Michael Ovitz: Empire Builder
Hi Friends :)
I’m back with Michael Ovitz. As I write this to you from this little town in England, I’m still amazed by what I just read. Who is Michael Ovitz is a monster read. The playbook, way ahead of its time. The accomplishments, unmatched. The stories, heartbreaking.
I’ve pulled out ideas and strategies that Michael used throughout his career at CAA to build the most powerful agency the world has ever seen. And as Gary Halbert would have said, “Most are quick, easy and painless to implement... a few take a little more effort. But they all...Just Flat Out Work!”
You can share this post with a fellow thinker and help rebuild the human colossus.
Issue 6
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. As agents, we didn’t create anything. We were sellers; we sold our clients our time and expertise, and then we sold the buyers our clients. Our tenuous capital was the hours in the day, less the few we slept, and we spent that capital at a frenzied pace.
I’d drop everything to get you the right cardiac surgeon, the right car, a place for your kid at the John Thomas Dye or Harvard-Westlake schools—whatever you needed. I was everyone’s chief psychiatrist, legal adviser, financial adviser, fixer, cultural translator, and shoulder to cry on. With so many clients’ very lives seemingly our responsibility, I obsessed about what might go wrong for them—and for the agency. I felt you could never be too paranoid because our competitors were out to get us and our clients were weak and easily wooed.
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.
Playing Time Games
Hollywood was an archipelago of talent, thousands of separate islands—but directors and stars were the keystone islands. We needed to build bridges and connect the islands to make packages, which would turn us into a kind of studio. To get actors, we needed directors, because directors had the stars in their pockets. I wrote a list of the directors I wanted and thought I could conceivably get, many of them in comedy, which wasn’t taken seriously in the agency world.
But to get to the directors, there was a further step: we needed writers and their material. Directors wanted great material a lot more than they wanted to chat with me about the opening crane shot in Touch of Evil. The easiest way to make some headway through this obstacle course was to turn our television writers into movie writers and directors. I encouraged Barry Levinson to write a screenplay based on his youth in Baltimore, and he came up with Diner, his debut as a film director.
The second easiest way was to turn other agencies’ television writers into movie writers and directors. We wooed Steve Gordon, a TV writer with a screenplay about a millionaire alcoholic with a romantic dilemma. Steve’s agents at ICM couldn’t or wouldn’t sell it. I sent the script to United Artists, which ordered the movie with Steve attached to direct. After Arthur became a surprise hit, Steve signed with us. We’d poach by assumption: behave as if we were the client’s agent already, make their dream happen, and then they’d sign.
When I heard about The Yakuza, a film about the Japanese crime syndicate that Sydney would release in 1975, I cold-called him and offered to connect him to Ed Parker, a local martial artist who could choreograph the movie. Ed didn’t get the job, but I kept in touch and stopped by Sydney’s office every so often. I stayed after him when we started CAA, escalating my soft pressure a notch in 1977 after Sydney invited me to the premiere for Bobby Deerfield. “I’ll kill for you,” I told Sydney.
All I had to sell was my passion and energy and the fact that I was thirty years younger than Evarts Ziegler. As Sydney wavered, we got screenplay after screenplay into his hands before Zig did. I pestered Mort Janklow for drafts of upcoming books and sent out summaries by the dozen. Each day I spent up to two hours on Sydney, far more than anyone would spend for his biggest signed client.
The Leverage of Knowledge
I insisted that our agents have a reading list: one national newspaper, one international news magazine, and one special-interest magazine, such as Golf Digest. I had two hundred magazine subscriptions, and I’d skim the magazines as I was on the phone, everything from Redbook to Road & Track. I got a lot of flak about all this homework, but I remember feeling vindicated when Mike Menchel, a twenty-six-year-old agent, came with me to Aspen for the opening of a play Robin Williams was in. Mike walked up to Jack Nicholson and offered him a light, then chatted with him about golf and the Lakers—two of Jack’s favorite topics.
No conflict, No interest
CAA was the first to orchestrate the entire development process. We took an idea (a yet-to-be-published bestseller, a magazine article, a news story), turned it into a script, and shoehorned as many artists into the project as we could. Rather than pitch a ten-page treatment to a studio for $10,000, we’d tell our writers to flesh out a first draft. Then we’d attach a name director and one or more actors and sell the option for $250,000. Nothing went out unattached.
If we filled a movie with clients, we could present the whole package to the studios, giving them nothing to do except say yes or no. This was a crucial shift: we began to view studios as little more than banks and distribution vehicles—they’d finance the movies and get them into the theater, but the films were essentially ours. I had never bought the Agenting 101 rule that representing two similar stars is a conflict of interest. Instead, I preached, “No conflict, no interest”—we wanted all the conflicts because that gave us leverage; the studios couldn’t threaten us that they’d opt for a similar piece of talent at another agency.
By the late eighties, CAA had become a story factory. Hundreds of scripts, treatments, articles, and novels poured into our office each month. Ten full-time readers generated three- or four-page synopses for our agents, who read the most promising material in full and brought it to staff meetings for review. On Friday, any of our agents could pitch me one-on-one, so each weekend I plowed through several scripts they’d recommended.
