Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  What happened after Joe walked into my office later that day became show business legend. Joe allegedly demanded to be released; I allegedly lost my temper and threatened him in the vilest terms; he allegedly left our offices in a rage. Two weeks later he shot off a heated letter with copies to his producer, his lawyer, and Guy McElwaine. He claimed I had threatened to sue him if he left CAA and tie him up in depositions so he couldn’t work, and that I’d added, for good measure, “My foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day will blow your brains out” and “If you make me eat shit, I’m going to make you eat shit.”

  Joe’s letter was leaked to the press. I put out a reply disputing his version of our meeting and inviting him to go back to Guy if that was what he wanted. Joe responded with a second letter that attacked me all over again.

  For months the entertainment world buzzed. Joe’s version of events sounded plausible to anyone who knew me, and my letter of reply, written by our lawyers—who were petrified that the Writers Guild would get involved and investigate us for restraint of trade—sounded weak and defensive. It’s absolutely true that I didn’t take losing agents or clients well, and that as a last resort I would threaten to scorch the earth, trying to make the wayward realize both how great a friend we were and how fearsome an enemy.

  But Joe’s account was total nonsense. Here’s what happened: Joe sat on my sofa and confessed that he was happy at CAA. His problem was that he couldn’t see how to stay with us without seeming disloyal to Guy. In jest, I said, “It’s simple, Joe. Tell Guy I threatened to make your life difficult and you didn’t need that kind of pressure. Tell him I said my foot soldiers will blow your brains out.” We both laughed. Then I advised him to say publicly that CAA was holding him to his contract and commission obligations—which would give him an out, and, I thought, be good advertising that we played hardball.

  He seemed relieved and pleased to have a plan. “Great,” he said. Even as we shook hands, I had a hunch that our private understanding wouldn’t stay private long, and that a wild man like Joe might leave us anyway. And so he did. I sensed—as I’m sure Joe did—that there was a lot going on beneath the surface of our meeting. Joe reminded me of the bullies in my elementary school, and I’m sure my disdain for toughs like him conveyed itself. He was neither dumb nor insensitive. Still, it never crossed my mind to anticipate that he’d claim my scripted “threat” was genuine and play the innocent victim. It was his word against mine, and Joe shouted louder. Think about it, though. What, even according to his version of events, was I actually going to do to him after he left? Break his typewriter?

  When the controversy broke, Ron supported me both inside and outside the agency, but not wholeheartedly, and Bill wrote me a note saying that I should have just let Joe go. He was right: Joe was such a loose cannon we were better off without him. But I did wish, while I was being attacked on all sides, that Bill had stood with me. I also wished that I hadn’t established a public persona that set me up so neatly to take the fall for Joe. I would have had a much happier life if I hadn’t been so determined to appear all-knowing and invulnerable.

  The fake controversy made Joe famous. Not long afterward, Guy got him a record $3 million for the screenplay for Basic Instinct. By bashing me and CAA and gaming the press, Joe had more than doubled his price. Four years later, with his career cooling, Joe approached one of our people to see if he could return to us.

  I declined. Politely.

  * * *

  —

  I became a Michael Crichton fan with The Andromeda Strain, his first scientific thriller. Michael was a Harvard MD and Salk Institute research scientist. He’d been published in Atlantic Monthly and Playboy and the New England Journal of Medicine. He wrote with authority about subjects as far-flung as architecture, computers, and Jasper Johns. He could delve into any topic and make the reader feel like an expert within a dozen pages. He also wrote cinematically; his books unfolded as a series of pictures in your head. I called him out of the blue to say how much I liked Coma, a film he’d written and directed from the Robin Cook novel. A year later, in 1978, when I visited Sean Connery in England on the set of The Great Train Robbery, which Crichton had adapted from his own work, I met the author. He was six foot eight, shy, and such a polymath that I felt smarter after talking to him for just a few minutes. It was the beginning of what would later become a beautiful friendship.

  My opening came the following year, when I made the deal for Bob Bookman, Michael’s movie agent, to move from ICM to ABC Entertainment. Michael was talking to other agents, but he had yet to sign. He felt frustrated, he told me, because nobody believed he could drive a hit film. Most agents were bound by yesterday’s thinking: audiences came out for movie stars. But Michael’s novels sold on his name, and people flocked to his lectures. I told him he was a brand in the making, which was what he wanted to hear—and also true.

  Signing Michael would eventually give us entrée to his powerful book agent, Lynn Nesbit, the head of ICM’s literary department. Bob Bookman—who moved on from ABC to Columbia, giving us a friend there as a buyer, and then joined us at CAA in 1986—told me how angry Lynn was with her agency, ICM, after it had snubbed her for a partnership. Bob and I met Lynn for lunch in New York and then went to Mort Janklow with a proposal: Why didn’t he and she partner up? Mort disliked ICM, so he was resistant, but we kept at it until he and Lynn joined forces in 1989. CAA’s toughest rival in the lit arena was now our ally. Janklow & Nesbit remains one of the largest literary agencies in the world.

