Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  But for the most part I ran in place. My directives were ignored; my suggestions vanished down the memory hole. More than one person at Disney later told me that Eisner went around me to everybody who mattered. He directed Larry Murphy, who led the planning group, to report on our meetings but to sit on anything I proposed. He did the same with Dean Valentine, head of TV animation, who fawned to my face while feeding the press anonymous negative quotes about me. Just humor him, Michael said, and they did.

  Unable to quit without losing my severance, I was a lame duck awaiting the ax. In mid-September 1996, Sandy Litvack barged into my office. “Michael doesn’t want you at the company anymore,” he said, triumphantly.

  “Go tell Michael to come tell me himself,” I said. After a twenty-something-year relationship with my so-called friend, I thought I deserved to be fired face-to-face. Michael didn’t appear.

  He had volunteered to throw the party for my fiftieth birthday that December. Hang in till then, I told myself, and perhaps not all will be lost. He repeatedly suggested that we’d figure out a soft landing so I wouldn’t be totally embarrassed in the community: I’d stay on Disney’s board for a year after leaving management, or serve the company as a consultant. (He reneged on those promises, too.)

  Three days before my birthday, Michael summoned me to his late mother’s apartment in New York to sign off on my resignation “by mutual consent.” He said he still wanted to stay friends and host my party—a bizarrely crazy idea that wouldn’t happen, of course, but one that was quintessential Eisner. I shook his hand glassily and walked out. Twenty years later, I still have no interest in ever sitting down with him again. Even if he made the most spectacular apology in the world, he’s incapable of true change.

  By the time I returned to my apartment, three blocks away, my letter of resignation had already been hand delivered. It was signed by Sandy Litvack.

  * * *

  —

  I spent a quiet birthday at home in Brentwood with Judy and our three children. For once, I didn’t answer the phone. Then I flew to Aspen for a week to be alone and think. I was livid with Eisner and furious at myself. I felt awful, worthless, an utter failure.

  Intellectually, I knew it wasn’t my fault. From the moment of the ambush in Bel Air, Michael had withheld the support he’d promised. It had been deliberate, and cruelly so. But I couldn’t process what had happened intellectually; the emotions were too strong. Betrayal really sets me off. I had to walk out of the movie Betrayal—based on the Harold Pinter play about a man who carries on a long affair with his friend’s wife—because it stirred up so many churning feelings. My dad once told me, “You give your all to your friends and clients, and you expect the same back. But you’re not going to get it. They’ll betray you. I was in sales—I know.” I had argued with him then, but now I decided he was right.

  A week of hard thinking about Michael Eisner wasn’t nearly enough. It took me half a year to feel normal again, and longer than that to make sense of Michael’s behavior. I think he was sincere when he wooed me, in his weakened postsurgical state. But then Michael recovered. And the better he felt, the worse I looked to him. I was four years younger and vastly more energetic. Ovitz the Savior became Ovitz the Rival.

  In my first week on the job, Eisner told me to fire Bob Iger. He thought Bob was stupid, or so he said. I thought he was being rash and said so: “Bob Iger knows ABC cold.” I later spent three hours over dinner with Iger—who’d heard of Eisner’s dissatisfaction—persuading him not to leave. I told him Eisner had a short attention span, and would soon be on to someone else. That was true: he promptly told me to fire Dennis Hightower, our head of television. Dennis was our only high-ranking African American executive, and I told Michael, “That’s a terrible idea for me or you.” Hightower stayed.

  In 2005, after Eisner resigned under pressure and Iger replaced him, I finally grasped the method behind Eisner’s madness: he saw Iger as a future successor. Bob has led Disney to new heights as CEO. He built the business with high-wire acquisitions and a stronger foreign profile, more or less what I’d tried a decade earlier. He made big M&A bets on Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox, and built the Shanghai Disney Resort. Bob was smart about it. First he changed the culture, dismantling the strategic planning group and erasing Eisner’s imprint. And then he empowered the people around him, as any successful leader must.

  I still think I could have run a big public company, given time to learn and adjust. But I never could have run that company as Eisner’s number two. Disney’s culture under Michael was too ingrained and ingrown. I lacked the power to change it or the temperament to blend in.

  Bert Fields later told me that Eisner didn’t want me at Disney so much as he wanted me out of CAA, in order to weaken the agency’s power—all agencies’ power. I’d been a thorn in Disney’s side for too long, so he pulled it out. Humiliating me every day was just a bonus.

  * * *

  —

  Right after I got fired, Teddy Forstmann called and said, “I want you to go on the board of Gulfstream,” an aerospace company his equity firm owned. “It’ll help you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, touched by his loyalty. “But I can’t. It won’t be good for Gulfstream—I’ll be getting a lot of bad publicity.”

  “You’re on the board,” he said, and hung up.

  The bad publicity came, and it was pretty bad. Headlines everywhere, stories of my fall. Within days of my departure, a group of Disney shareholders brought suit against the company and me. They charged that I’d broken my contract and that my $130 million, no-fault payout was a fiduciary breach. In 2004, as the action headed toward trial in Delaware’s Court of Chancery, I seized it as a chance for vindication. I was raring to go, to tell the world what had really happened.

