Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  Though sequels didn’t appeal to Marty, either, directors my age worshipped the same stars I did. Marty wanted to work with Paul Newman as much as Paul wanted to work with Marty. When I put them together, they seemed an odd couple, the rugged sportsman and the jittery aesthete. But they were opposites who attracted.

  We brought in Richard Price, one of CAA’s top novelists, to help Marty with the script for The Color of Money. They found a middle ground between their darker take on Eddie Felson and Paul’s sense of what his fans could accept. But even with Marty and Paul attached, it was no easy task to find the film a home. We thought we had a deal at Fox until the studio chief lost his job. The same thing happened at Columbia. Others passed because the movie sounded esoteric. It wasn’t a high concept you could pitch in two sentences, and you couldn’t actually market it as a sequel, because no one under thirty-five remembered The Hustler.

  As a last resort I asked Marty to write to Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, part of the Disney empire that my old friend Michael Eisner had been appointed to run in 1984. Disney never bought from CAA. They didn’t believe in paying up for our packages, which Eisner claimed were essentially vehicles for extorting the studios. Furthermore, Touchstone was best known for family comedies such as Splash. But at that moment Disney was hungry for a star vehicle, particularly one that could be made—at their insistence—for only $14 million. For Marty it would mark a return to guerrilla filmmaking in the tradition of Mean Streets, only with stars. Given his habit of going over budget, he needed to prove that he could deliver a big picture with big names for a price.

  To bridge the movie to younger viewers, we had someone special in mind for Fast Eddie’s protégé: Tom Cruise. CAA was known for poaching clients after someone else had developed them. We had no compunction about it. Given the time and effort we invested in our artists, it made sense to sign people with track records, or at least with demonstrated potential. But we nurtured some young talents from the beginning. Barry Levinson was one case. Another was Tom, who came to us on the recommendation of Stanley Jaffe, the producer of a low-budget drama from Columbia called Taps. Stanley called Paula Wagner, who covered Columbia and was one of our best young agents, and said, “You guys should take a look at some footage of this kid. He’s incredible.” (Like most people who made this sort of recommendation, Stanley was looking to ingratiate himself and to get a chit, so that the next time a project came up we’d think of him.) Tom was eighteen, and he’d gotten just $50,000 for Taps. Knowing Stanley’s superb taste, we checked out the dailies, and Paula became completely convinced that Tom was the next big thing.

  We set up a meeting, and Tom was polite and engaging, all “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir.” He must have been nervous, but he didn’t let us see it. He wasn’t one of those great-looking guys trying movies on a lark. He was rigorously trained, and you could tell that he was not only passionate about his craft but fanatically determined to become a star. “I want guidance,” he said. When I said, “It’s going to take guts for you to put your complete faith in us,” he nodded vigorously and said, “Yes, sir!” That was another one of my vaccinations—I was inoculating him against all the other agents who’d take a run at Tom once he got going.

  We jotted down the names of the directors and actors we thought he should work with: Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Roger Donaldson, Barry Levinson, Marty Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Rob Reiner, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert De Niro. Then we promised that he’d work with every one of them if he came to CAA—by then, we could make such promises. And Tom did work with them all, eventually, except for Robert De Niro. Every time he crossed a name off his list, he’d call to remind us that he was getting closer to zeroing it out, and to thank us.

  Now it was two years later, after we’d helped Tom break out in Risky Business. He was about to blow up in Top Gun, so his days in supporting roles were numbered, but we knew he’d leap at a chance to work with Paul and Marty—two of the names on his list, in one film.

  Heading into the shoot, Marty came by my office with a loosely bound script. Scrawls of semilegible notes crowded the margins. The left-hand pages were filled with hand-drawn production setups, three or four per page, with stick figures for the actors. Marty precut his movies in his head, down to the camera placements. There were close to four hundred setups, and he knew exactly what he wanted in each one. Any director would put the camera directly over the pool table during a tense match, but only Marty thought to put the camera in the upper corner of the room, to show the tension from a 45-degree angle. I admired that shot enormously, knowing that I wouldn’t have thought of it in a million years.

