Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  Of all our clients, De Niro was the most private, even more private than Redford. He didn’t act like a movie star and couldn’t stand being treated like one. (Meryl Streep, who lived down the street from us in Brentwood and who took her turn in the school carpool, was the same way.) Shortly after Bob signed, I met with him at Matsuhisa, the yet-to-be-discovered Japanese place on La Cienega. It was a hole-in-the-wall, but Nobu Matsuhisa’s cooking was fantastic. And he’d converted a studio above an adjoining garage into a private room you could secretly enter from the parking lot—perfect for Bob.

  As Nobu’s gracious wife served us one knockout dish after the next, Bob kept glancing over my shoulder or through the small window. A four-star meal in Los Angeles in total anonymity—he couldn’t believe it. He went back three times in ten days before I joined him again and introduced him to Nobu. They had a passionate conversation about food and New York, beginning a friendship that would later lead them to become partners in Nobu’s restaurant in Tribeca, Bob’s home neighborhood.

  Like Paul Newman, Bob had made some iffy choices as an actor for hire. I explained to him how our clients controlled their own projects, and Bill Haber suggested putting the producer Jane Rosenthal into his life. Jane worked with us to develop strong roles for Bob in The Untouchables, Midnight Run, Awakenings, and Backdraft. She and Bob cofounded the Tribeca Film Center, and still work together today.

  It’s hard to believe, now, that some of the films we assembled at CAA ever got made. Goodfellas, adapted by Marty Scorsese and our client Nick Pileggi from Nick’s book, was a textbook risky idea. It was the true story of Henry Hill, a cocaine-addicted stool pigeon who beats his wife and pistol-whips an unarmed man even as his mobster friends casually shoot people in the head. On paper, at least, Henry was wildly unsympathetic. Nine years before The Sopranos aired, we had no way of telling if the movie could be commercial.

  After Universal passed, I brought it to Bob Daly and Terry Semel at Warner Bros. They wanted the running time held to 140 minutes, max, and they approved a lean $25 million budget. Our first clash came over casting. Warner was a star-driven studio, and Goodfellas’s lone star was De Niro in a supporting role. Ray Liotta had wowed De Niro in Something Wild, and Marty decided that Ray should be Henry Hill. The studio tossed out bigger names, from Tom Cruise to Eddie Murphy (a classically terrible studio idea that would have led to some extremely acrobatic story changes), and it was prepared to raise the budget to accommodate a star. But Marty thought too much star power would overwhelm the story. So I held firm, which made De Niro appreciate how I’d fight for what he wanted.

  Today it’s impossible to imagine anyone but Ray Liotta as Henry Hill. He had to play four distinct characters: the wannabe wise guy, the mature wise guy, the out-of-control addict wise guy, and the schnook in the Witness Protection Program. Goodfellas inspired the performance of his life.

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  I’d read all the great books on Hollywood’s history and seen every Oscar-winning film going back to 1929. But I didn’t get movies until I started watching them with Marty in the late eighties, when he rented a one-bedroom apartment in my building in Manhattan on West Fifty-seventh Street. After getting in from L.A. at one in the morning, I’d drop my bags at my place, rap on Marty’s door, grab a plate of food, and sit in front of whatever was playing that night on his projector. Marty was a walking film encyclopedia, and the fare ranged from Michelangelo Antonioni to obscure Czech and Polish directors from before World War II. He adored the work of Michael Powell, the husband of his editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, and screened The Red Shoes over and over. There was nothing better than walking into a dark room with a projector flickering, showing an old movie I’d never heard of but that might one day influence Marty’s own work. That dark room became one of the few places, in my increasingly busy life, where I felt at home.

  My schooling continued on the set of Goodfellas, where Marty let me shadow him. I learned the importance of detail and how planning and inspiration could coexist. I took a master class in the film’s soundtrack, one of the best scores anywhere, ever. When Henry Hill runs from the narcs to Harry Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire,” Marty used no dialogue. Music was all he needed to propel the action.