  The judge, Chancellor William B. Chandler III, was sharp and attentive. And after he listened to thirty-seven days of testimony, his 175-page decision was strongly in my favor. Chandler found that I was “a poor fit with [my] fellow executives” at Disney, but he rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that I’d been untruthful or derelict in my duties. In approving my contract with the company, he observed, Disney’s directors were well aware I needed “downside protection” before taking the job. I was walking away from up to $200 million in booked CAA commissions. My severance would offset my losses if I were fired without cause—which I was.

  While Chandler cleared the board of impropriety, he had harsh words for their conduct. Disney’s directors “fell significantly short of the best practices of ideal corporate governance,” he wrote. He called Eisner a “Machiavellian” CEO who stacked his board with cronies and “enthroned himself as the omnipotent and infallible monarch of his personal Magic Kingdom.”

  That’s the tragedy that can befall the company man: we come to believe we are the company.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE THIRD VALLEY

  CAA was relentless in chasing new business, and whenever we gained a client, someone else lost one. When I left the agency, after twenty years of dog-eat-dog, a lot of dogs out there had livid scars and long memories.

  You might think that I’d still have a few friends at CAA itself. After all, Ron and Bill and I had sold the agency to the new leadership team on fire-sale terms, essentially floating them a zero-interest loan and having them pay us back out of earnings across four years, all so the agency would continue to thrive. But when I was at Disney, Richard Lovett routinely spewed about me in staff meetings, neutralizing me the way I used to neutralize anyone who crossed us. Even years afterward, when Lovett ran the memorial services for Marty Baum and Ray Kurtzman, he refused to let me speak. Given how close I’d been to Marty and Ray, I found that very painful. Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane felt the anxiety of influence, not wanting to be compared to me; Lourd would later insist that the agency leave the I. M. Pei building and move to Century City. And David O’Connor, who I’d thought of as a frie
nd, was mad at me because I hadn’t included him among my designated heirs. That wasn’t a verdict on his qualities—it was simply that, as a lit agent, David didn’t generate nearly as much income as the others. (The agency’s new leaders included him in their ranks—then later pushed him out.) The group had plenty of reasons to dislike me, I suppose—no one ever really likes the boss, especially one as demanding as I was—but they also felt that I’d abandoned them. Companies are families, too.

  I found it even more painful that Ron was still being less than complimentary about me to everyone. After I parted ways with Disney, I had lunch with him, trying to coax him to leave Universal and start a management or production company with me. I told him that ever since we’d suddenly stopped talking thirty times a day it had been tougher on me than him, because I wasn’t pissed off. He could work his grievance out by venting, but I just felt deserted. He nodded, then said evenly that he had no interest in forming a company together.

  Ron also told me that he’d bought a place in Point Dune, in Malibu, and that he had his eye on the adjacent property, owned by Berry Gordy. But he said that at $5.5 million, it was too expensive. I owned a place in Malibu, and I’d always wanted to buy Berry Gordy’s place. Now, thinking that Ron was priced out, I did. A week later, Ron called, incensed, and said, “We have a problem. I went to buy Berry Gordy’s house—and you have it in escrow. I was the one who told you about it, and I want to buy it.” I told him I’d think about it. And that was our last conversation for years.

  The truth is, I was mad. I was stewing about remarks he’d made that had gotten back to me—that I was like Secretariat, hopeless without the right jockey—and I was stung that he had so little interest in working with me again. So I wanted him to sweat a little before I gave it to him, which led me to behave like an asshole. Ron called everyone—Herb Allen, Barry Diller, David Geffen, random people out of the phone book—to complain about what I’d done, and the dispute wound up in the New York Times. A few weeks later I finally gave him the property, handling the transaction through our mutual business manager, and Ron lives there to this day.

  * * *

  —

  In 1999, two years after my crash-and-burn at Disney, I formed a new production and management company, Artists Management Group. With my smart, accomplished partners, Rick and Julie Yorn, I intended for us to become the leading provider of mobile content, even as we kept a profitable foot in old media. The idea was that in their downtime after writing a television show, say, our creators would create three-minute comedy episodes for mobile phones; compile seven of those and you’d have a twenty-one-minute episode of a sitcom. We’d push sports scores and restaurant information to your phones (as is now common) and make short-form television you could view on any screen (an idea Jeffrey Katzenberg got headlines for in 2017).

  Structurally, AMG was designed to be free from CAA’s constraints. It could produce content and represent artists simultaneously, without any conflict. Scaling up quickly, we placed a stellar roster of writers under contract to our TV production arm, and in our first six months we sold thirteen TV pilots to the networks. And then, slowly at first but with increasing speed, we did a face-plant.

  One big problem was that the smartphone-adoption rate and bandwidth needed for large numbers of people to receive programming on their phones weren’t in place yet. We taped Robin Williams reading the front page of the New York Times and riffing off it—a bit we thought would be a repeatable, snackable way of advertising our wares. But when we tried to upload it to Verizon’s network, it simply didn’t transmit. We intended to be two years ahead of everyone else, but we turned out to be five years ahead not only of everyone else, but of the technology.

