Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  Of course, he wasn’t the easiest guy. In the late nineties I put him together with Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, the producers who’d made a bundle off shows like The Cosby Show and Roseanne, in a bid to buy the Family Channel, a network that aired a lot of old sitcoms. I prepped Teddy carefully, trying to get him to sand his rough edges, explaining that it was an entertainment deal and he had to play nice. He promised to be good. At the table, the first thing he said was, “Look, you’re going to go bankrupt. So you can either sell to me now or come back to me in six months and get a lot less.” No deal, unsurprisingly. Teddy was right about the channel’s future—the owner did lose control of it—but that’s not how you start a meeting. Still, he was wonderfully loyal: when he died, in 2011, his ex-barber, his ex-driver, an ex-cook, and five ex-girlfriends were still on his payroll.

  At Toscana, Sherri Alexander and I chatted for two hours; she was a charming and vivacious conversationalist, though Teddy didn’t seem to notice. As dinner concluded, Sherri rose to stand . . . and kept rising . . . and rising. How tall was this woman?

  After confirming that she and Teddy were just friends, I called Michael and said, “I have finally found a woman you will actually enjoy and get along with—and she can look you in the eye.” He laughed and took her number, but kept losing it or forgetting to call. At last I told him, “If you do not talk to her by tonight, I will not speak with you again.” He did call, they went out—and instantly found the love they’d both sought all their lives. Tragically, they were together just four years before Michael’s life was cut short by throat cancer.

  Michael and I shared the same taste in art: Johns, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg. Michael considered Johns the definitive American painter. After I acquired my White Flag, he would sit in my living room, staring at the work by the hour and telling stories about Jasper. He never tired of that painting. Whenever I look at it today, I think of him.

  In one of his essays, Michael wrote:

  If you want to be happy, forget yourself. Forget all of it—how you look, how you feel, how your career is going. Just drop the whole subject of you. . . . People dedicated to something other than themselves—helping family and friends, or a political cause, or others less fortunate than they—are the happiest people in the world.

  He was my wisest friend and the most steadfast; he was quiet when I succeeded but generous and comforting when I screwed up. As he liked to say, “There’s always another race and another racetrack.”

  I miss him every fucking day.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WRIST LOCKS

  As a high school freshman, I did gymnastics after school. I remember being stunned by the Sakamoto Brothers, respected local gymnasts who showed us martial-arts wrist locks. What awed me was their discipline. They had a stillness that set them apart from the kids I grew up around—or from me and my temper.

  Inspired, I taught myself budo, the philosophy of martial arts and self-defense. I soon learned about the danger of a little knowledge. When I tried my beginner’s judo moves on a bully named Scott Craig, he beat the crap out of me. After I lost, I thought, I do not want to keep being terrorized by a bully who only lives a few blocks away. So I congratulated Scott on beating the crap out of me, praising his power and technique. After that, whenever he came around the corner on his American Flyer bike, I’d wave and call out. A few weeks into my charm offensive, he became my friend and then my protector. It was a great lesson in how to make your enemies your friends.

  At William Morris I began going to Ed Parker for Saturday classes in Kenpo karate. After we started CAA, I switched to a trainer in Santa Monica and to the more traditional Shotokan style. I finally focused on aikido, a blend of dance, chess, and combat in which you redirect your opponents’ force against them. It felt a lot like being an agent, where you had to redirect a client’s passion for doing something ruinous in a new and more productive direction.

  My forty-five-minute morning workouts grew legendary after I began inviting people to my house on Saturday to watch; karate became part of my mystique. Richard Lovett, one of our young agents, treated me with noticeably more respect after he saw me toss my instructor around like a feather. Norman Lear couldn’t get over what he’d seen, and started taking lessons. But he stopped, because it was hard: it required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped. I didn’t stop.

  One day Marty Baum told me, “I met the most amazing martial artist. I’ve never seen anything like what he does—you’ve got to meet him.”

