Who Is Michael Ovitz? Read online

  Portfolio/Penguin

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Michael Ovitz

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Ovitz, Michael, author.

  Title: Who is Michael Ovitz? : a memoir / Michael Ovitz.

  Description: New York, New York : Portfolio/Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2018] | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018028852 (print) | LCCN 2018033455 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101601488 (ebook) | ISBN 9781591845546 (hardcover) |

  Subjects: LCSH: Ovitz, Michael. | Theatrical agents—United States—Biography. | Executives—United States—Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC PN2287.O77 (ebook) | LCC PN2287.O77 A3 2018 (print) | DDC 659.2/9791092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028852

  Version_1

  Judy, for the journey,

  Chris, Kim, Eric, Minty, Ara, Jordan, Kendall, and Marco, for my purpose,

  My grandson, Pax, for my light,

  Tamara, for the laughs and new adventures

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  IS THE GODFATHER HERE?

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE FIRST VALLEY

  CHAPTER THREE

  MAIL MAN

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GOOD COP/BAD COP

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FROM ZERO TO ONE MILLION

  CHAPTER SIX

  CAR PHONES

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE SECOND VALLEY

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  P.L.

  CHAPTER NINE

  NO PRESSURE

  CHAPTER TEN

  SHOWTIME

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DINOSAURS AND FOOT SOLDIERS

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WRIST LOCKS

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BRINK’S TRUCK

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PICASSO

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ALWAYS COCA-COLA

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I’M NOT AFRAID OF YOU

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  GONE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  NUMBER TWO

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE THIRD VALLEY

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  GENTLEMEN

  Photographs

  Index

  About the Author

  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 soundstage.

  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 directors 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 or she 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.

  * * *

  —

  Rain Man, for instance, came to CAA in 1986 as a script by Barry Morrow about a mentally disabled man named Raymond Babbitt and his brother, Charlie, a hard-boiled con artist. I instantly thought of Dustin Hoffman for Charlie, packaged with Bill Murray as Raymond. Dustin had made only one film since Tootsie, in 1982—the legendary flop Ishtar, a movie so ill-starred I had tried to squeeze him out of it by refusing to do his paperwork or take a commission. He needed a great role to get back in the public eye, and we needed him to start earning his $6.5 million fees again. Dustin wanted to play Raymond, unexpectedly, but fine, whatever. He was what I called a motor, a force potent enough to singlehandedly get a project green-lit.

  Unfortunately, Warner Bros., which had a first-look deal with the film’s production company, Guber-Peters, passed. I told Peter Guber I wanted to run with Rain Man, and he said great. It was dead, so why not let me try? The script had no sex, no car chases, and no third act, but I was convinced that if we could keep the budget to $25 million, we could earn back $50 million from date-nighters and grown-ups. So I started talking up the project. Nothing in Hollywood is anything until it’s something, and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief. If you keep insisting that a shifting set of inchoate possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one. Sometimes.

  I needed a second star and a great director. I introduced Dustin to my close friend Barry Levinson, who’d directed Diner, and they became fast friends. Then, in one of our packaging meetings—where we worked to assemble all the talent for a film, to make it completely ours—our agents Paula Wagner and Jack Rapke suggested putting Tom Cruise into the mix. After his success in The Color of Money opposite Paul Newman, we believed he’d be terrific as Charlie, and the combination of stars would make the film special. Everyone in Hollywood scoffed: given the age difference (Dustin was fifty, Tom twenty-five), how could the actors possibly play brothers? The conventional wisdom was that the project was CAA packaging run amok; the movie would collapse under its own weight and all three clients would fire us.

  Barry Levinson dropped out to do Good Morning, Vietnam, and we brought in Marty Brest, who’d done Beverly Hills Cop. Screenwriter Ron Bass, another CAA client, rewrote the script. Ron’s firmer structure helped us get United Artists to commit to the film. Then Dustin decided that Raymond should be autistic. Autistic people can’t be cured, so now the film couldn’t deliver any real redemption—but Dustin lived for difficulties. Without anguish he got bored. Marty Brest left to do Midnight Run, and Steven Spielberg came aboard. He developed it for a while, then left to shoot an Indiana Jones movie. We kept Tom Cruise busy by getting him cast as a babe-magnet bartender in Cocktail. Tom shot the whole movie while Rain Man inched along. Sydney Pollack came in and brought in four new writers. Then he dropped out.

