Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  CHAPTER NINE

  NO PRESSURE

  I grew up in an environment without paintings and sculpture. They didn’t teach art at my high school, and my parents had no interest in it. The first time I saw art worth mentioning was when I drove to New York before starting at UCLA and went to the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art. The sheer visual stimulation was so emotionally shocking that I felt like I was hallucinating. Art was everywhere in New York, in parks and squares and the lobbies of apartment buildings. It was only a three-day visit, but I would never be the same. In my second year in college, I enrolled in the first of many art history courses, one of those slide-show surveys that range from caveman drawings to Jackson Pollock. It was the one class I’d literally run to.

  At William Morris, I began to collect young California artists such as Laddie John Dill and Chuck Arnoldi. I wasn’t systematic; I bought what I liked and could afford. The next leap came after we started CAA and I began going to New York regularly. In the late 1970s, before Chris was born, I’d be in the city two or three Saturdays a month. After work I’d squeeze in a few hours at the galleries and museums, often with Judy at my side, loving what I was seeing, though for the most part I had no idea what I was looking at. Minimal art in particular left me nonplussed. (My tastes have changed; I now collect extensively in that area.) But I didn’t need to understand a piece to be moved by it. Art nourished me. The Museum of Modern Art became my home away from home. I could always find something new and exciting there, even in works I’d seen a dozen times before.

  Around this time I met a close friend of Bill Haber’s, a TV exec named Barry Lowen who was assembling the most interesting collection of contemporary paintings and sculpture in Los Angeles. Barry was smart, curious, engaging, and involved. He was a founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. and a key supporter of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And he was one of the warmest guys I’ve ever known. Cultured and soft-spoken, he had an extraordinary eye for young artists, such as Ellsworth Kelly and Cy Twombly, who could go the distance.

  We talked every other day, more about art or life than business, often over dinner at my house or his. After Barry became ill with AIDS, I stayed in touch daily to try to lift his spirits. He made me the executor of his estate and left me his vast art library, the core of my library today. Barry died in 1985 at the age of fifty. Every now and then I’ll slide a book off the shelf and a slip will fall out with his name on it—a note about a picture he wanted me to look at. These visitations are poignant, but they always make me smile.

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  My first big buy, in 1976, was a Jasper Johns Gemini print, Periscope I Red, Yellow, Blue. It cost $600, and I felt trepidation as I wrote the check. Knowing that I needed guidance, Mort Janklow later set me up with his friend Arne Glimcher at the Pace Gallery. I strolled through Arne’s showing room, feigning savoir faire, wide-eyed at the price tags. He said, “I have something to show you.” A minute later I was staring at a Matisse. “A real bargain at seven hundred fifty thousand,” he said.

  The number seemed so surreal I didn’t know what to say. Afterward, I called Mort in a fury: “Who the hell has seven hundred fifty thousand dollars?” Arne, I complained, was a snob who’d made me feel like a rube.

  Mort chuckled and said, “Give him another try.”

  So I did. After Arne put in the time to guide me and help me to see the nuances of the works in front of me, I finally bought a major Brice Marden from him for $60,000. Our phone calls were a welcome break from my work, and the guy I had written off became a close friend. When we traveled to Paris with our wives, Arne showed me an artist’s-eye view of the city. He expanded my collecting into different mediums and periods. After he took me to “Primitivism” at the Modern, which revealed how African masks inspired Picasso’s Cubist portraits, I returned thirty times. Today a room in my house is dedicated to Picassos and African masks. I feel a little charge of strangeness—which is what Picasso does to me—every time I go in there.

  My growing art collection made me feel I’d escaped the Valley at last. But escape is never painless. One day my dad came to our house in Brentwood and saw my first Picasso, which I’d bought for $100,000. He looked at it, looked at me, then looked away. Neither of us said anything.

  I bought my parents a large condo, and my dad was grateful, if a little embarrassed, that I was now taking care of them. My mother was grateful in a general way, but she complained that I never spent enough time with her: she was a guilt expert. She increasingly reminded me of a demanding client, the kind you can never satisfy no matter what you do. Families always want you to stay the person they think you were.