  His name was Steven Seagal. After moving in his teens from California to Japan, he became the first foreigner to run an aikido dojo. He had 2,500 disciples, extraordinary for a gaijin, or outsider. He had returned to Los Angeles to help Sean Connery with a fight sequence for Never Say Never Again. I asked for a lesson, though I was a little concerned to hear that he’d broken Sean’s wrist.

  My new instructor rolled up our driveway in an ancient Rolls-Royce. It took fifteen seconds on the mat for me to see what Marty was talking about. Seagal was six foot four, strong, slim, and he moved like a gazelle. I hired him for three workouts a week at fifty dollars an hour.

  A few weeks in, after we bowed to each other at the end of a session, Steven went to his backpack and pulled out a script he’d written. “Would you read this?” he asked. “I want to be an actor.”

  I said, “Steven, I know you want to be an actor, or you wouldn’t be here teaching me. I’ll read it over the weekend.” I read the script on a Friday night, before our Saturday workout, and then I told him, “The script is fine”—which was overstating it—“but let me see what I can do more generally.” As Chuck Norris had shown, a guy with the right physical attributes didn’t need acting chops or a great script. In an action movie, all you need is a character and a mission and a blocked-out outline of the action. I loved action movies—they relaxed me—and I believed that a new action megastar would percolate up every decade: Eastwood, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, and, later, Vin Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

  Warner Bros. had Eastwood, but he was shifting into less physically demanding roles. I called Terry Semel, Warner’s president, and pitched a series of martial-arts films around a fresh face. “I’m going to send this guy over,” I said, “and I want you to set up some mats and sandwiches and get your secretaries and assistants to come out at lunchtime for a demonstration.” Then I told Steven I wanted him to bring his best apprentices and I wanted blood and shock.

  He showed up with four black-belt protégés. He strode to the center of the mat, pricked his thumb with a butcher’s knife, showed his audience the blood, and wiped it on his face. Then he shouted something in Japanese and all four guys ran at him full tilt with knives. Steven slipped aside and then picked them off one by one, sending each one flying, and flipping the last guy high into the air. There was blood all over the mat. Steven bowed and left without a word.

  Terry was still jonesing on adrenaline when he called: “What the hell was that?”

  “That,” I said, “is your new action star.” The studio budgeted $8 million for a nonunion production of Above the Law with a promising young director, Andy Davis. When I saw the rough cut, I thought, This guy is going to be huge. The opening scene was essentially the battle he’d choreographed for Terry Semel.

  We previewed the movie by invitation in Burbank. Steven prowled the hallways of the theater, totally unrecognized. Bob Daly, the studio’s CEO, came over and said, “Michael, you really screwed me on this one. I ran this movie last night, and it’s terrible.” He’d watched it by himself, and he was not a chopsocky aficionado, so he had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Bob, I know martial-arts movies,” I said. “This one’s terrific.”

  “No, you screwed me.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “CAA will buy it back from you right now. I’ll send you a cashier’s check for
eight million dollars tomorrow morning.” I knew that Fox needed a spring replacement for a film they’d canceled. I could resell Above the Law with one phone call.

  Bob said, “Deal!” and we shook hands.

  That Burbank preview marked aikido’s screen debut in America. As Steven hurled bad guys through plateglass windows, the audience response was electric. At the end, after our hero had dispatched a rogue CIA agent and a savage drug ring, there was a standing ovation. When the lights went up and people spotted Steven, they swarmed him.

  I turned to Bob Daly and said, “Too bad you don’t own the movie.”

  “Nonsense!” he replied.

  While Above the Law did just okay at the box office, the videocassette went through the roof. Steven Seagal made a series of movies that together grossed nearly $300 million, and he was by far Warner Bros.’ most profitable star in the early nineties. He got $150,000 for Above the Law and he was thrilled. We got him $3 million for Hard to Kill, and $40 million for the next three movies. Including the back end, CAA made at least $10 million off him. Though Steven was growing fleshier by the release, I thought he could go on for years.

  But he wanted more. One day he told me, “I think I’m as good an actor as Hoffman, De Niro, all those guys.”