  Warner’s main concern was the film’s graphic violence. When we screened Marty’s 175-minute rough cut for the execs, two scenes particularly troubled Bob Daly. The first occurred right after the opening credits, when you could hear Joe Pesci’s character’s kitchen knife carving through a hog-tied gangster. The second came when Pesci shoots and kills Spider, the young man waiting on the wise guys at their poker game. (Spider was played by Michael Imperioli, who went on to star as Christopher in The Sopranos.) Marty thought the action was funny and revealing, but Warner Bros. found it gratuitous.

  I moved like Henry Kissinger between studio and client. After half the audience fled a Goodfellas test screening in Burbank, it was touch and go. Fearing the film might be canceled, I appealed to Marty to modify the stabbing, saying it really was too much, and also to cut some time so Goodfellas could play twice a night and have a chance at earning out. Passionate as Marty was, he was open to a good argument. He shortened Goodfellas to 145 minutes and made the first scene crisper and less gory. In return, I backed Marty in his determination to keep Spider’s death intact. That scene exemplified his characteristic tone of savagely funny realism; to tamper with it would have been like telling Degas he couldn’t use blue.

  The Warner Bros. executives were half an hour late for the next preview in suburban Orange County, and the audience was fidgeting before the lights went down. There were Pesci and De Niro butchering the hapless gangster—but no audio! The lights came back up and after a delay, the projectionist tried to sync picture and sound—and failed again. Marty was going nuts. No picture could get a fair screening after a long delay and two false starts. I hustled him across the street to a coffee shop. Bob Daly and Terry Semel followed. Seconds before they caught up, I whispered into my assistant Jay Moloney’s ear. I heard Bob and Terry out as they pleaded for another try, and at last I said, “Okay, go ahead. But we won’t participate.” Marty shook his head violently, feeling betrayed. I led him to my car for the drive back to Los Angeles.

  He said, “Aren’t we going in for the screening?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  At that instant my car phone rang. I put it on speaker, and heard a frantic Warner’s executive wanting to know where the print was: they couldn’t find it anywhere. Marty looked horrified. I said, “Oh, no! I can’t imagine what happened!” After I hung up, I explained to Marty that I’d told Jay Moloney to secure the film canisters and drop them in my trunk. Marty burst out laughing and could not stop.

  The next preview was glitch-free. Goodfellas came out that fall to near-unanimous acclaim and went on to earn six Oscar nominations.

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  For months in 1989 I pushed Marty to commit to Cape Fear, a remake of a noirish film from 1962 about a psychopathic ex-con named Max Cady (played by Robert Mitchum) out for revenge. It was commercial, it would fulfill Marty’s deal with Universal, and I knew he’d nail it. “It’s a remake,” he kept saying. “I don’t do remakes.”

  That’s what he’d said about sequels. It was an edict I knew I could work around. But there was a further problem with Cape Fear: Steven Spielberg, not Marty, controlled the rights. At the time Steven had no agent, though I was working hard to rope him in. He’d caught wind of a script that Scorsese controlled, Schindler’s List, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Based on Schindler’s Ark, a novel by Thomas Keneally, it told the story of a German industrialist who saved a thousand Jews from the Nazi gas chambers. Steven saw Schindler’s story as the ideal vehicle for an accessible movie about a monstrously difficult subject.

  It seemed to me that the wrong people were matched to the wrong projects. Steven needed a mor
e culturally relevant film to broaden his profile: to get bigger he had to go smaller. So I did what I always did—I represented the client before I actually, technically, represented him.

  “You know,” I said to Marty, “I understand why you want to do Schindler’s List. But you don’t need to do it. Steven doesn’t need another picture like Cape Fear. Why don’t the two of you swap?”

  Marty was unconvinced. I tried again: “Look, you can cast Bobby in the Mitchum part and have a field day.” Working with De Niro always appealed to Marty. But it was never easy to talk him into or out of anything—he had to work his way through it. He was as deeply Catholic as Steven was deeply Jewish. Religion permeated his movies and he was eager to explore another faith. It would be wrenching for him to part with Schindler’s List.

