Company Town : Some Ovitz ‘Insiders’ Left Out in Cold
The New York tabloids are having a field day with the failed Michael Ovitz-MCA deal.
Hollywood insiders particularly had a good belly laugh over a column that ran Wednesday in the New York Post that reported that the real deal breaker for Ovitz was a chauffeured limousine. Um, right. Somebody blew a quarter-billion-dollar deal demanding a chauffeured car at his service 24 hours a day, seven days a week and a guarantee that he would be driven back and forth from lunch at the Polo Lounge, according to the report.
“The fact that for them the Polo Lounge is still the epitome of power in this town shows how out of touch they are,” said one source. The item ends by saying the super agent will have to be content with his CAA limo. In fact, Ovitz drives himself to and from work in his own BMW. (CAA, like most companies, uses a car service that has a fleet of town cars.)
“Of every story I’ve read, that was the best,” one studio head said with a laugh.
No matter how ludicrous, the Post story illustrates that most people in this industry, even those who fashion themselves as powerful and “in the know,” often know very little about what they speak. It also illustrates that when it comes to information about Ovitz, who is ultra private and neither transparent nor predictable, chances are nobody knows nothin’.
At the moment, every entertainment reporter across the country is trying desperately to be the first to get the real story behind the story about why the $250-million mega-deal between Ovitz and MCA blew apart at the seams in the wee hours of Monday morning.
*
The problem is that only Ovitz and Seagram Co. Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr.--and a small circle of lawyers and advisers--really know what happened. And so far, the two central characters aren’t talking.
No one plays it closer to the vest than Ovitz. Many say it’s his way of keeping up the mystique that seems to shadow him. It’s also a nifty technique for someone who is notorious for wanting to maintain control.
Ovitz keeps his own counsel, even as he counsels everyone from his closest friends and associates to the world’s mega-companies.
“He doesn’t have a ‘kitchen cabinet,’ where he’ll put a group of people together and seek their advice,” said one of his closest personal friends, Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael D. Eisner. While Ovitz is “extremely collaborative on other people’s problems,” Eisner says, “I know how private he is . . . and he is very introspective, which, by the way, is a great asset.”
Eisner said that when he was in the hospital last year recovering from quadruple bypass surgery, Ovitz “was practically living inside my room,” but “when he is sick, it’s very hard to find out about it. . . . I usually have to hear it from his wife.”
From the nanosecond that the news leaked out that Seagram was negotiating to buy MCA, the Hollywood hot line went haywire--spewing out a lot of disinformation.
Last week, Bronfman told The Times that on the day virtually every newspaper in North America said he was buying 80% of MCA for $7.1 billion--valuing the entire company at $9 billion--”we were still $500 million apart.” Bronfman ultimately paid $5.7 billion for the stake, putting the margin of error by sources sure of what they were talking about at about $1.4 billion.
That was just for starters. What followed was virtually two months of done-deal pieces.
And because Hollywood is a town that trades on information, there were certain industry heavyweights--known for how brilliantly they work the phones overtime with reporters--who made it their daily business to promote with unflinching certainty the fact that Ovitz would leave Creative Artists Agency to run MCA under the new ownership.
That clearly came close to being the case. But it didn’t happen. Nonetheless, that has hardly stopped the gossip mongers, all of whom have the inside track (so they claim) about why Ovitz and Bronfman didn’t come to an agreement.
*
Bronfman dreamin’ on: It now appears that since Michael Ovitz is a lost cause for Edgar Bronfman Jr. and because he has no clear alternative in mind, he’s focusing, or refocusing, on other things. Bronfman’s next move, no doubt, will be to do a big piece of business that will make for splashy, positive headlines--i.e., that long-in-the-works DreamWorks distribution deal for international theatrical, worldwide home video and record distribution that sort of got sidetracked.
A source close to partners Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen indicated, “They’re back on his [Bronfman’s] sight line.”
*
Spielberg and Katzenberg have given their proxies to Geffen, who’s been instructed to go ahead and nail down a deal. Before the Ovitz deal blew, the trio had been waiting until Bronfman brought in a new CEO and they’d been given assurances that Spielberg’s mentor, Sid Sheinberg, and his longtime boss, Lew Wasserman, were being treated fairly. But now sources say that the Dream boys figure the time is ripe to squeeze the best deal possible out of Bronfman, while he’s still vulnerable from the public embarrassment of the Ovitz debacle.
While all of this management stuff has been transpiring, the Dream Team has apparently been working nonstop on a potential transaction that could put its new home at the massive Playa Vista development near Marina del Rey.
At one point, MCA, where the partners are temporarily based at Spielberg’s Amblin headquarters, was reportedly considering putting up $200 million to build out part of its back lot for DreamWorks, figuring it would recover its investment through distribution fees.
But Bronfman has to consider whether he wants DreamWorks taking up valuable real estate that he may eventually want to earmark for theme park attractions. If the team does move to Playa Vista, chances are its animation division will remain on the Universal Studios lot, since virtually all of the animation business is based in the Valley.