  I said, “Steven, I’m not sure about that, but what makes you special is that those guys can’t do aikido.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I want to direct my next movie and win an Academy Award. And I want you to help me.”

  It’s true that we were often able to do nearly impossible things. In 1982, Prince came to see me in the office. He was wearing a one-piece gold lamé jumpsuit and huge wooden platform shoes that clip-clopped in our hallways like a cart horse, and he was accompanied by the largest bodyguard I have ever seen. After I persuaded Prince, not without difficulty, to leave his bodyguard outside, he told me that he wanted to make and star in a musical movie. I told him we could do it. But Bob Daly at Warner Bros.—whose label put out Prince’s music—was completely resistant to the concept.

  So I called his son, Bobby, to get him to talk to his father. I didn’t know that Bobby was a Prince fan, as fortunately he turned out to be; if he hadn’t been, I’d have said, “Let me send you over some albums and then we’ll talk.” Bobby spoke to his dad and convinced him that Prince was indeed the future, and Purple Rain ended up being huge. That’s a move I still make, getting people’s kids to tell their influential parents what’s really going on. After you hit thirty-five, maybe even thirty, you no longer have any idea what’s coming next, assuming you ever did. I only became convinced Madonna was a true superstar when my daughter, Kim, started dressing like her.

  Yet CAA’s reputation as miracle workers meant we were constantly being asked not merely to heal the sick but to raise the dead. After The Wiz hit big for our client Michael Jackson, we took a meeting at Michael’s house, and Michael told us he wanted to be the star of an action movie. As he talked, his hat fell into the guacamole in front of him, and he picked it out and put it back on—unfortunately, with a blob of guacamole attached, which began to slide down the brim. Ron Meyer tapped my leg to draw my attention to it, and we all watched in horrified fascination as it slid lower and lower while Michael was pitching us hard on how he was America’s next action hero. Then the blob fell off, and Ron totally lost it. I cracked up, too, despite my best efforts at self-control, and Michael stalked out.

  I went and found him and explained for fifteen minutes that we hadn’t been laughing at him, but at the incident. That we’d never laugh at him, as we had so much respect for him as a man and an artist. And so forth, over and over, more and more vehemently. Finally, Michael’s face cleared. “Okay, Ovitz. Okay,” he said. “But I want to play James Bond.” I am proud to report that I didn’t laugh, this time. I nodded empathetically, as if I were really thinking through the possibilities, and then I said, “You’re thinly built, you’re too sensitive, you won’t be credible as a brutal block of stone. You’d be great at it, of course, but it’d be bad for you.”

  Steven Seagal’s secret dream of playing a sensitive, tortured artist was, unfortunately, just as unlikely. Discerning my lack of enthusiasm, Steven left CAA. He went on to direct himself in On Deadly Ground, a total misfire. He had fallen prey to the dangerous, entirely human delusion that if you succeed in one arena you can do anything.

  * * *

  —

  Judy made it clear that, for her, three kids was plenty. But I’d always wanted to have five or six kids. The idea of a large family milling around together, particularly on vacations, was deeply appealing (perhaps because when I was growing up we could never afford a real trip anywhere). So as the kids grew I began adding to our family ad hoc. When Chris’s friend Jordan Harris graduated from Colgate and needed a place to live, I encouraged him to move in. Jordan lived on and off with us for years. He became my godson and our family’s behind-the-scenes peacemaker—an incredibly upbeat, unflappable kid who always made sure everyone else was getting along.

  In the late nineties, I met Rickson Gracie, the Brazilian jujitsu star, and became curious about his dynamic brand of martial arts. I was soon working out seven days a week with Rickson’s protégé, Marco Albuquerque, a twenty-three-year-old kid from the favelas of Rio. Marco was five foot nine, with a twenty-inch neck and a scarred, shaved head. Despite his formidable appearance, he was remarkably sweet tempered, and he became like a son to Judy and me and like an older brother to our kids. He was always watching out for them. It gave me an extra sense of comfort knowing that he could really handle himself: on Saturdays, he was teaching FBI agents how to control white-collar criminals during an arrest. (He brought me in as a guest teacher on the topic of wrist locks.)

