I glanced anxiously at Paul. Paul glanced at Joanne. And Joanne said, “Paul looked as bored doing the movie as I was watching it.”

  My heart began to race. I said, “Joanne, I’m sorry you feel that way. Let’s run it in front of real people and see where we are.” She had a gift for making me feel crass and stupid, just another agent. Paul and I were by now drinking beer and hitting racetracks together, and I felt he was beginning to see me as a kind of surrogate for his lost son. For a personable movie star, Paul had almost no close friends, yet I was becoming one. But the only person he really trusted was Joanne. If the first project we’d put together for him turned out to be a turkey, we could lose my flagship director and my new big star in one go. That evening I called Paul and said, “I have to tell you, I love Joanne, but I thought you were awfully good in that movie. I don’t agree with her.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I do, either,” he said, thoughtfully. “I know she’s critical of my work. But we’re open with each other, and I trust her.” Joanne’s scorn kept me churning until the film was released—to strong reviews. Paul’s understated performance earned him an Oscar nod, and we could feel his fortunes turning.

  Our next Newman package was The Verdict, the David Mamet courtroom thriller directed by Sidney Lumet. The producers had originally cast Robert Redford as the alcoholic ambulance chaser Frank Galvin. But Bob, always sensitive about his image, balked at playing a loser who punches a woman in the face. As Paul was eager to display a darker side, I slid him into the role. The film played beautifully, earning him another Oscar nomination. He was back.

  * * *

  —

  Redford and Newman looked out for each other. Paul went to the mat for Bob on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when Redford was a young unknown, and Bob returned the favor on The Sting four years later, when he was the hot one. For fifteen years I tried to find a third buddy picture for the two of them. The closest I came was Lethal Weapon, but Bob hated the script.

  They were fast friends but very different people. Paul was gregarious, while Bob kept the world at arm’s length. Paul was punctual; Bob was always two hours late, running on Redford Standard Time. When I signed Bob, Claire Pollack, Sydney’s wife, told me, “I’m going to give you some great advice. Meet Bob only in your office, and if it’s in his office, call before you head over to make sure he’s there.”

  Redford and Sydney Pollack had a complicated relationship. True friends who did magical work together, they also bickered constantly. I was once having dinner with Redford at a restaurant in Santa Monica after they had squabbled on the set of Out of Africa. When I told Bob that Sydney had just come in, Bob immediately made us sneak out the back.

  In Utah, where Bob founded the Sundance Film Festival, and where he could eat out undisturbed, he was a totally different person. He was loose and relaxed and great fun to be around. And when he became a director, later, he saw it as a high calling and rose to its demands. Actors like Brad Pitt and Donald Sutherland all told the same story: Bob the director was easy, understanding, generous, and supportive. He held nothing back. When I visited his sets, they were happy places. The entire cast of The Milagro Beanfield War adored him. As a director, Bob became the person he wanted to be.

  Unfortunately, most of my dealings were with Bob Redford the actor. On the first day of shooting for The Natural, the thirties-era baseball movie we’d packaged, I arrived at the set in Buffalo, New York, at 8:45, fifteen minutes early. Bob rolled in after 10:00. Wearing a sheepish smile, he told Barry Levinson, the director, that he’d forgotten to reset his watch after flying in from L.A. the night before. Uh-huh. When the actors were sized for their baggy period uniforms, Bob decreed that his would be tailored and tapered, historical accuracy be damned. He did look amazing in the movie. But he behaved like a dick off camera. When Glenn Close, his costar, asked whether she should sign with us, he counseled her against it: “They’re too big.” She signed with us anyway because, she told us, “I asked him, ‘So, are you leaving?’ And he said, ‘No.’”

  David O’Connor, who serviced Redford day to day, liked to tell people the story of how Bob called him to say that he was tired of me, and that he was going to phone me to suggest that David be his lead agent. A little while later, David’s story went, I summoned David to my office and said I felt that he was ready to finally handle Bob Redford himself. Now, it’s true that I liked to seem all-powerful, as if I’d foreseen and ordained everything under the sun. It was a weakness of mine, and Bob knew that. But what really happened was that I’d called Bob to say that maybe David should take him over (because Bob was such a pain in the ass). Bob had agreed. And then he’d immediately called David to pretend the shift was his idea—knowing that the resulting crossed signals would stir up strife.