  From countless nights with Marty and his 16mm projector, I knew of his passion for genre movies, from horror to obscure Asian pictures, the bloodier the better. (Years later, the Hong Kong drama Infernal Affairs, which he’d shown me in the eighties, would inspire his Oscar-winning The Departed.) “Cape Fear could be something you’ve never achieved before—a Scorsese-style film noir,” I said. “You’ll create a truly sinister villain!” Marty loved the dynamic in the original between the Mitchum character and the budding-but-innocent girl played by fourteen-year-old Lori Martin. He’d created a similar vibe in Taxi Driver between De Niro and Jodie Foster, who was thirteen at the time.

  Five or six bruising conversations later, Marty was finally ready. I called Steven and said, “Marty has a terrific take on Cape Fear. You guys should talk.”

  I set a call between Steven and Marty. They’d never had a business conversation, but given their shared intrepid spirit, I wasn’t surprised to hear that they had hit it off. Hesitantly, Marty joined Steven in asking me to put the switch together. Within a week they had an understanding. Steven agreed to produce Cape Fear, with Marty directing on a generous back-end deal, and Marty passed Schindler’s List to Steven.

  In the midst of this statecraft I took a call from another client. Stanley Kubrick said, “I hear that Marty’s doing a Holocaust project.”

  “That’s not quite true,” I said. “It looks like he might be trading with Spielberg.”

  “Because, you know, I’ve got one, too.” Stanley had grown up during World War II in a Jewish family in New York. He’d been thinking about making a Nazi Germany picture called The Aryan Papers for years; he made so few films because he treated each one like a doctoral thesis, nailing down every detail. It had stalled on his development list, until the rumors about Schindler’s List rekindled his interest. Now he wanted me to read his first-draft screenplay and help me decide his next move.

  Because Stanley didn’t send scripts out, and because he hadn’t flown in twenty-five years, I went to see him in the English countryside at Childwickbury Manor, his enormous house in Hertfordshire. First, a messenger came to my hotel with the Aryan Papers script, sat outside my door as I read it, and collected it when I was done. It was tense reading because I knew there was room for only one Holocaust film; two would dilute the box office and spark unfortunate comparisons. Soon I’d be advising a hall-of-fame artist to surrender a passion project—either one of our most venerable clients or the director we most hoped to recruit.

  It was even more ticklish because the two directors formed a mutual-admiration society. Stanley vocally admired the younger director’s work, and Steven felt the same way about The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey. They had hours-long phone calls, and Steven dropped by Stanley’s house whenever he went to London. But Hollywood friendships had often been wrecked by lesser conflicts.

  I drove to Stanley’s estate bearing bad news. The Aryan Papers wasn’t as good—or as commercial—as Schindler’s List. It had no complex protagonist, no Oskar Schindler, for an audience to engage with. And because Stanley took longer than Steven in development, plus forty weeks or more to shoot (roughly twice the norm), he’d be in theaters second, putting him at a major disadvantage.

  We sat at the wooden picnic table in Stanley’s kitchen. I told him Aryan Papers was too similar to Schindler’s List and too derivative of Sophie’s Choice, the acclaimed film from eight years earlier. “It’s just not Kubrick to be unoriginal,” I said. Seeing that he was still uncertain, I lowered my voice and added, “Plus, in all candor, we just killed ourselves switching scripts between Marty and Steven.” I only used the help-me-out-for-once card because I knew that what I wanted, in this case, was also what was right for Stanley.

  “I get that,” he said, gravely. The following week, he called Steven to tell him he was letting Aryan Papers go. His act of generosity brought the directors even closer, and they remained intimate friends until Kubrick’s death in 1999. Two years later, Steven completed Stanley’s unfinished AI: Artificial Intelligence, and dedicated it to Stanley.

  Cape Fear would gross $182 million worldwide, more than three times Marty’s record, and seventeen-year-old Juliette Lewis would earn an Oscar nomination for her not-so-innocent flirtation with De Niro.