Empires are built on Powerful Networks
When New York magazine touted Mort Janklow as the hottest literary agent, I rang him up. It took me ten days to get him on the phone to ask if I could come to see him. I flew to New York at a cost that made my stomach twitch. Trying not to seem overawed, I laid out our book-first strategy. I asked to call him every Thursday at 10:00 a.m. in case he had something for us. Mort could have set his watch by my calls. I kept at it for a year, every week, no matter where I was before he gave us a novel called Chiefs, a police drama set in the South. The story was solid, but Mort neglected to tell us that the networks had already turned it down. Bill Haber worked round the clock to get Chiefs produced and prove we were for real. His friend and client Martin Manulis, the producer of Gunsmoke, somehow wrangled Charlton Heston, a big-enough star to get Chiefs adapted into a successful miniseries on CBS. Ecstatic, Mort started sending us manuscripts by his most commercial writers: Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steele.
We went on to package pulp sensations like Mistral’s Daughter and Hollywood Wives, each of which brought the agency $50,000 to $100,000 upfront and millions in syndication when they were resold to the nation’s more than six hundred independent stations. Soon we had eighty agents sending us novels in manuscript, to be optioned by our producers and then lateraled to our screenwriters for adaptation.
Vision needs Preparation
At CAA we kept a “dashboard” of every project underway in film, TV, music, and books. A copy was placed in each agent’s black binder, together with the latest box-office data, TV ratings, bestseller lists, and other pertinent data that might give us an edge at our 8:30 a.m. staff meetings. Our rule at staff meetings was “No idea is too stupid.” I consulted the dashboard several times a day, looking for opportunities for clients, potential film packages, or new business, the crazier-sounding the better. Agents used to be like firemen: they ran from one crisis to the next, reacting to offers and ultimatums, never knowing what tomorrow would bring. At CAA, we prided ourselves on making tomorrows.
My pitch ran the risk of sounding fulsome: another salesman, full of blarney. But it’s only blarney if you can’t make it happen. If you can, then it’s the truth—and the truth is the supreme sales tool. When I accurately foretold future events, my client: (a) felt good about getting the outcome I had predicted; (b) thought I was a genius for predicting it; and (c) spread the story, which helped us sign the next client.
Fan Letters and Gifts can do things Logic can’t
We instituted CAA’s famous gifts office in the late seventies on the uncontroversial theory that people love free stuff. One of my assistants kept track of all our clients’ hobbies and charities. The next time the client had a birthday or a book coming out or a movie shooting, he’d get an outdoor watch or a nice piece of luggage or, say for Paul Newman and Tom Cruise on The Color of Money, an ornate pool cue. We gave them to nonclients, too, working the theory that a nonclient is just a future client who hasn’t realized it yet. Except for start-date gifts, my rule was that important gifts shouldn’t be disposable: no champagne, no muffin baskets. Instead, rare first editions from Heritage books, ancient Greek coins, paintings and prints, even the occasional car—sturdy, thoughtful presents that would last. If a client was paying us $500,000 a year in commissions, and we spent $5,000 on a gift for him or her, it didn’t hurt us much and it made the client feel fabulous. Our gifts office spent more than $500,000 a year and generated a ton of goodwill.
How Michael crafted the partnership between Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese (They worked together in The Color Of Money)
“I don’t know yet, but I’ll find something. In the meantime, write him a fan letter.” People still wrote letters in longhand then, and their impact was underrated. I often sent out more than a thousand letters a year, commemorating every opening of a film, award nomination, or award. I dropped Paul’s letter by Marty’s office. When I saw him light up as he read it, I sensed my opportunity. I’d been an admirer of Marty’s since Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. If I could bring him to CAA, he’d be a force multiplier. Every actor worth representing wanted to work with Scorsese.
The 10-minute rule that led to friendships with many giants
In the early eighties, I’d begun collecting relationships. For instance, I reached out to Felix Rohatyn, who had almost single-handedly rescued New York City from bankruptcy in the seventies. I called and asked to see him, saying, “I need no more than ten minutes of your time.” On my next trip to New York, I went to his office, shook hands, and placed my watch on his desk. Then I said, “I’d love to talk to you about how you saved New York, and also how you advise Lew—to learn from the Dean. And I’d love to be helpful to you in L.A. in any way I can.” All to get him talking and to show that I knew what he’d done and that I admired it and wanted to learn from it. After ten minutes, I said, “Thanks so much,” and stood to pick up my watch. Felix—and everyone else I used this strategy on—asked me to sit back down.
In this way, I got to know Herb Allen, the head of Allen & Co., and Bob Greenhill at Morgan Stanley, as well as on Mort Janklow and fifteen other book agents, a number of figures in the art world, and our clients Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Al Pacino, Sidney Lumet, Bob De Niro, and Marty Scorsese.
