There just aren’t any shortcuts to that sort of wisdom. You’ve got to go through the journey and make all of the mistakes to be able to know what works and what doesn’t, and that journey always comes with moments that make you want to kick a hole in the wall. If this period was frustrating to me, you can imagine how it felt to the execs at RCA. No matter how I felt about the choices Hall & Oates made, I never stopped breaking through the doors of the promotion and marketing departments at ramming speed. RCA put up with it through the first album with no hits. On the second, they started to question. And by X-Static, they began to push aside my requests for more promotion with excuse after excuse.
Champion Entertainment had hit an ice-cold front. Lisa and I were expecting our first child, Michael, and my daughter, Sarah, would come not long after. Certainly there’s never a good time for the hits to stop. But this definitely felt like the worst.
When you’re putting out money and it ain’t coming back, you start to see the world in a whole different way. You don’t immediately reach for the check at dinner. You stop and look around, and start to notice how many people have tiny alligator arms as soon as dessert is done.
By no means were Daryl, John, and I ready to give up the Petrus and start drinking Gallo. Daryl certainly wasn’t trading our pre-Castro Cubans in for White Owls. We needed to come up with a new plan. Immediately.
The reason you go to all those cocktail parties that you vaguely remember is that one might turn into the night that you never forget. It was at one of those cocktail parties that I met David Geffen.
The timing couldn’t have been better. I was looking to reinvent myself—and he, himself, was doing just that.
Geffen is one of the smartest and shrewdest guys to ever leave Brooklyn and work his way up from the mailroom of the William Morris Agency. He started Asylum Records in 1970, and quickly became a force by signing Jackson Browne, the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan. But he stepped aside for a time after being misdiagnosed with a severe illness. When he found out he was healthy, he came back to start Geffen Records in 1980, and by no means did he stop there. He branched out into the movie business and would soon have a huge hit with the film that launched Tom Cruise’s career—Risky Business. Geffen would go on to become one of the most influential people in the media industry. If you were looking to emulate someone’s success, you couldn’t do much better than David Geffen. The title of a book written about him says it all: The Rise and Rise of David Geffen.
Our initial conversations centered around his desire to sign Hall & Oates to his record company after their contract with RCA expired. But soon we were sitting over marrowbone steaks at Trader Vic’s in L.A., and I was getting an education on Hollywood, the financial markets, politics, and anything else David chose to talk about. He’d taught business studies at Yale, and he was a genius at both: business and teaching. David had the uncommon ability to be cunning and shrewd at the same time that he shared ideas and opened doors.
One night over dinner I told him I wanted to go into the movie business, and he cringed. “It’s the worst business in the world!” he said. “It’s absolutely crazy. Don’t even think about it. Why would you want to do that to yourself?”
“I have some great ideas for films,” I told him.
“Stick with the music business,” he said. “You’re going to be really successful, and it’s so easy compared to the movie business.”
“I don’t want to leave the music business,” I said. “I just want to grow.”
He gave me one of those looks that said, If you insist, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. One phone call later, and I was stepping into the office of the man who shaped nearly every major deal that went down in the film industry at that time.
The office belonged to a former tax attorney who opened a full-service entertainment law firm that represented the likes of Barbra Streisand, Nick Nolte, Robert Redford, Sean Connery, and almost everyone who’d recently left their fingerprints in cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The man behind the desk was buttoned down and quiet. His name was Gary Hendler. “Why,” he asked me, “do you want to get into this business?”
I told him a couple of my ideas for films. A few minutes later, he picked up his phone, and a few minutes after that, a budding superagent whose offices were three floors below came through the door. It was Mike Ovitz. That meeting set in motion a string of phone calls that would introduce me to Michael Eisner, Dawn Steel (the first woman to ever run a major Hollywood film studio), Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Barry Diller. It boggles the mind to think now that all those people were once under a single roof at Paramount. The connections that Geffen and Hendler supplied didn’t stop there. In no time, I was linked to virtually every studio head and television executive in Hollywood.
I’d gotten the rights to two ideas and was eager to begin developing. One was a true story of a street priest whose parish was in the South Bronx. He cared deeply about his faith, serving Mass and taking confession, but he also used his Georgetown education to build low-income housing units for minorities and take care of the less fortunate in his community. His name was Father Louis Gigante. It was said that Father Gigante built the South Bronx up from the ashes. The contrast in this story was that the priest’s brother was Vincent “Chin” Gigante.
The second idea was a book written by a friend named Philip Carlo. It was called Stolen Flower. It was about a private detective tracking down a ten-year-old girl who’d been kidnapped and ensnared by the underground sex world. I’d talked about it with my friend Joe Pesci, and he thought it would make a terrific film. Joe spoke to Robert De Niro, and the three of us decided to develop it.
We spent months doing research. But the nature of the material made this project tough to get off the ground.
