Big Deal

Robert Slater had a problem. He had signed to write a book on Michael Ovitz and, as he put it, “I don’t just want Ovitz’s cooperation, I need it. You don’t research a book about Michael Ovitz and expect anyone else close to him to agree to be interviewed unless he says it’s OK.”

Robert Slater got lucky. Ovitz read Slater’s biographies of businessmen Jack Welch and George Soros and decided to cooperate. Slater and Ovitz met or spoke on the phone 11 times, in Ovitz’s office at Disney, over lunch and dinner at Ovitz’s home and on Ovitz’s private jet on the way to Bermuda. Ovitz made his wife and his parents available, and he provided Slater with an eye-popping list of celebrity colleagues to interview (“not 25 Ovitz friends, but 70 of the most famous stars in Hollywood”), including Tom Cruise, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Newman, David Letterman, Magic Johnson and L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan. All checked with Ovitz before talking. Some checked twice.

Armed with these sources, Slater limns the Ovitz version of the Horatio Alger saga: Ovitz, the voraciously curious child, leads a middle-class boyhood of paper routes and baseball, reared by doting Grandma, a PTA president mom and Encino Little League founding dad, whom Ovitz calls his only true mentor. At UCLA, the scrappy intramural defensive end and president of Zeta Beta Tau works 50 hours a week as operations manager for the Universal Studio tour. At the William Morris Agency, Ovitz shoots from the mail room to full agent in a record seven months; in 18 months, pioneering an untapped market, he makes the Morris office “the force to be reckoned with” in daytime television.

Then, crisis: jealousy and bureaucratic rigidity force Ovitz and four like-minded young agents to strike out on their own, in pursuit of their vision of a genuinely collaborative workplace. Working from card tables in borrowed office space, they founded the Creative Artists Agency with, in Ovitz’s words, “no money, no business, no systems, no organization. I mean nothing.” “And yet,” writes Slater, “Ovitz is exaggerating when he suggests that the five partners had no resources whatsoever to draw upon. For they possessed the most important resource of all, an unlimited supply of enthusiasm.”

“There was,” observes (CAA partner) Mike Rosenfeld, “a synergistic cloud that enveloped us all. We just worked seven days a week, around the clock. And Ovitz set the pace. Just to watch Ovitz was enough if anybody had any doubts about our succeeding. This was not a man who was thinking about failure.” Ovitz forges a brilliant series of strategic alliances, first with literary agent Morton Janklow; then with new partner Martin Baum, who brings the first A-list movie clients into the agency; then with Gary Hendler, the attorney of Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

Ovitz’s persuasion and persistence bring new clients into the fold, including Newman, Redford, Sydney Pollack and Dustin Hoffman. To Newman, he is “a cross between a barracuda and Mother Teresa. He’s a tough and crafty businessman, and I mean that in the best sense of the word.” Michael Crichton describes him as “unusually smart and disciplined. You don’t see that combination.” And according to Dustin Hoffman, “The word ‘agent’ wasn’t a pejorative after Ovitz came to town.” In 1990, every Oscar nominee for best actor and best director was a CAA client.

Ovitz developed his own philosophy, which he explained to Slater: “Read [Sun Tzu’s] ‘The Art of War’ and the ‘Tao Teh Ching,’ get it flavored by a little of Aristotle, and watch the Los Angeles Lakers do a fast break. . . . That was my philosophy. Total precision as a team. . . . No egos. . . .” According to Slater, Ovitz “truly believes Hollywood is one big battlefield, and he sees himself as one of its generals. Thus it never bothered him to be called ‘a control freak,’ for he wanted others to sense that he is in command--in full command.” Following Sun Tzu’s dictum, he tried to win without fighting; Slater says that meant instilling fear in his rivals, by creating the impression of overwhelming power, in Ovitz’s phrase, “a stick at his side” that he might wield against them.

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Practicing Sun Tzu’s assertion that “those skilled in defense hide in the deepest depths of the earth,” Ovitz swathed himself in an aura of secrecy, but CAA needed a public affirmation of its power and stability. He commissioned world-renowned architect I.M. Pei to build his first building in Los Angeles. “I had never done a building in that part of the world,” Pei told Slater, “simply because there was no permanence in Hollywood. Things seemed to come and go.” Ovitz convinced him otherwise.