  The shoot was an on-budget dream. On set in Chicago, I saw what made Marty unique. He came fastidiously prepared, but he’d change his plan on the fly if someone had a better idea. He gave his actors maximum latitude but reined them in if they went too far. As Paul said, “He watched me like a hawk.” Every movie star has a screen persona: Paul’s was the devil-may-care rogue who lit up the screen in Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy and The Sting. The audience expected it and the studios made mounds of money from it. But Marty never let his actors coast through their comfort zones. In The Color of Money, Paul became someone else—brooding, touchy, corrupt, yet somehow principled underneath. Years later Marty did the same thing with Leo DiCaprio in Gangs of New York, which is why Leo has worked with him on four more films. It’s a Scorsese specialty, grinding movie stars into artists.

  * * *

  —

  I bore Joanne Woodward’s slam of Absence of Malice in the pit of my stomach for years. I worried about The Color of Money until Paul swept the early honors for Best Actor. By that point, having lost all six times he’d been nominated for an Oscar, he’d sworn off attending the Academy Awards. He’d been embarrassed to have to settle for an honorary Academy Award the year before (via satellite hookup from Chicago, he’d said, “I’m especially grateful this award didn’t come wrapped as a gift certificate to Forest Lawn”). Yet Scorsese’s prestige helped, and voters finally seemed ready to reward Paul for being so good for so long. When his name was read out—and his good friend Robert Wise, the director of The Sound of Music, went up to accept the statue for him—I rushed to the lobby to call Paul at home. “So I’m one for seven,” he said. “Better than a kick in the ass.” But he sounded pleased and proud.

  I was, too. But I privately worried that Paul hadn’t yet signed for a new film. Ron and I had a rule that if one of our actors was nominated for an Academy Award, we had to sign him to a film fast, because experience had shown us that if he won, suddenly he would feel all sorts of new pressures and expectations, and no project would look quite right. And, indeed, it would take three years before Paul next appeared on-screen, in the unmemorable Fat Man and Little Boy.

  The year after his win, Paul was asked to present the award for Best Actress, as was traditional. Knowing that I disliked the ceremonies as much as he did, he agreed to present on the condition that I go with him. I took him to Spago for Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party. Forty-five minutes before he was scheduled to go on, we stepped into a limo and shot down to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. We stepped through the back door and into the greenroom, where Paul was pleasant to everyone if not exactly sociable. He walked onstage, did his thing, walked off, and said, “Let’s get out of here.” We went back to Spago for the rest of the evening.

  Once our relationship became more than agent-client, I joined his friends in calling him P.L., for Paul Leonard, his first and middle names. We’d race go-karts together at a slick track in Los Angeles, or I’d meet him near his home in Connecticut for beers. One night he drove me back to New York in his souped-up Volkswagen—a white-knuckle ride because P.L. was aiming to beat his personal best of around fifty minutes.

  He was always on me to take more vacations. When I told him about an upcoming family trip to the Kahala Hilton in Honolulu, he said, “It’s abou
t time.” One balmy afternoon I went to our suite there and turned the key. The door swung a few inches and stopped dead. I craned my neck to look inside and saw cases of Budweiser stacked to within two feet of the ceiling. Having scored Paul a Bud promotion deal to help finance his race-car team, I knew the guilty party even before I saw the note: “Relax, P.L.”

  Unlike most film royalty, Paul understood the trap of stardom. He told me, “You know, I’ve been a movie star for a long time. And no matter how hard I try to tell myself I’m just a normal person, I keep hearing how wonderful I am. It gets to the point that you start to think you’re something you aren’t.”

  He enjoyed the occasional reality check, such as the one that happened when we met to watch Marty edit The Color of Money at his New York office. A middle-aged woman stepped into the elevator, gasped, and told Paul how much she adored him in The Towering Inferno. He flashed his grin. Then she started calling him “Steve,” as in McQueen, his costar. Paul played along, but I could see he was about to crack up. When we reached the woman’s floor, she said, “Steve, it was so great to meet you.”

  And Paul said, “You should take a better look at my costar, Paul Newman. He’s a fine actor and a really good guy.”

