Who Is Michael Ovitz?

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“When the history of Hollywood is written, few people will have played a larger role than Michael Ovitz…. It is impossible to read such a chronicle and not see Mr. Ovitz as the Steve Jobs of agenting, possessing a version of Jobs’s fanatical drive and a similar desire to remake an industry.” —The Wall Street Journal

Who is Michael Ovitz? He’s a striver who talked his way into the famous mailroom of the William Morris Agency without any connections, then worked his way out of the mailroom in record time.

He’s an entrepreneur who left a safe job to launch Creative Artists Agency, growing it from five guys in a rundown office to the most powerful agency in the world.

He’s a friend and confidant to megastars such as Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, David Letterman, Sean Connery, Bill Murray, Paul Newman, and Martin Scorsese.

He’s a pioneer who reinvented the role of the agent in packaging actors, directors, writers, and producers, which made CAA the essential hub of countless movies and television shows.

He’s a master negotiator who drove historic deals for many of his clients, as well as the acquisitions of two major studios by Sony and Matsushita.

He’s a self-taught connoisseur of art and architecture, a generous philanthropist, a devoted father…

And to his detractors he’s a world-class jerk and a ruthless manipulator who double-crossed his friends, crushed his enemies, and let nothing stand in his way, ever. 

After decades of near silence in the face of relentless controversy, Ovitz finally tells his whole story in this memoir, with remarkable candor and insight. If you’re going to read just one book about how show business really works, this is the one.”When the history of Hollywood is written, few people will have played a larger role than Michael Ovitz…. It is impossible to read such a chronicle and not see Mr. Ovitz as the Steve Jobs of agenting, possessing a version of Jobs’s fanatical drive and a similar desire to remake an industry.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“A revealing retelling of his Hollywood career…. A study in the unusual personality traits required to pull this off, Who Is Michael Ovitz? represents a master class of sorts.” —The New York Times

“Learn how to build an empire and transform an industry from the Jedi master of modern Hollywood.” —Marc Andreessen 

“This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. The meticulous detailing is as graphic and captivating as Michael’s Jasper Johns ‘White Flag’ painting. The stories are vivid, educational, entertaining, and deeply satisfying.” —LA Reid

“Who Is Michael Ovitz? is an unexpectedly good read….What makes [it] juicier than the average business memoir is that the author proves surprisingly willing to dish about the foibles of former clients and colleagues alike.” —Michael Cieply, Deadline: Hollywood

“Michael is a legend and I don’t use that term lightly. Learning from his journey is something that every entrepreneur and executive should do.” —Gary Vaynerchuk

“Michael’s brilliance and relentless drive clearly shine through in this entertaining memoir. You see the man behind the agency and how he built a global business empire. His life story has powerful lessons for us all.” —Roger Goodell, NFL Commissioner

“It is truly rare to read a book this honest from a living legend. The Hollywood superhero lets us peak behind his mask and understand his weaknesses and methods…. I was shocked, thrilled, and surprisingly educated. A masterpiece of a memoir.”—Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner, Andreessen Horowitz Michael Ovitz cofounded CAA in 1975 and served as its chairman until 1995. For most of the past two decades he has been a private investor and an adviser to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. This is his first book.PROLOGUE

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I slipped downstairs and started watching Terminator 2 on television. It was so late it seemed like no one else was awake anywhere. From my living room, high in Beverly Hills, the glitter of Los Angeles below felt like key lights burning on an empty sound stage.

As I watched Arnold Schwarzenegger bulldoze his enemies, I had a sudden realization. That was me. I was a Terminator. When we built Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood’s premiere talent agency, I’d get banged around, hurled through a wall, plaster dust exploding everywhere . . . and then I’d climb out from the rubble, red eyes glaring, and hurl my opponents through the wall even harder than they’d hurled me. I completed my mission. The fear my opponents felt derived from sheer hopelessness: How could they beat someone so tireless, so relentless? So inhuman?

That was the image I took great care to project, anyway. It was an image I grew to hate. Who wants to scare the living shit out of people? But it was so effective. Our sell was simple: if you were with us, as an agent or a client, CAA would protect you 24-7, take care of your every need. At a time when other agencies were full of solo acts, we had teams of four or five agents on each client. By working longer and harder and smarter than the others, we became a mighty fortress. You were either with us or you were against us, and if you were against us, our phalanx of agents would stream forth from our stone walls, eager for combat.