Lesson One: Pedophilia isn’t exactly a topic that warms the hearts of studio execs.
Lesson Two: A project like this takes time. I just spoke with Joe Pesci about Stolen Flower—we’re talking thirty years later—and he’s still trying to develop it.
The story of Father Gigante needed time, too, but it moved nicely from stage to stage. Through an agent at William Morris I befriended a director who cut his teeth by creating a television series called Naked City. Later on, he directed classics like Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, and The Pope of Greenwich Village. His name was Stuart Rosenberg. Father Gigante came to love and trust him, which was important because he was sharing his most intimate stories. Eric Roth, the writer who’d later win an Academy Award for best-adapted screenplay for Forrest Gump, also came aboard. We had many meetings with Al Pacino, who wanted to star in the movie. We set up meetings with Alan Ladd at the Ladd Company, and Laddie greenlit the project.
But after all of these amazingly talented people had come together for this project, the movie came to a screeching halt when we fully realized that nobody, and I mean nobody, wanted to risk the possibility of offending anyone in that family.
Lesson Three: Just because a film is in development doesn’t mean it will ever be developed.
I didn’t give up. The sun began to shine as I moved through these setbacks when Hall & Oates released their next album, Voices, and we were back in business big-time, going forward with a run of hits over the next few albums that included “Private Eyes,” “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do),” and “Maneater.”
These hits gave me the resources to step up and option big books. I had read a great one called Wise Guy by Nicholas Pileggi, and I fell in love with it. I knew it could be a major film. The problem was a lot of other people knew it, too. Getting the rights was going to be expensive. But the sun was shining again, and I was prepared to write the check.
The bidding started, and I told Mike Ovitz I was willing to put up $250,000 for the option. I told him that this was really important, and he had to get it for me. But after about a week, I didn’t hear anything.
Finally, a call came from Ovitz. “Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to do me a favor.”
“What?”
“You’ve got to let this one go.”
“Really? Why?”
“This is really important to me. I’m working on signing a major new client, and delivering this book is pivotal to me making that deal.”
What could I do? Even if I said, “No, you owe it to me,” I would’ve lost anyway.
“Mike,” I said, “consider it done.” That new client was Marty Scorsese. The movie came out four years later, and it was called Goodfellas.
Lesson Four: David Geffen was right.
Lesson Five: It was easier for me to convince Mike Ovitz to get into the music business, which I did, than it was to get a film made.
The differences between the movie business and the music business had been made brutally clear to me. In the music business, I could get excited about a song, find the right musicians, put them in the studio, and have a single out a week later.
With a movie, I had to option the book, find a writer, get a script that moved through second and third drafts, and pretty soon three years had passed. Back then producer fees were not that great anyway. Sure, there was the back end, but whoever gets to see the back end? It turned out much easier to get big advances in the music business.
There was a lot of irony in my journey to Hollywood, especially if you were watching it through the eyes of Daryl Hall. Of course, I hadn’t made any hit movies. Forget that, I hadn’t even gotten one made! But, as Daryl said, you’ve got to look at the long road. My frustrations in Hollywood ended up being a blessing in disguise.
I’d gotten my hands into the mix. It was an opportunity to meet and get close to all the heads of the movie studios and the agents at all of the agencies. These experiences gave me a chance to look at things differently than if I were just another music guy. All of the contacts and relationships that were made during this period would become invaluable ten years down the road when I became chairman of the biggest record company in the world. I instantly understood exactly how Celine Dion could benefit from doing the Beauty and the Beast and Titanic sound tracks. In fact, later on at Sony, we became the only record company in the world to have an exclusive sound-track division. It became enormously successful.
Which brings us to Lesson Six: Success may look like a hit, but it’s really about finding a way through the struggle.
While I was trying to find my way around Hollywood and making my bones in the music business in the late seventies, a man who would have a profound impact on my life was beginning to make his mark on the world. I’d even go as far as to say this man would become like a second godfather to me. I had no idea who he was at the end of the seventies. And it would have surprised me at the time to learn that one day I’d have a Japanese godfather. Now, looking back, it’s hard to fathom my life without him. His name was Norio Ohga.
Ohga grew up in Numazu, a city eighty miles west of Tokyo, wanting to be an opera singer. Around the time he was about to enter college, one of the founders of the telecommunications and engineering company that would later change its name to Sony came to his neighbor’s home looking for investors. Ohga was introduced, and from that point on in his life he would straddle two roads: music and engineering.
Ohga went on to study as a baritone at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts. This was the early fifties, around the time that tape recorders were being introduced, and he immediately became convinced of their power. “The tape recorder is for a musician,” he said, “what the mirror is for a ballerina.” He persuaded the university to purchase some.