  * * *

  —

  The Color of Money grossed more than $52 million in North America, nearly four times its cost. Disney was ecstatic; Marty was giddy with relief. “You know, Marty,” I told him, “you could actually get paid for being a film director.” Before we signed him, his price was in the low six figures and he’d never shared in his movies’ profits; we would raise his price to $3 million. (By the mideighties, we’d made all our directors three-million-dollar guys—there weren’t any women directing then, unfortunately—and five years after that we established our top directors as five-million-dollar guys.)

  It was CAA’s first hit package with an auteur director and two big dramatic stars. However, I still owed Marty The Last Temptation of Christ, an unpackageable disaster in the making. It was tainted by incendiary content, weak curb appeal, and the stigma of Paramount’s rejection. Yet Marty wanted to make Last Temptation, he told me, “more than anything in the world.” I shared neither his passion for it nor his belief in it, but just getting the thing released would make CAA look heroic.

  Marty offered to cut the budget in half, to $7 million, by switching locations from Israel to nonunion Morocco, paying the actors at scale, and slicing his own fee to the bone. Before going to the studios, we created a financial model for the film, a matrix of expenses and revenue streams (domestic, foreign, video rentals, network, and cable TV prebuys). We projected Last Temptation’s worst-case loss—with zero ticket sales—at $20 million. A medium scenario cut the loss to $5 million.

  So who owed us a seven- or eight-figure favor? Twenty million dollars sounds like a hugely expensive good turn, but it’s all relative. Two years earlier, MCA/Universal had fattened on two CAA packages, Back to the Future (a $350 million worldwide gross on a $19 million budget) and Out of Africa ($266 million worldwide). It was time for them to reciprocate by taking Last Temptation. Because Marty needed a permanent office where he could cut his films by hand with his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, we’d ask for that, too—all of Marty’s needs in one big favor package.

  In October 1986, MCA named the entertainment lawyer Tom Pollock chairman of Universal Pictures. It seemed like a radical choice, but Tom was a discerning reader who knew film economics cold. He’d made creative deals as early as 1973, when he negotiated George Lucas 20 percent of the net in lieu of a salary on American Graffiti. Tom’s handiwork financed the Star Wars trilogy and made Lucas’s career. We loved Tom because he made development deals with a number of CAA directors, including Ivan Reitman, Bob Zemeckis, John Hughes, and Ron Howard and his producer Brian Grazer. Universal under Pollock was a throwback to the old Hollywood system, only with an agency in the middle. I knew the studio would work to land a talent magnet like Marty, just as we had; an enterprising guy like Tom could be persuaded to see Last Temptation as a loss leader.

  I pitched the movie as part of a broader deal for Universal to get first look at all Scorsese projects. Later I wove in the other goodies we wanted—the overhead to run Marty’s company out of the MCA building in New York, edit facilities, and a screening room. Tom hedged his bet on Last Temptation by bringing in a financial partner, Garth Drabinsky’s Cineplex Odeon chain, but he agreed to bankroll the film even before Marty signed to do something more commercial.

  There was one last loose end. Because Last Temptation had gone into turnaround at Paramount so late in development, more than the usual sum had been sunk into sets, costumes, props, and location costs. Frank Mancuso, Paramount’s studio chief, had already waived $3 million. When I asked Frank to forgive the last million on the books, as Universal was demanding, he let it go without a fight, remembering that he’d just had Top Gun from us. The business in those days was more like a family. Everybody bitched and groused, but we all took care of each other, confident that the favors would come back around.

  The smooth sailing lasted five minutes. Then Universal resisted Marty’s choice of Brooklyn-accented Harvey Keitel to play Judas. Harvey was one of Marty’s boys, along with De Niro and Joe Pesci, and we told Tom Pollock it was futile to fight it. They had to let Marty do the movie his way. Last Temptation was more than a movie for him; it was a profession of his faith, and he doubted he could do it justice. I called him every other day in Morocco as he battled the worst angst of his life.