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  A few years later, I saw Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans. The film overwhelmed me; it was like a 112-minute oil painting. I called Michael from my car and said I had three words for him. The first was brilliant. The second and third were Albert Bierstadt, the nineteenth-century painter of luminous landscapes of the American West.

  Michael was surprised and pleased: “How did you know?” He said Bierstadt was an inspiration for him to make the movie.

  I felt happy, hearing that, because it ratified an idea I’d had for some time. As I’d become more involved in the New York art scene, I’d begun to see parallels between art and fashion and movies and television—a connection among all things creative. The more deeply I understood painters and sculptors, the better I related to film artists. Art deepened my feel for writers, in particular. When one of them pitched me an idea, I had a stronger visual sense of its possibilities than before. I could see how it might work on the screen (or not work). I had a frame of reference for production design, even lighting and costumes. I could be a more useful part of the conversation.

  My affinity for Scorsese’s work came from deep in that place. If you froze Marty’s films, you could mount the individual frames.

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  When Chris, our firstborn, was less than a year old, he got terribly sick with a systemic infection. It took awhile for the doctors to diagnose him, and Judy and I were scared to death. Chris was still struggling when we ran out of his antibiotic at our weekend home in Malibu, where no drugstores were open on Sunday. I drove at top speed to Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica in my T-shirt and cutoff jeans and flip-flops. I rapped on the glass and told the druggist what I needed. Then I realized I’d forgotten my wallet.

  “Look,” I said, “here’s my number, call my wife, she’ll verify who I am!” I must have sounded crazed.

  The man held up his hand and calmly said, “Take the scrip and bring me a check tomorrow.”

  The next day I returned with two checks, one for the prescription and one for a substantial donation. When I couldn’t find anyone to take the second check, I called a board member listed on the hospital’s brochure—Glen McDaniel, the Litton Industries general counsel. Six months later, I joined the board myself and began working with Glen on the Saint John’s Health Center Foundation. With Judy in charge, we organized an annual movie premiere around big CAA packages such as Ghostbusters and Out of Africa. We raised at least $2 million each time.

  As UCLA graduates, Judy and I later gravitated naturally to helping the university’s medical center. It had no board at the time, just a doctors’ society that raised about $65,000 a year. We assembled a board of prominent people to engineer a kickoff fund-raiser for 1,500 people at Fox. We enlisted CAA clients Chevy Chase and Crosby, Stills & Nash to entertain and raised another $2 million. I worked hard for UCLA in part because it proved extremely useful for CAA to be able to get our clients or potential clients the best medical care with one call—but even more because I believed in its mission and liked the idea of helping people, saving people.

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  By 1985, we had about six hundred clients. We’d gradually become a
corporation, with buttoned-down execs running large fiefs of our expanding empire. I’d gotten to know Ray Kurtzman at William Morris; by the time he replaced Sam Sacks as the lawyer who headed its twenty-five-man group, he had already headed up both Columbia Pictures and the Mirisch Corporation (and produced such classics as The Guns of Navarone and The Magnificent Seven). Ray’s office was next to mine, and we were friendly. He was short and soft-spoken and nondescript, but he wasn’t afraid to raise his voice when someone was doing something shady or unprofessional. When our Gang of Five left to form CAA, it fell to Ray to collect the commissions we owed William Morris from preexisting contracts—a sizable sum. The awkward circumstances kept us in touch.

  One day in 1978 I told him, “I can’t offer anything close to what you’re making, but we want you to come with us.” Ray was in his forties, with three kids and a Beverly Hills mortgage. Leaving powerful William Morris for our start-up was a gutsy risk; he’d be taking a 75 percent pay cut, to $120,000, and we had no legal department other than him. But he didn’t like the leadership at WMA, and he was ready for a gamble. He built our business affairs and legal departments from scratch and closed thousands of deals for us—our agency turned over more of the details of contracts to our lawyers than other agencies did, so the agents could devote their hours to developing new business—but, most important, he served as our grown-up. He was our fifties-sitcom dad who lays down the law. Ray became the conscience of the agency, a personal mentor, and a close friend. I find it quietly pleasing that his son works at CAA today.