We could demand $5 million for our best directors, double what they’d gotten at other agencies. We could package the stars and the writers and the director of huge films like Ghostbusters and Forrest Gump and Jurassic Park and insist that studios make the film we gave them. We could collect almost $350 million a year in commissions from our 1,350 clients, who included everyone from Isabelle Adjani to Billy Zane, from Pedro Almodóvar to Robert Zemeckis, from Andre Agassi to ZZ Top. And it was all because our agents carried a heavy club: the implied threat of terrible consequences if the buyer didn’t do what we wanted—a boycott by our talent; all the best films going elsewhere; total humiliation. I taught our agents to reach for the club every day, but to never— or almost never— pick it up. Power is only power until you exert it. It’s all perception.

I was that club. The most persuasive point our agents could make to a stubborn exec was “I don’t have the authority to close the deal at that number, so you’ll have to talk to Michael.” That was the last thing the exec wanted, because he knew I’d ask for even more. Better to close at an unpalatable number now than to be upsold into stratospheric realms once I got on the phone.

Most of our 175 agents uttered some version of that threat five times a day. My name became a kind of hex, a conjuring. In just twenty years I went from a complete unknown, to a comer, to being hailed as the most powerful man in Hollywood— a man the press invariably described as a gap- toothed, tightly scripted, secrecy- obsessed superagent. After a few years of that, I became the most feared man in town. And once I left CAA, when it became safe for everyone to vent, I became the most hated.

“Mike Ovitz” was such a potent bogeyman because he wasn’t a person, he was a specter. I avoided red carpets; I’d enter and leave parties through the back door; I kept the rights to almost all photos of me; I didn’t do any press for the first ten years, and very little after that. When conducting business, I was so soft- spoken I made people inch their chairs closer. I rarely lost my temper (which was an enormous strain because I’m a perfectionist, and everything— everything— bothered me if it wasn’t just so). I drank barely at all, I didn’t use drugs, I didn’t even dance. I never understood why you’d want to shower and change for a dance just so you could go get all sweaty. This set of traits made me seem freakishly composed and controlled. And you know what? I was.

My clients played characters on-screen; I played them offscreen. Ninety- nine out of a hundred people, their act is who they are. But anomalies like me manufacture their characters from bits and pieces of those they’re with. I was a chameleon, becoming whomever I needed to be to make everyone comfortable and close the deal. My basic character was buttoned-up, omniscient, wise, loyal, indomitable. But I could be a sports car aficionado with Paul Newman just as easily as I could discuss fiscal policy with Felix Rohatyn, the banker, or dive into the specifications of the Walkman with Akio Morita, the head of Sony. So to those I worked with I was a control freak. A shape-shifting machine. A Terminator.

Yet the private me, the one only my closest friends saw, was ultrasensitive to every slight and constantly concerned about threats from every direction. This me, the man with back pain and uneasy memories, wandered into my living room to look at Jasper Johns’s White Flag, his 1955 masterpiece. I bought it from a bankrupt Japanese construction company years ago, and a condition of the sale was that I couldn’t show it in public for a year because the company wanted to hide the state of its imploding finances. So for that year I kept the painting in an empty room in my house behind a locked door, the way Bluebeard guarded the secret room where he was truly himself. I’d go look at White Flag every day, and sink into a reverie, admiring Johns’s talent, his fluidly expressive brushstrokes, his extraordinary will and imagination. Great art brings out the boy in me, the insatiably curious kid who has to know everything about everything. 

I’m a frustrated artist. I couldn’t paint or sculpt, I wasn’t musical, and I sure couldn’t act: when Albert Brooks asked me to make a cameo appearance in his movie Real Life I froze up completely. So I did the next- best thing with my life. I spent it around artists: appreciating them, admiring them, helping them become their best, fullest selves. I was the whetstone that sharpened them so they could slice through anything. Our pitch at CAA was “better material, better information, better deals— and we’ll make your dream project happen.” James Clavell’s Shōgun moldered on the shelf for four years before my partner Bill Haber and I came along and turned it into a huge miniseries; Tootsie was just another dead- end script for six years before I began representing Dustin Hoffman and put him together with the director he loved to hate, Sydney Pollack.

Yet agents make dreams happen at a terrible price. When a painter paints, other painters may be jealous of his success, but they don’t believe he’s personally screwing them over with every brushstroke. It’s not a zero-sum game: there’s room for everyone to do his best. When an agent agents, though, the list of the personally embittered lengthens with the size of the deal. If we poached a new client, his old agency hated us. If one of our movies went to Universal, six other studios hated us. CAA’s goal was to have all the clients, and therefore all the conflicts; we used to say “No conflict, no interest.” It was a heroic goal, but it cost us. And it cost me.US