When the company that would eventually change its name to Sony sent its model over, Ohga evaluated it and sent back a note listing ten serious problems with the machine. His note concluded that the university would not make a purchase until the problems were resolved. This memo set off a furor in the factory. Nobody believed that a college kid could know so much about tape recorders and new technology. But the company founders, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, were not angry about it at all. On the day that Ohga graduated, they sent a car to pick him up and drive him to company headquarters, where they asked him to become a contract employee.
Ohga didn’t want to take the offer. He wanted to sing opera, and he was headed to Germany to study music. But a deal was worked out. Ohga got a monthly stipend, and in return the company got occasional reports from Europe. Ohga would go on to sing baritone in many operas and marry the famous Japanese pianist Midori. He simultaneously began to work as an executive at Sony. One night, after a long and serious company negotiation that had exhausted him, he had to go onstage to perform The Marriage of Figaro. Toward the end of the opera, he briefly fell asleep backstage just as the moment called for him to go out and sing. Jolted awake, he pulled his part off, but from that point on, he turned his attention to Sony. Most importantly for the world, and certainly for me, his love and passion for music would forever remain one of the most important things in his life.
When one of Sony’s founders, Ibuka, wanted to listen to music on airline flights, he asked Ohga to come up with a portable device that could play cassettes for him. That’s how the model for the Sony Walkman was born.
Looking back on it now, it seems like a caveman’s version of the iPod. It allowed you to hear only a dozen songs or so on a single cassette as opposed to the thousands of choices the iPod now provides. But, believe me, at that time, the Walkman was heaven. Everybody wanted it. Everybody had to have it. For the first time, music was portable. You could actually take the music you wanted to hear to the beach. The closest I’d gotten as a teenager was a transistor radio and the hope that the DJ would play the songs I liked.
The Walkman represented more than just a shift in configuration. It was a shift in control. The 33 1/3 long-playing record—and the smaller 45—was about the only way you could own music through the fifties. In those days, a big innovation was high-fidelity stereo. A record could be heard through two speakers instead of one—whoa! Even through the development of the clunky eight-track cartridge in the midsixties and the tape cassette players that were installed in cars in the seventies, we associated a musical release with an album cover and vinyl. The Walkman changed all of that.
It was the beginning of the rapid death of vinyl, but few people in the industry seemed to care because everyone was too busy celebrating. Not only did the Walkman allow you to listen to the music you wanted wherever you went. Not only did it give everybody in the industry the convenience of working on their projects while they took a walk around the block. But it enticed consumers to go out and buy the same music on cassette that they already owned on vinyl—and sales soared.
The world of music was changed forever—and Ohga was just getting started. A few years after the Walkman, Sony came out with the first compact disc. In the planning stages, the CD was only supposed to hold sixty minutes of music. When Ohga realized that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was seventy-three minutes long—he knew that sixty minutes just wouldn’t do. A study showed that 95 percent of classical performances could fit into seventy-five minutes. That’s why the CD holds up to seventy-five minutes of music to this day. Around the time the CD was released, Ohga became president of the most powerful electronics company in the world, a company whose four branded letters were as powerful as the word Coke.
But even as a boss and a president, he still thought and acted like a musician. He was a performer on the opera stage, and this was really reflected in his personality. He was outgoing, and he enjoyed being attached to music and artists. That energy and creativity gave Sony a totally special and unique vision.
There was absolutely nobody in the world better suited to understand what I was capable of doing than this man.
The first commercial CD released was Billy Joel’s 52nd Street. I remember putting it on, sitting back, and listening in total shock and amazement to the clarity, the definition, the isolation of the instruments, and the brilliance of the overall sound. It was stunning how meticulously you could hear Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet on “Zan
zibar.”
Once the music stopped, the contrast was as stark as the difference between black and white. Oh, my God, I thought, is this the end of vinyl? Flashing in front of my mind was a thirty-second movie of snapshots from the first Elvis LP to my 45 collection. But at the end of that movie, a burst of light was saying, Do you know how incredible this is going to be?
It took time for people in the music industry to adjust. I would sit around with musicians and producers, listen to the CD, and ask, “What do you think?” Some of them would say, “It’s too clean, man, it’s too clean.” They just loved the blend of an analog sound. But, of course, that didn’t last very long. Even the hard-core audiophiles who loved their jazz and classical music on vinyl, and cherished their albums as if they were their children, were swept away by the superior sound quality on the CD. Classical performances were taken to a whole new level. The rap of the conductor’s baton against the music stand could be heard cleanly and clearly in a way that made vinyl feel primitive.
Within months, all of us embraced the CD. I can remember going into a record store one day and loading up on CDs for every favorite record I ever owned. I spent thousands of bucks and came out of the store with bags and bags filled with CDs. Entire catalogs were being repurchased by almost everyone I knew.
The CD was probably, to this day, the biggest sales catalyst in the history of the music industry. It was smaller than vinyl, it was portable, it didn’t scratch like vinyl. It was an absolute gold mine. Higher prices could be charged because of the superior sound quality—and there was a global conversion.
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