  By the time the eight-week shoot wrapped on Christmas Day, the religious right was beginning to rumble. I wasn’t troubled by the small, early protests, or by the offer from Campus Crusade for Christ to buy the film for $10 million so it could burn all the existing prints. Maybe the local news would pick up the story, I thought. (I was a sucker for free publicity.) I was naive. In July 1988, a few weeks before it opened, Last Temptation landed on the cover of both Time and Newsweek as a brewing controversy. A so-called reverend denounced “these Jewish producers with a lot of money.” There was fundamentalist street theater outside Lew Wasserman’s home in Beverly Hills, with the guy playing Lew planting his foot on Christ’s back. As the FBI logged assassination threats from the Aryan Nation, a bloody pig was delivered to Wasserman’s number two, Sid Sheinberg.

  Lew didn’t scare, but Sid came unglued. He called me from his home one morning and said, “Mr. Ovitz?” We were friendly—I was friendly with anyone who ran a studio—but he always addressed me and everyone else as “Mister.” A gangly, six-foot-two exec with a pockmarked face, Sid was Lew’s longtime whipping boy. Knowing he was never going to get Lew’s job, he took his rage out on others. But there was a purity to his animus. When he compared me to an agent for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, I took it as a compliment.

  “Yes, Sid?”

  “Mr. Ovitz, I would like to inform you that a hundred people with placards are marching up and down in front of my driveway, and my family is quite frightened.”

  “Sid, I’m really sorry. Should I come over?”

  “You won’t be able to get through.”

  It was my job to anticipate public opinion, and I felt I’d failed. I worried about Marty’s future. Could I even have cost Tom his job at Universal?

  As the frenzy peaked, Marty asked me to join him for the film’s debut at the Venice Film Festival. Judy and I left early for a weekend on the French Riviera. Our first morning there, out for exercise on a racing bike, I headed down a steep road by the hotel. A mile or so out, a sports car cut me off, and I swerved onto the cobblestone shoulder. My bike jackknifed and I flew into a low rock wall.

  I woke up in the hospital in the worst pain of my life. I had four broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a concussion. Hours later, in a medication fog, I called Marty to tell him Venice was out. He was nice about it, though he kept saying, “Are you sure you can’t come? It doesn’t sound so bad.” />
  The rest was anticlimax. The movie ran largely without incident and grossed about $8 million. Universal broke even. Jon Avnet, Marty’s producer on the film, later credited me with having “made that film happen,” and said I “willed it into existence.” I appreciated the salute. But the best thing about Last Temptation was the day it was behind me.

  * * *

  —

  Once Marty joined us, I knew that Bob De Niro, who’d starred in five of Scorsese’s films, was sure to follow.

  I had never bought the Agenting 101 rule that representing two similar stars is a conflict of interest. Instead, I preached, “No conflict, no interest”—we wanted all the conflicts because that gave us leverage; the studios couldn’t threaten us that they’d opt for a similar piece of talent at another agency. Three guys competed for roles in Bob’s category of the character-actor leading man: Bob, our client Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino. Dusty’s fee in the mideighties was $6.5 million, about the same as the other two—and as Newman and Redford, pure leading men who played versions of themselves. The only actors who earned more—a lot more—were the action heroes, Stallone and Schwarzenegger.

  Also, and crucially, the conflicts were always more apparent than actual. I canvassed our files, and there wasn’t one film Dustin had done in the previous five years, from Kramer vs. Kramer to Tootsie, that De Niro would have wanted. After making the same point to Dusty, who agreed with the logic—that he wouldn’t have wanted to be in Raging Bull or The King of Comedy—I pitched De Niro on the idea that it was better for everyone if CAA cornered the market on leading men. All the best parts would flow into our agency and be parceled out to whoever fit them best. In the unlikely event that two stars wanted the same role, we’d talk it out. (It never happened.)

  Using the same logic, we would sign Al Pacino a few years later (after he stopped asking us to cut our commission to 5 percent). All three stars thrived at CAA at the peak of their popularity, and we got better deals for all of them. Though the studios always tried to pretend that if De Niro didn’t take a role at their price they’d go to Hoffman, we already knew Hoffman didn’t want it. We even packaged Pacino and De Niro as dual leads in Heat, a big hit by the brilliant director Michael Mann.