  Schindler’s List would win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Steven’s first Oscar for Best Director.

  Marty was happy. Steven was happy. Stanley was not unhappy.

  This was extremely unusual.

  * * *

  —

  It took Steven Spielberg three years after his swap with Marty to finish Schindler’s List. Universal was in no hurry to get it done: Schindler struck the studio’s execs as a more expensive Last Temptation of Christ 2, a hot-button topic that would repulse moviegoers. If Steven hadn’t been Universal’s meal ticket—and hadn’t worked on their lot, where they had to see him every day—they probably wouldn’t have warily backed it in the first place.

  Steven felt he had to shoot in Poland, where the events took place, but Sid Sheinberg said that was too expensive. After Steven won that round by accepting a bare-bones budget, the studio objected to his plan to film in black and white. Tom Pollock begged for color for the video market with a transfer to black and white for the theatrical release. Steven held firm. Color shoots, he said, made a transfer look pink and white. The dispute dragged on for weeks. Because Sid and Steven were like family and it hurt them to fight, I had to jump in. I said that Steven had an unambiguous vision of the Holocaust as “life without light.” Black and white was essential to that vision—case closed.

  Schindler’s List was filmed in Krakow in the dead of the Polish winter. As I flew over to meet Steven there on other business, I began to feel jittery. I grew up with kids calling me a kike and was pummeled more than once when I fought back. But all my life I had avoided thinking about the Holocaust because it enraged me that so many Jews had been so powerless, and that the world stood by and let the atrocity happen.

  I arrived in the morning for a quick tour of the sets, including the death camp exteriors thrown up outside Auschwitz-Birkenau. One hour into the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, with stone-faced men in Nazi uniforms everywhere, I felt like I was living in 1941. Steven wanted to make the scene almost unwatchable, and he succeeded. As the Nazis raided a home and machine-gunned two Jews wedged between a mattress and a bedspring, I thought to myself, Six million were killed, and I could have been one of them. I felt so nauseated I almost threw up.

  I spent that day in a walking stupor. As a boy, I’d asked my immigrant grandmother, “Why didn’t the Jews fight back?” Now I felt that I understood. The Jews didn’t fight because they couldn’t move; they were terrorized into paralysis. I had the same sense of paralysis on that set.

  That night I joined Steven and Kate Capshaw and his stepdaughter, Jessica, at their rented house nearby. I came with a proposal that we’d been working on for a year: an expansion of Amblin Entertainment, Steven’s production company, into a full-service studio. CAA would shepherd and commission Amblin’s productions for a monthly consulting fee. The potential seemed limitless—and,
of course, we’d finally land Steven as a client.

  Shaking off my existential dread, or at least compartmentalizing like crazy, I gave it my best pitch over dinner. I was pitching Kate as much as Steven because she was strict about family time; I always asked her permission before calling her husband after six p.m. As I spoke, I could see Kate shaking her head. She didn’t want her husband toiling like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Eisner’s studio chief at Disney. “That man does nothing but work,” she said. “That’s his whole life.” My shiny idea was dead on arrival.

  A year later, with Katzenberg and David Geffen, Steven founded DreamWorks SKG, the first new full-service studio in L.A. in seventy years. Kate gave it her okay because Jeffrey was one of the partners. She figured he would log the long hours while Steven just made his films. And for as long as DreamWorks lasted, that’s pretty much how it worked out.

  After Schindler’s List was released, CAA gave a million dollars to the Shoah Foundation, which Steven had founded to preserve video testimonies by Holocaust survivors. It was more than our combined commissions on the film. I felt good about the donation, but my experience on the set highlighted the underlying problem with my life. Because as soon as I got back to Los Angeles, I suppressed all the feelings that being on the set of the Holocaust had stirred up in me and went right back to scorching the earth for my clients.

  Yet every time I saw the film—and we previewed it a lot—the experience hit me fresh again, and I took a beat to remember how lucky I was, and to remember the fate of all those who weren’t so lucky. That’s what movies can do.