  We also ran into a gale-force headwind from entrenched businesses like the TV networks, which felt threatened; from skeptics who bad-mouthed AMG all over town; and from CAA, which perceived our model as a dagger aimed at its heart. I had no intention of stealing the agency’s clients, figuring there was plenty of work for everyone, but when Mike Menchel left CAA to join us and brought along his longtime client Robin Williams, the agency declared war. They told their clients that if any of them hired AMG as their managers, they’d lose CAA as their agents. The day after Richard Lovett announced this edict, Ron Meyer dropped by the agency to tell the staff, “You’re doing the right thing.”

  As AMG began to founder, CAA worked to poach Robin Williams back. I visited Robin in his dressing room at the Universal Amphitheater, where he was performing, and saw Bryan Lourd there. Good God, who taught you that trick? I thought. I wasn’t shocked by Bryan’s behavior; he was doing what I would have done. I was shocked that Robin’s wife, Marsha, had allowed Bryan to infiltrate and undermine me. I remembered how grateful she’d seemed in the nineties when I’d gone to bat for her and Robin, reaming out People magazine for breaking its promise to the couple and trumpeting the fact that Marsha had been Robin’s nanny when they met. So I took her betrayal personally. I saw Marsha not long ago in San Francisco, and I felt sick to my stomach.

  Worse by far was that after Robin left, I heard that Barry Levinson was thinking of leaving, too. Barry was my oldest client and one of my closest friends; we’d talked every day for twenty-seven years. Each Christmas he sent me a pint of Chivas Regal with a handwritten note about our year together, and I was always deeply touched. I went to Barry and begged him to stay. I said I was devastated—devastated—that he’d even think of doing that to me. He said it was done; he’d made a business decision. Friends, trying to cheer me up afterward, told me exactly that: “It’s just business.”

  I said, “No, it’s not.” What Barry and Robin and Marsha did to me, when I was at my lowest moment? I carry that within me still.

  In April of 2000, I met Bryan Lourd to try to make peace with the agency. We took a walk around the outside of the CAA building and I told him that my father was very ill with leukemia (he would die in June), and that I didn’t want to fight with anyone anymore. I just wanted to run my business and let them run theirs. The following day, I received a two-page handwritten letter from Bryan laying out in precise, lawyerly detail all the reasons I was a horrible person.

  I got out of AMG in 2002, selling its assets to The Firm and taking a loss of tens of millions. Days later, I made the spectacular miscalculation of meeting with a writer from Vanity Fair. By then my joust with David Geffen was well into its third decade, and I had it on good authority that David and his friends had sabotaged the last-ditch financing I had needed to keep AMG going. On a mutual friend’s advice—which turned out to be terrible—I’d even gone to see David in his offices at Amblin Entertainment, and warned him that if he didn’t stay out of my affairs, “I’ll beat the living shit out of you.” He didn’t stay out. So I vented to Vanity Fair. It would have been fine if I’d confined my remarks to Geffen. But in my fury I characterized my various nemeses as “the Gay Mafia.” The idea was more absurd than poisonous because a number of the men I’d named (Michael Eisner, Bernie Brillstein, Bernie Weinraub at the New York Times, Ron Meyer) weren’t gay. But the sentiment was as stupid as it was offensive, and both it and the loss of control that led me to utter it were out of character. Every problem I tried to solve I now ended up making worse—the opposite of my traditional MO.

  I’d always thought it was vital to mix business and friendship. I was learning, painfully, that it was better to keep those realms far apart. Business always gets personal.

  * * *

  —

  They only win if they kill you.

  They didn’t kill me. In the years that followed, I tried to bring a pro football team to Los Angeles (didn’t happen, long story) and to become the head of the International Red Cross (didn’t happen, end of story). I thought back on the career path I’d taken and realized that I would have been much happier as an artist or an architect—happier in an arena where you don’t make five new enemies every time you create something.


  Meanwhile, I turned my attention to Silicon Valley. Intrigued, early on, by software and the internet, I’d dreamed of remaking MGM or MCA as a digital-age studio. In the early nineties I flew to Redmond, Washington, and had a four-hour dinner with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft to talk about what was coming. I met with Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, to see how our companies might mesh, and before I left CAA, Intel built a media lab there to give us a jump on the internet age. I picked the brains of dozens of tech innovators at Allen & Company retreats and other industry conclaves. I especially admired Ron Conway, the Bay Area’s leading “angel” investor in embryonic start-ups.

  In 1999, Ron phoned to say, “I know a young man up here who’s extraordinary. He’s starting a company that’s ahead of its time, and he’d like to meet you.”

  The company was LoudCloud, and the young man was Marc Andreessen, who as an undergrad had invented the Web browser. Three years later, at twenty-four, he monetized the browser as Netscape and landed on the cover of Time. Three years after that, partnering with Ben Horowitz, Marc imagined how start-ups might use business software on the network (what people now call the cloud) instead of sinking capital into costly servers. Way ahead of the herd, he saw that everyone would soon be connected to the digital network. Wired magazine fittingly named him its first “Wired Icon” under the headline: THE MAN WHO MAKES THE FUTURE.