  Though we began working with Michael with high hopes, his first two screenplays misfired. We planned to package a new Crichton novel with another director and keep Michael focused on his next big idea. But he slid into a depression. For two years in the late 1980s, he shut down completely. I called every day to try to get him up and moving, and I visited him often. When offers came in for him to direct or to rewrite a script, I had our agents say he was busy on an original.

  A pillar of CAA’s philosophy was that we told our clients the truth. That didn’t mean we told everyone else the truth. I often had to offer more than I could deliver in order to be able to eventually deliver what I had offered. If the truth was bad for us, we had to change the reality, and then deliver it as what we’d said it was all along. In the meantime, well, you’d get creative. One of our best cover-up jobs was convincing the town, for two years, that Michael was hard at work when he was actually curled up in a ball. We didn’t get caught on this kind of smokescreen because it hardly served the client we were protecting to throw us under the bus.

  I never viewed this kind of misdirection as lying. Lying, to me, is a point-blank misstatement with no purpose in mind. I viewed what we did as positioning, molding, manipulating: taking fact sets and making them work for the result we wanted. That mind-set underpinned every single conversation we had with the buyers and they had with us, all day long. For instance, a studio exec calls me and says, “We want to replace Bob with Fred”—both are CAA clients—“for the next rewrite of the script.”

  “Not going to happen,” I say. Because Bob is more expensive than Fred and I know Bob can get this done if the studio gives him a chance.

  And the exec says, “Well, it is, because we already talked to Fred.” He’s trying to outflank me with a lie, and I know it’s a lie because I already talked to Fred, and he’d told me that he didn’t want to replace Bob (another lie).

  And I say, “I already talked to Fred myself and he told me he doesn’t want to replace Bob, who by the way is one of his closest friends”—a complete fib, but it makes the exec feel bad for getting between them and gives me some momentum. “Furthermore, Bob is already three quarters done with his next draft and it’s terrific.” Not even close to true, but at this point who can tell? And on it would go.

  They were never lies to me. They were tools I needed to use to get shit done.

  * * *

&nbs
p; —

  One day Michael called and said, “I want to tell you about an idea I’ve been working on.” I was elated to hear the vigor in his voice, and we made a date for lunch.

  He arrived in his signature blue blazer, gray slacks, and penny loafers. As he folded into his seat, he said, “Three scientists get trapped in an amusement park where they’re cloning dinosaurs. The clones overrun the fences, and everyone has to flee for their lives. Chaos ensues. What do you think?”

  I said, “Wow!” Everyone I knew was nuts about dinosaurs, from my kids and their friends to my seventy-year-old father. Having quietly put in months of research as his depression began to lift, Michael said he could finish the manuscript in six months. I told him we’d all stand in line to see Jurassic Park, and we spent the rest of lunch plotting the book’s afterlife as a film.

  Research was the phase Michael enjoyed most. After putting off writing as long as possible, he went at it eighteen hours a day, seven days a week until he was done. He banged out Jurassic Park in a fury. It was like he’d been in hibernation, amassing energy for his signature work.

  I read the rough draft in two sittings. “I think it’s the best thing you’ve ever written,” I told him. “And it’s a gangbuster movie.”

  With Michael’s assent, we did something unusual with his unpublished manuscript. We offered Jurassic Park exclusively to Steven Spielberg—who still hadn’t signed with CAA. Steven was the one director Michael and I knew who possessed both the technique and the sense of wonder to pull the plot off. Playing favorites on this one would alienate a lot of our other filmmakers, but it was worth it. Bob Zemeckis, for instance, saw everything that came through CAA except for one or two projects. This was one of the one or two. When he and a half dozen other directors asked me about Jurassic Park, I told each of them, “Michael Crichton feels very strongly that only Steven can pull it off. If that doesn’t work out, I will absolutely get you a meeting.”

  It was worth all the flak because this was how I could finally land Steven Spielberg as a CAA client.

  To instill urgency, I asked Steven to read the book in one evening. He called at 6:00 the next morning and said, “I love this story. I’ll do it.” You couldn’t get a top director to attach to an unfinanced project, much less to attach himself overnight, but Jurassic Park was the very rare exception. Kathleen Kennedy, Steven’s partner and producer at Amblin Entertainment, followed his lead. With Michael helping to adapt his book as a screenplay, all the key elements were locked down. Casting would be secondary; the dinosaurs were the stars.

  Given Steven’s close ties to Universal’s Sid Sheinberg, there was no screen rights auction. I called Sid and said, “I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

  “The good news?” he said, uncertainly.

  “The good news is we have a Michael Crichton book about dinosaurs that will be published in six months. Steven has committed to direct it as his next film. Michael will write the screenplay with David Koepp. Kathy Kennedy says it can be done for sixty million, all in.”

  “That sounds fantastic! What’s the bad news?”

  I said, “The bad news is we own it and you don’t.”

  Sid laughed nervously and said, “Well, how do we remedy that?”

  I laid out the deal, a more radical version of what we had done on Twins—a fifty-fifty joint venture between the studio and Michael and Steven, who’d waive their above-the-line fees up front. Costs came off the top. Once the gross covered the budget, every subsequent dollar would be split down the middle. If the movie flopped, my clients wound up with nothing. But Jurassic Park’s story and talent made that a smart gamble.