  One night when Chris and his friend Jake Hoffman, Dusty’s son, were in their early twenties, they were out at a club called Nacional. A big, tough-looking drunk got very aggressive when Jake accidentally bumped him. Jake apologized immediately, but the guy started to threaten him. Then, from nowhere, Marco was in the guy’s face screaming at him in Portuguese. Terrified of this pitbull of a man, the guy said, “Sorry, brother, my mistake,” and apologized to Jake. Marco, still spitting fire, told the guy to go apologize to Chris, who was on the other side of the bar. The guy was so shaken he made his way to Chris, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Hey man, I’m so sorry, please tell your buddy that I don’t want any trouble!” I always felt more at peace knowing Marco was watching my kids.

  Marco did everything for us: he laid a tile floor for Judy, trained Eric in jujitsu, and helped him move into his apartment. Loyal and considerate, he came on every vacation with us, just as Jordan did. As a side hustle, he often went to Rio to guide American tourists, but when he was in L.A. he slept at our house three nights a week, and stayed at the beach house in Malibu the other four. To advance his cause with women he liked to let on that the beach house was his. When we were all on vacation off Capri, he brought three Italian women to the boat and gave them a proprietary tour. “Mr. Albuquerque, is there anything I can get you?” I said, playing along. “We’d like a bottle of the best chardonnay on the boat,” he said, grinning at me. “Immediately, please.”

  On Christmas Eve 2010, we got a call from Marco’s cousin in Rio: Marco had been shot and killed by two hoods from his old favela. High on angel dust, they wanted his Range Rover and the stack of presents he was carrying for his friends.

  It was an enormous shock; a crippling jolt of unfairness, and it left a giant hole in our family.

  He was thirty-nine.

  * * *

  —

  CAA came to subscribe to nemawashi, the Japanese style of bottom-up consensus. We didn’t hire anyone from outside until they’d met with and been approved by the whole department. The process made onboarding smooth, easing new talent into the company. (It helped that we promoted two people for each one we imported.) No one questioned our calls beca
use they’d already signed off on them.

  It may seem like anceint history now, but in the eighties, America was fascinated by Japan. It was the little-understood, much-feared Asian force that China is today. The intrigue with the Japanese culture began with our 1980 miniseries Shōgun, only to grow warier as Japanese industries threatened the American semiconductor and computer companies. Their cultural values—homogenous, self-deprecating, hard for outsiders to read—made them seem formidable. Who knew what they’d buy or disrupt next? As former vice president Walter Mondale remarked about the future, “What are our kids supposed to do? Sweep up around the Japanese computers?”

  Believing that Japan had to be reckoned with, I read everything I could about the country and its culture, from the works of Edwin Reischauer, our former ambassador, to Akio Morita’s Made in Japan, the story of Sony’s remarkable rise. In 1963, after cofounding the company and choosing its English-sounding name, Morita moved his family to New York City. He enrolled his children in American schools and absorbed how Americans thought. He watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Our culture made a lasting impression on him—and vice versa. Sony eventually became a top brand name in the United States. Morita was a chameleon CEO: an Asian in Asia, a European in Europe, an American in America. But I was the only person I knew with a copy of his book, and it served me well.

  My entrée to doing business in Japan came through Walter Yetnikoff, the brash president of CBS Records, then the world’s leading music company. We became friendly after I snagged him a producer’s credit on Ruthless People, a dark comedy with Bette Midler and Danny DeVito, and we began officially representing him in 1985 in “an exclusive motion picture deal with Disney,” as I wrote the staff. Walter wanted to be in movies; I wanted to understand his world. Walter’s style was to shake everything upside down and inside out, but his artists swore by him. Underneath a New Age veneer, he was a tough customer. “I’m very spiritual,” he once said. “I connect spiritually with my inner self, then I go out and I try to fuck people.”