eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
As the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, Michael Ovitz earned a reputation for ruthless negotiation, brilliant strategy, and fierce loyalty to his clients. He reinvented the role of the agent and helped shape the careers of hundreds of A-list entertainers, directors, and writers, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Sean Connery, Bill Murray, Robin Williams, and David Letterman.
But this personal history is much more than a fascinating account of celebrity friendships and bare-knuckled dealmaking. It's also an underdog's story: How did a middle-class kid from Encino work his way into the William Morris mailroom, and eventually become the most powerful person in Hollywood? How did an agent (even a superagent) also become a power in producing, advertising, mergers & acquisitions, and modern art? And what were the personal consequences of all those deals?
After decades of near-silence in the face of controversy, Ovitz is finally telling his whole story, with remarkable candor and insight.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101601488 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/25/2018 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 546,626 |
| File size: | 41 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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.
Table of Contents
Prologue 1
Chapter 1 Is The Godfather Here? 13
Chapter 2 The First Valley 33
Chapter 3 Mail Man 47
Chapter 4 Good Cop/Bad Cop 59
Chapter 5 From Zero to One Million 73
Chapter 6 Car Phones 93
Chapter 7 The Second Valley 103
Chapter 8 P.L. 137
Chapter 9 No Pressure 163
Chapter 10 Showtime 193
Chapter 11 Dinosaurs and Foot Soldiers 211
Chapter 12 Wrist Locks 223
Chapter 13 Brink's Truck 247
Chapter 14 Picasso 267
Chapter 15 Always Coca-Cola 279
Chapter 16 I'm Not Afraid of You 295
Chapter 17 Gone 309
Chapter 18 Number Two 321
Chapter 19 The Third Valley 333
Chapter 20 Gentlemen 351
Index 357