  He hated the constraints I put on him; hated that I insisted he read the scripts he was sent and respond quickly. The real problem was that he hated being a movie star, hated being fawned over and treated like a rare and valuable commodity. He’d once been a painter, and he would have been much happier if he’d kept doing that. Sydney Pollack told me that Bob was, at heart, deeply embarrassed by acting. All of which was entirely human and understandable. But instead of choosing another profession, he took his unhappiness out on the people around him.

  He was one of our most difficult clients. But he was so talented we never once said to each other, “It’s not worth it.”

  * * *

  —

  Paul followed The Verdict with a passion project called Harry & Son, about a construction worker cut off from his two grown children. It was his way of working through his grief and guilt over his own lost son. Though he directed and starred and assembled a strong cast, he didn’t have a prayer at the box office.

  But I had a plan to help him, and us. Paul was always looking for tips on recent movies. When I touted Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, he watched it and called me all revved up: “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen!”

  “You should work with Marty,” I said instantly.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I’ll find something. In the meantime, write him a fan letter.” People still wrote letters in longhand then, and their impact was underrated. I often sent out more than a thousand letters a year, commemorating every opening of a film (I’d send along a lucky horseshoe from our gift office), award nomination, or award—and those were just the rote letters. The ones that really had an effect were the personal ones, the ardent ones, wooing and praising and letting people know: I saw what you did and it was terrific.

  Paul said, “You’re kidding.”

  “No, he has enormous respect for you.” I wasn’t sure this was true, but how could it not be? Everyone had enormous respect for Paul.

  I dropped Paul’s letter by Marty’s office. When I saw him light up as he read it, I sensed my opportunity. I’d been an admirer of Marty’s since Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. If I could bring him to CAA, he’d be a force multiplier. Every actor worth representing wanted to work with Scorsese. Like Dustin Hoffman, he’d be a reference client for us, someone who’d humanize us with the very top talent.

  Marty’s longtime agent, Harry Ufland, was moving into film production. To edge my way in, I had spent a lot of time sympathizing with the director over The Last Temptation of Christ, his embattled adaptation of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel. Marty had somehow swung a development deal with Paramount even though no one thought the project even faintly commercial. But four weeks before the shoot, a group of evangelical nuns had barraged the studio with outraged letters, and Paramount’s parent company, Gulf & Wes
tern, had pulled the plug. It was devastating for Marty, who’d spent a year in preproduction and the ten years before that obsessing about the film.

  Our agent Tina Nides had passed me the galleys for The Color of Money. It was a pool hall novel by Walter Tevis, a quasi sequel to his The Hustler, featuring a middle-aged Fast Eddie Felson, twenty-five years on. When we asked Paul to option the book for development, he was reluctant. Fast Eddie was one of his signature roles. What if the new film—or his performance—didn’t measure up? Old-style movie stars neither did sequels nor optioned projects. So we optioned Tevis’s book on spec for $75,000, a sizable sum for us at the time. Agents didn’t option projects, either, but I considered it an investment in the Marty Scorsese business.

  Marty read the galleys overnight and came to my house the next morning. He was sweet, tightly wound, and anxious about his future. He poured out his worries amid a torrent of creative ideas. Then we addressed his finances, which were a mess. Marty’s business manager hadn’t paid his taxes. Two of his last three features, New York, New York and The King of Comedy, had been inspired works that never found an audience. He was lost and needed a champion. You didn’t sign Scorsese for the commissions, because he hardly cared if his movies made money. The rub was that he worked in a pricey medium. My plan was to nudge Marty toward the commercial side, alleviate his financial woes, and free him to make whatever he wanted. Marty liked my business background and my willingness to take a stand with the studios. He became emotional when I said I’d revive Last Temptation. I had no idea how to do it, but I promised to find a way. By the end of the conversation it was understood that we’d represent him.