  Bob Goldman was my personal accountant before he became CAA’s chief financial officer. Even quieter than Ray, he was equally professional and ego-free. He handled our real estate investments and tax matters, keeping our money safe. He and Ray helped keep CAA grounded and stable while the rest of us flung zip lines into distant treetops.

  The first ten years at CAA were the best ten years of my life. And it seemed, for the first few years after that, that everything just kept getting better. By the late eighties, CAA had become a story factory. Hundreds of scripts, treatments, articles, and novels poured into our office each month. Ten full-time readers generated three- or four-page synopses for our agents, who read the most promising material in full and brought it to staff meetings for review. On Friday, any of our agents could pitch me one-on-one, so each weekend I plowed through several scripts they’d recommended. Our packages were in full swing. ICM or William Morris might package half a dozen multiclient projects a year in TV and film; we assembled thirty or more. As a rule, we loaded artists into a film until their aggregate share of the producing studio’s gross totaled 20 percent to 30 percent. If the film returned $100 million to the studio, our clients earned $20 million to $30 million. Ten percent of that was a handsome payday for CAA—$3 million in 1985 is the current equivalent of more than $7 million.

  We busted a gut for the money. We scrutinized the film’s budget, gave notes on every rewrite, sat in on screenings, broke the news to the director if revisions were needed, then reviewed every ad for the finished picture. We trained our young agents in how to read by giving them a 1978 Esquire article by Aaron Latham, whom we represented, about a honky-tonk bar with a mechanical bull. The brightest of our up-and-comers could envision the article as a movie, which we’d made in 1980—the hit Urban Cowboy, written by Latham and director Jim Bridges and starring John Travolta and Debra Winger. We put the same inspired hard work into our television and music projects. When the Wall Street Journal interviewed Aaron Spelling about Hollywood Wives, a Jackie Collins miniseries, and other series that we’d packaged for him, he called us his extramural “creative staff.”

  The joke around the industry was that our agents were like the Stepford Wives: well paid, affable, driving shiny new cars, living the American Dream. They were young, on average in their early thirties: ten years younger than agents at our biggest rivals. And they were happy because it was all working—or at least as happy as agents can be. As the famous talent agent Swifty Lazar put it, “There hasn’t been a phenomenon such as CAA since 1947, when Lew Wasserman and MCA dominated Hollywood. Comparing CAA to its strongest competition is like comparing Tiffany’s to the A&P.”

  I was beginning to have personal leverage, and it was a great feeling: it was like putting your foot on the gas pedal of a Ferrari and feeling the chesty rumble. When Wolfgang Puck opened Spago on the Sunset Strip in 1982, he introduced Los Angeles to a lighter California cuisine: smoked salmon pizza, squab on peaches, goat cheese galore. Judy and I became devotees of the place. Wolfgang made such great food, was such a charmer, and had such a disarming accent that I thought he deserved a larger audience. So in 1986 I took the president of ABC Entertainment, Lew Erlicht, to dinner at Spago with his wife and Judy. I called Wolfgang beforehand and told him to cook the meal of his life, and to pay particular attention to Lew. The food was excellent, Wolfgang was witty and engaging, and Lew personally polished off at least two of the three bottles of carefully chosen red wine that Wolfgang sent out.

  When Lew was good and hammered, I said to him, “Listen, you’ve got Julia Child doing cooking segments on Good Morning America. She’s great, but why not give Wolfgang a trial of three appearances so you can bring in some younger, hipper viewers? As you can see, he’s a natural. If he does well, he’d be a great regular contributor.” Lew said: “You write it up and I’ll sign the contract.” At that point he would have agreed to pretty much anything. “Great!” I said. I pulled out a pen, drew up my plan on a napkin, and had Lew sign it.

  He called the next day to thank me for dinner, and after some chitchat I asked when Wolfgang could expect to go on the show. Lew said, “What are you talking about?” He had no memory of that part of the evening. I said, “I’ll send the contract over.” I had a kid from the mailroom drive to ABC’s offices in Century City. He was immediately ushered into Lew’s office. The kid opened his sports jacket and there, safety-pinned to his shirt, was the napkin Lew had signed.

