COMPANY TOWN : Ovitz, the Sequel : His Move to Walt Disney Co. Leaves a Void in Hollywood

Who will be Hollywood’s next super-agent?

With his appointment as president of Walt Disney Co., Michael S. Ovitz becomes the logical and much-needed heir apparent to Michael D. Eisner and his Magic Kingdom. However, there doesn’t appear to be any such obvious successor to Hollywood’s most powerful agent lurking in the office suites lining Wilshire Boulevard’s agency row.

Then again, in the early 1960s, when a similar cataclysmic event occurred and MCA chief Lew Wasserman bowed out of the agency business to run a studio, nobody knew who would fill the shoes of that decade’s most influential figure.

As it happened, two of Wasserman’s former charges, Freddie Fields and David Begelman, went on to launch the formidable Creative Management Associates and become the industry’s new power players.

Ovitz himself seemed to come out of nowhere. One of his former colleagues at the William Morris Agency, where the fair-haired, wide-eyed Valley boy began in the mail room, recalls, “Mike Ovitz didn’t come upon the scene as a 22-year-old genius. He was a guy working on the third floor booking TV game shows and everyone would walk right by him.”

In fact, when Ovitz and four of his William Morris cronies decided to defect from that agency in 1975 and form Creative Artists Agency, it wasn’t Ovitz who was the obvious visionary or stand-out leader. It was Rowland Perkins. The partners applied for a bank loan to start their own shop around him , when Perkins became miffed that he had been passed over as the new head of Morris’ TV department.

It wasn’t long after CAA came into its own, however, that Ovitz emerged as the shining star.

And so the feeling in Hollywood today is that, just as every decade or so has its Lew Wasserman, Freddie Fields and David Begelman, Sue Mengers, Stan Kamen, Irving (Swifty) Lazar and Michael Ovitz, another new mega-agent is sure to come along and once again redefine the business of the 10-percenter.

“Without Mike’s shadow over the whole agency business, we don’t know who will replace him as the heir-apparent,” says former CAA agent and now MGM President Mike Marcus. “But, of course, there will be the next hottest guy.”

And, as producer and former Columbia Pictures President Dawn Steel, adds: “A vacuum always creates opportunity. . . . All my greatest leaps came when there were vacuums to be filled.”

Many believe that Wasserman and Ovitz were the two most significant innovators in the history of the talent agencies.

Ovitz single-handedly took the traditional role of agent to another level by becoming a respectable businessman in his own right. He became as much a power player on Wall Street and Madison Avenue as he did on Hollywood’s creative landscape by advising corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, brokering such deals as Matsushita’s purchase and recent sale of MCA and Sony Corp.’s acquisition of Columbia and TriStar, not to mention persuading French bank Credit Lyonnais to prop up the financially ill MGM/UA.

As one veteran agent suggested, “Mike has created the mold for somebody to be the next visionary and do something that hasn’t been done. His leaving doesn’t mark the end of an era, but the beginning of a new agent.”

The prototype for the super-agent of the future will undoubtedly be someone, such as Ovitz, who can both hobnob with the Bill Gateses and the Herb Allens of this world as well as break bread with Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise at Mortons or the Grill.

He or she must also know the difference between Warren and Jimmy Buffett and work with each on his own terms. And, like Ovitz and all of the mega-agents before him, that person must possess an obsessive, inherent shark-like nature with that killer instinct to eat their competition for breakfast.

If there is to be another Ovitz, someone will have to pick up where he left off in a radically changing industry in which the new interactive and digital technologies are marrying with the product suppliers and distributors and the creative talent behind the product.

“The evolutionary process of where the business is going will always create people for whom those labels [of super-agent and powerbroker] will be used,” said one top-level industry executive. “Each generation has this type of leader, who is usually a clone of others in the past who went beyond the traditional role of agent.”

TriStar President Marc Platt concurs that if there is to be another mega-agent, “it will have to be someone with an entrepreneurial spirit that goes beyond just representing talent.”

Platt and others wonder whether budding visionaries might gravitate more toward the sexy, new corporate universe of the entertainment-media giants.

“Maybe with the shift of the ‘90s, you’ll see these super-individuals align with the big entertainment conglomerates and not the agencies,” suggests Platt. “It may be that the Mike Ovitzes of the world will aspire to be part of the new corporate environments rather than the agencies.”

While CAA held power through the 1980s and ‘90s, it’s now the Viacoms, the Time Warners, the Disneys and the MCAs, who, as one source put it, “control the entire food chain and create more.”

As we’ve witnessed from the events of the past few weeks, entertainment conglomerates are only getting bigger.

Yet many believe there are ample opportunities left in the agency world, which will continue to attract the best and the brightest.

Scott Sassa, president of Turner Entertainment Group, says: “I have tremendous faith that there are a lot of people out there who will advance the game forward, and there will continue to be opportunities for agents to amass that power. The world is different so the set of skills have to be different.”

Producer Cary Woods (“Kids”), a former young hotshot agent himself, avows: “The agency business is probably attracting even better executive talent today because Ovitz changed the national perception of what an agent was.”

He said 10 years ago the word agent had a “pejorative edge,” when the perception was “they fed off the income of artists and hadn’t earned their percentage.” Today “the word agent in and of itself opens doors,” he said.

When he began as an agent in the William Morris mail room in 1982, Woods recalls, “Business people couldn’t even name an agent, now they take them much more seriously.”

There is also the possibility that with the passing of the Ovitz era, agencies will refocus on their primary roles as good old-fashioned talent brokers.

“I hope agents are going to pay more attention to helping talent and filmmakers tell the stories, as opposed to fragmenting their time by expanding” into other businesses, said Brian Grazer, producer of “Apollo 13.”