  As Universal was mired in a long dry spell and desperate for a blockbuster, Sid didn’t come back to us asking for 70/30 or 60/40 or even 55/45. He came back with a yes. We’d moved from typo-ridden manuscript to fully financed studio commitment in less than a week. And Steven was finally a CAA client! We never actually had that conversation or filled out any paperwork; I just started representing him from that point on, taking it for granted.

  The hardest part of Jurassic Park was fielding the calls from the other studios. The execs were furious—not with Michael Crichton, but with me. Eisner was a master at beating the crap out of me, trying to soften me up for next time, but it was a ritual they all engaged in. They’d say, “How could you do that to me after we did [Movie X that bombed] with you?” I’d say, “You’re right, and we feel awful.” And then I’d explain the particular circumstances: in this case, that “Michael wanted Spielberg, and Spielberg insisted on honoring his relationship with Universal.” They’d call back after the movie had a test screening to repeat their complaints if it looked like a hit. If it tanked in testing, they didn’t bother.

  It was all theater.

  * * *

  —

  Steven never watched his films with an audience, never held a test screening. He was as sure of his instincts as he was sensitive to rejection, so what was the point? But I felt so confident about Jurassic Park that I coaxed him into joining us for the opening at the Avco Embassy. Judy and Kate and I dragged him into his back-row seat as the curtain rose. From the first jolting scene with the raptor in the box, the audience was there, riveted. After shielding his eyes with his hands through the first fifteen minutes, Steven began to relax. As the credits rolled, and we ran out of the theater amid wild applause, he was higher than I’d ever seen him.

  Jurassic Park grossed nearly a billion dollars, minting money for Universal. And for once the deal was equally good for the artists who made the film.

  * * *

  —

  With Michael’s name back in the news, we canvassed our files for old material from him that could feel new. A young agent named Tony Krantz recalled a screenplay Michael had written in 1974 about a hospital emergency room, a setting derived from Michael’s stint as a resident. “It’s very avant-garde,” Tony said, “and too small to be a movie.” But not too small, he thought, for a dramatic TV series.

  I called our old friend Tony Thomopoulos at Steven Spielberg’s nascent television company, Amblin. (We helped Tony get that job after he was forced out at United Artists.) Then we brought in Warner Bros. to guarantee the financing and distribution and we pitched the idea to NBC, which bought a pilot.

  Per Michael’s and Steven’s specifications, the pilot was made in an abandoned hospital in Los Angeles. It was fast paced and propulsive, all handheld cameras and people yelling over one another and blood everywhere. It felt fresh and strikingly authentic. But not to Don Ohlmeyer, NBC’s West Coast chief. Don wore cashmere sweaters and no socks like a country club golfer, but he was a profane cowboy. He called me and said, “This is the biggest piece of crap I’ve ever seen. There’s no way this shit is going on the air!” The audience research on the pilot—the equivalent of a test screening for a film—was also very negative. Don went on, combatively, “But I know you’re going to try to force this on me.”

  I said, “I’m not going to argue with you on that.” I hung up and called Les Moonves, a client of ours who ran Warner Bros., and then we each called Don’s boss, Bob Wright, who ran NBC, to double-team him. We both stressed how groundbreaking and visceral the show was, and I told Bob: “Bottom line: Spielberg, Crichton, Warner Bros., and CAA.” He wouldn’t want any of those relationships to suffer a profound dip.

  “What do you want?” Bob asked.

  “Six more episodes,” I said. The usual first order would have been six total, including the pilot, but I had such belief in the show I wanted viewers to have as many chances as possible to see it and love it. Bob agreed to pay for an additional six episodes filmed on a set built at Warner Bros. The cast was top-notch and the shows, overseen by a writer-producer named John Wells, were exquisitely crafted. I took a call from Ohlmeyer, expecting to hear some pleasure at how well it was turning out, and maybe even a backhanded apology.
/>   “You guys really stuck it to me, didn’t you?” he bellowed.

  ER went on to win twenty-three Emmys over fifteen seasons, the longest run for a prime-time medical drama in history.

  * * *

  —

  Though Michael had been married five times, he was by nature a loner. He was newly single when we met and he’d come solo to the weekly Ovitz “family” dinner parties for friends like Sean and Micheline Connery, Dustin and Lisa Hoffman, and Sydney and Claire Pollack. I remember one dinner that went until 1:30 in the morning, unheard of in L.A. Michael’s flair for discussing the potential of computers or the various sources of Jasper Johns’s inspiration made him the fulcrum around which conversations swung.

  A number of years later I was introduced to Sherri Alexander at Toscana, the Italian restaurant in Brentwood, where she’d come with my good friend Teddy Forstmann, the private-equity billionaire. Teddy and I had met in the mideighties and I’d warmed to him, though a lot of people didn’t. I ended up on five of his boards, and I served as his love-life consigliere, a busy role. He never married—though he was famously involved with Princess Diana and Padma Lakshmi—because he could never find the right woman.