  “Give me that,” Lew said, reaching for it.

  “I’m sorry,” the kid said, closing his jacket and backing away. “Mr. Ovitz told me to let you view the contract you signed, and then return it to him.”

  Lew wasn’t too happy about it, but Wolfgang got his shot on air. The day before he went on, I sent around a memo telling everyone in the agency to have their relatives call ABC’s switchboard the following morning, after Wolfgang’s appearance, to say how much they loved the new chef. Switchboard calls were the networks’ way of measuring heat in the mideighties, an early version of Twitter followers. ABC was blown away. I never pulled that trick again; it’s something you can only do once. But it was all to help a genuine talent who would have made it as a TV personality on his own—just more slowly. And ABC could hardly complain that I’d pulled a fast one, as Wolfgang remains a regular on Good Morning America to this day.

  With my growing leverage it became increasingly easier for me to help our artists expand their footprints into related fields. I knew that Steve Ross at Warner Bros. wanted to build an empire in which the right artist could excel in every facet of the business. Now we found ourselves representing just such an artist: Madonna. After discussing her future with her manager, Freddy DeMann, and her lawyer, Allen Grubman, I told Steve that we had a client who could simultaneously showcase her talent and his company. “She’s doing huge business on your record label,” I said. “She’s big in personal appearances. She was really good in Desperately Seeking Susan for Orion. She wants to write a book—and you own an imprint. Why don’t you and I figure out how to cover all the things she can do?”

  Steve was game, so Freddy and Allen and I went to work. First we had to enlist Time Warner’s division chiefs, who had considerable autonomy. Madonna was Warner Music’s hit machine, and Mo Ostin, the label’s president, didn’t want her distracted. Somehow we cajoled him into a meeting in New York. The toughest sell was Bob Daly, who didn’t need Madonna in his movies
. But he agreed to come, too. So did Larry Kirshbaum, who ran Warner Books.

  Sometimes stardom happens by accident. You’re Peter Frampton and everybody starts buying your live album just because. You sell sixteen million units, then you fade away. But Madonna was no fluke. I met her when she was nineteen and Freddy DeMann brought her to our Century City offices. She took the whole meeting with her head on the table, like a bored teenager—but she absorbed every word. She called me “Mr. Ovitz,” then and later, seeing me as a suit-wearing grown-up. Yet of all of CAA’s clients, she was the best at expanding her brand. Despite her extreme persona, she was disciplined, focused, and cultured.

  When we met with Steve and his chieftains, Madonna sat at the circular table and studied a lengthy outline she’d written in fountain pen. As we got started, one of Allen Grubman’s partners spilled his water glass all over Madonna’s notes, rendering them illegible. Though obviously upset, she composed herself and spoke off the cuff. She talked about movie development and TV production, and how they could play off her music and vice versa. She pitched a sex book. She pitched every aspect of her brand working for Steve’s empire. He was so impressed that we signed an unprecedented omnibus deal. Some of Madonna’s ideas worked out great—her sex book, with its metallic cover, sold half a million copies in one week—but she never made it as an actress. No one can do everything perfectly.

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  I was now able to put executives in place at the studios and then sell our projects to them, controlling both supply and demand. By 1984, after Michael Eisner wasn’t chosen to succeed Barry Diller at Paramount, he knew he had no future there. Fortunately, another studio needed new leadership. Disney was hurting in film and TV and hurting even worse in merchandising. Its overseas business was next to nonexistent. CEO Ron Miller, Walt Disney’s son-in-law, left for the day at two o’clock. Michael and his running mate, Frank Wells, campaigned for the job with every board member they could find. But they had no entrée to Sam Williams, the state bar chairman who headed Disney’s search committee. Sam practiced at a downtown L.A. law firm whose senior partner, Seth Hufstedler, was my personal attorney. In those days the Los Angeles business community was split between downtown and West L.A., and one had little to do with the other. The lead contender to replace Ron Miller, Dennis Stanfill, was a downtown favorite. He looked like a shoo-in.