The greats work smart, hard, and long
I was up at 5:45 a.m., and fifteen minutes later I’d be riding the bike in my gym and making calls to Europe and skimming five newspapers, marking articles for my assistant to strip out and distribute to the firm. After forty minutes on the bike, I’d do thirty or forty minutes of martial arts, working to exhaustion. By 8:00 a.m., after showering and eating a fast breakfast, I’d be on the car phone en route to the office. After our morning meeting, I’d take meetings, have lunch, a drink with a colleague, and a working dinner, all in between “running calls,” up to three hundred phone conversations a day—Spielberg to Kubrick to De Niro to Hoffman to Murray, each call as important as the rest. I had all these brilliant and talented children as clients, and I could never give them enough time and attention. And unlike with my actual children, I could never make a mistake, or they’d fire me.
After the kids went to sleep, I worked every night, skimming through a couple of the three or four VHS cassettes I’d brought home and chipping away at the stack of screenplays. Then I’d fall asleep to Johnny Carson at midnight.
Ideas ahead of their time
In 1993 we signed a deal with Nike to develop and promote sporting events together. In July, Phil Knight and I had pitched the NCAA on our biggest idea: a seven-game playoff system (quarterfinals, semifinals, and a final) for college football teams, leading to a title game between the best two: a college Super Bowl. We projected that by building TV specials around the games and showing the title game worldwide, the tournament would net the NCAA more than $100 million a season. But the organization sat on our idea for a year and finally rejected it. They eventually adopted a simplified version of our plan in 2014, the College Football Playoff that now crowns a national champion. As was often the case, I was a little too early.
Getting my foot in the Door
Almost everyone at William Morris started in the company’s mailroom. It could take three years to become a junior agent and four more to start signing your own clients as a senior agent—and more than 80 percent of the trainees washed out along the way. The way you got ahead at WMA was nepotism: everybody was somebody’s nephew. It was an old, soft, corrupt place.
I didn’t know anybody, so I needed another way to stand out. I told the head of personnel, “I have a proposition for you. I think I can learn all I need to know to become an agent in 120 days. If I can’t, I’ll give back everything you paid me.” I was agenting him, and he knew it. He broke out laughing. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” he said. “But I’m going to hire you. You start Monday.”
We had a file room the length of a basketball court. It was lined with steel cabinets, the hard drives of the era, all packed with seventy years’ worth of manila folders. I viewed those files as an encyclopedia of entertainment, albeit a helter-skelter one, so I helped the woman who ran the file room, Mary, with her mimeographing. And I brought her little gifts—a box of candy, a scarf. One day I said, “You know, I’d love to read some of the files.” She told me to make myself at home.
Within a week she was letting me stay on after she left. Then she gave me a key. While other trainees waited to be told what to do and read and learn, I entered Mary’s domain each morning at 7:00 and every evening after work. For ten weeks I made my way from A to Z, through the client files and the network and studio deals.
377 meetings in a year
I decided to study Silicon Valley the same way I’d studied the entertainment industry when I was twenty-three. I began networking, taking eight to ten meetings a day with founders and engineers - 377 meetings that first year alone. Getting a second meeting with the superstars was harder; you had to prove in the first meeting you had something to offer.
How A16Z learned from the CAA Playbook
They borrowed our roots to give themselves gravitas the same way I had borrowed from Lew Wasserman and Sun Tzu. The team provides in-house experts to assist its start-ups with recruitment, budgeting, operations, sales, publicity, IPO rollouts—whatever an entrepreneur might need.
While other venture firms seek out executive talent for their clients, Andreessen Horowitz goes further. It develops ties with the Valley’s best software engineers, designers, and product managers, helping them with introductions and career counseling. At times it connects these engineers and managers to one of its portfolio companies, but often there’s no direct payoff. It does the same for top Valley executives, much as CAA negotiated employment contracts for studio executives. Andreessen Horowitz aims to forge long-term relationships that might eventually prove helpful at a future start-up, or as part of future deal flow.
Hard work and Good Ideas are an Unstoppable Combination.
I learned my most important lesson when two MIT engineers came to me with unproven technology to improve mobile payments. Acting as their agent, I called John Donahoe, the CEO of eBay, and asked him to take a look for PayPal, which eBay had acquired. John brought two of his senior engineers to the meeting, and they began picking the code and the technology apart, asking nasty and insinuating questions. I finally stood and told my guys, “They can’t talk to you like this! We’re going.” The engineers stared at me and said, “What are you talking about? It’s totally fine.”
I sat back down; eBay ended up buying the tech. And as we walked out, John Donahoe put his arm around me and said, “You’ve just learned something very important about the Valley. There are no manners here, just brain challenges. It’s about getting to the truth of the idea any way you can.” If Hollywood is like high school with money, as people often say, the lesson from that eBay meeting is that Silicon Valley is a true meritocracy. The best idea with the best execution wins. In Hollywood, I was always going to be judged against my own legacy at CAA, whereas in Silicon Valley I was judged simply on the ideas I brought to the whiteboard. The Valley ringingly echoes my shouted belief that hard work and good ideas are an unstoppable combination.
If you liked this, please share it with a friend or tweet about it :)
The next issue comes on 12th Dec - We go into the intellectual software of James Dyson. His story is Unbelievable. Excited to share it with you in 2 weeks.
- Abhishek