  When the original director leaves a project, it usually dies, having lost its primary profound believer. We’d lost four directors. But I refused to give up because Dustin was determined to play that role, and because I felt so warmly about him and his family (not that I ever wanted to show anyone, even Dustin, the strength of my feelings, because I worried that emotions were a fatal weakness). I called Barry Levinson and told him, “You were the right guy from the start.” He read the latest script and decided that it needed to be a road movie: “It’s not a three-act movie,” he said, “it’s a one-act movie. The movie goes on the road, and it meanders, and then it ends, but it’s not an ending. Raymond’s not going to change, and he can’t live with his brother. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it goes.” Rain Man would wind up with so little overt action that Dustin and Tom privately titled it Two Schmucks in a Car. But the developments that matter in a Barry Levinson film take place beneath the surface.

  United Artists was in for $25 million but not a penny more, so CAA guaranteed the deficit. If Rain Man went over budget, the agency could lose its commissions, and then some. As we had money, relationships, and friendships on the line, I haunted the set and got a daily briefing from Mark Johnson, the film’s producer. I couldn’t rely on Barry to keep me informed, as he tended to ignore life outside his viewfinder. (During Good Morning, Vietnam I sent roses to Barry’s wife in his name—“I miss you!”—so she wouldn’t feel neglected.)

  Dustin went into every role, he once said, “full of fear and pain and self-loathing.” During the first week on location, Barry shot a scene by the duck pond outside the institution where Raymond Babbitt has been living. As Raymond and Charlie sit together on a bench, Charlie feels out his long-lost brother. Raymond stares into nowhere and mutters “I don’t know” over and over. I watched ten takes and at least five seemed flawless. Tom had his character nailed. But I should have noticed that Dustin seemed mopey.

  After flying back to L.A., I called him: “How’s it going, Dusty?”

  “Not good.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I can’t find my character.” His voice was shaking. “I thought I had it, but I just can’t find it.”

  For three days Dustin phoned me every few hours in a growing panic. He went so far as to nominate Richard Dreyfuss to replace him. “This is the worst work I’ve ever done,” he moaned. I asked if he wanted us to shut down the movie so he could gather himself. Even at $100,000 a day, it would be less costly than reshooting later.

  “No,” he said, “I want to keep working at it.” People called Dustin a prima donna, but all he cared about was the end product.

  I called Barry: “Dusty can’t find his character.”

  “I know,” Barry said, “but I can’t get him to tell me if he likes anything he’s done.
I’ll just keep going till he figures it out.”

  Ugh.

  Finally, Barry asked Dustin to look for just five seconds in the dailies that felt right. Once he found them, they had their foundation. By the time they shot the underwear scene (“I get my boxer shorts at Kmart”), Dustin had dialed in.

  A good package matched directors and actors who elicited the best from one another, even if they didn’t always get along. Barry’s equanimity was perfect on Rain Man. When Dustin stayed in character off camera and refused to make eye contact, Barry took it in stride. When Dustin shouted, Barry filtered out the noise, took the point, and moved on. He gave his actors room to find funny or poignant moments that weren’t on the page. The scene where Raymond enters the darkened hotel room and mimics the sounds of Charlie and his girlfriend having sex was all Dustin, and all hilarious.

  Rain Man came out in 1988 to very low expectations, and shocked everyone by grossing more than $400 million around the globe. Our clients with a share of the profits, or what’s called back-end participation—Dustin, Tom, Barry, and Mark Johnson—made many multiples of their salaries. And then the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards.

  During the Oscars ceremony, in March of 1989, my wife, Judy, and I sat one row behind Dustin. Barry Morrow and Ron Bass won for Best Original Screenplay early in the night, a good omen. Then Dustin’s name was called out for Best Actor, and I felt a thrilling jolt of pride. My friend had joined an elite club of multiple Oscar winners: Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Marlon Brando. Dustin was nearly ten years older than me, but I felt like a father to him, and to all my clients—I was the dad holding on to the back of their bikes and running them down the street shouting, “Pedal, pedal!”

  Dustin had brought Tootsie to CAA, but I had steered this film to him, a vital difference. Even so, I was startled when he began his acceptance speech by saying, “I thank my agent Mike Ovitz for making this project stick with glue when it was falling apart.” I’d been mentioned at the Oscars as a name on a list, but never like that. Barry Levinson then won for Best Director, and said, “I have to thank Michael Ovitz, who worked to keep this movie alive a lot of times when it may never have happened.” And when we won Best Picture, Mark Johnson thanked me for “standing by this for weeks and years.” The editor of Variety’s column about the awards would be headlined MIKE OVITZ—AN OSCAR HERO. I was on cloud nine.