Ovitz used his clients’ power to generate more power. Sensing a creative vacuum in the new corporate studios, he took over the work of combining scripts, directors and stars. “Tootsie” (1982) was the first major CAA package; through the rest of the ‘80s, CAA packaged 150 movies. On the television side, Janklow estimated that he and Ovitz put together more deals than any three studios combined. “If you wanted to do business,” Slater quotes Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, as saying, “you had to do it with him. That’s pretty much the definition of power.”

Ovitz says he had power but not respect. And respect, he maintains, was his true goal. He remembers being praised only three times by his entertainment colleagues (by Hoffman, Letterman and Cruise). When he finally left CAA, his colleagues didn’t throw him a party.

Ovitz tried to leverage his unique position as the man with his finger on the pulse (or the throat) of Hollywood to move into advertising and investment banking; he advised on the sale of Columbia Pictures to Sony and brokered the sale of MCA to Matsushita. He earned fees that dwarfed an agent’s cut of a movie deal, but he also had to face the reality that his Hollywood was a very small place indeed. Last year, gross domestic box office for all of Hollywood was $6.5 billion; CAA’s ad client Coca-Cola had a share of the worldwide soft drink market that was more than $20 billion. He might have been the most powerful man in show biz, but to the investors who bought and sold studios, Ovitz saw he was a penny ante player.

Ovitz realized that even his Hollywood power was the power of the middleman. He couldn’t make or market films, he could only convince others to do so. Ovitz the general needed an army. He tried to broker a place for himself running MCA for Edgar Bronfman, but negotiations fell apart. Finally, he signed on with his friend Michael Eisner as Eisner’s No. 2 at Walt Disney Co. CAA had about 500 employees; Disney had 117,000.

It didn’t work. Ovitz tells Slater he was lied to by Eisner, who promised he would cede Ovitz the operation of the company but instead left him adrift without portfolio. In an untenable position, Ovitz the defeated general withdrew, solaced by a sweet severance deal Ovitz the master agent had negotiated.

Slater tells his tale in the breathless style of the business success story. (“I interview Michael Crichton for two hours. What a treat!”) And for anyone who hopes to make a living in Hollywood, Ovitz is in many ways exemplary. Indeed, reading this, I vowed to be more focused and more disciplined, to make more phone calls to strategically placed acquaintances, to ply useful friends with gifts. I yearned to become part of a dedicated team, striving for our mutual success, keenly aware of what I really want, and what other people want, and where the business is going. I resolved to follow through more.

But for all the interviews, Ovitz has told Slater very little. “Ovitz” is, in fact, an example of an Ovitz deal in miniature. With sharp casting and a clever combination of coercion and co-option, Ovitz ensured that he got exactly the biography he’d want on the market.

But it is a mark, perhaps, of Ovitz’s fall from grace that it is such a small deal. Slater is no I.M. Pei. This is a rickety book. Slater shows no particular knowledge of Hollywood: He has Ovitz “renting” the film “Taps” six months before it’s released, and he doesn’t ask what happens to a man who represents Al Pacino, Hoffman and Robert De Niro when they all want the same part. He describes Ovitz tap-dancing on a table to woo a client, but he doesn’t try to explain the intricacies of Ovitz’s art form, the deal: how packaging increases value, how pressure can be creatively applied, how relationships really pay off.

Ovitz is by most reports as good an agent as ever existed. He got Cruise, Redford and Crichton what they wanted. Why can’t Ovitz get himself what he wants? Slater never asks this question. Nor does he explore the limits of the Ovitz philosophy. “The Art of War” is a manual of conquest. As one CAA agent put it, Ovitz “is a guy who didn’t want to lose, ever.” And while this can lead to great victories, it cannot lead to peaceful coexistence. Perhaps in order to command respect, you must show respect. The world outside Hollywood is bigger than a battlefield. Perhaps large corporations are less like armies than like governments. Perhaps, for Ovitz to get what he wants, he needs to be less like Patton and more like Ike.