Polymath Monopoly
When Michael Ovitz co-founded the Creative Artists Agency, little did he know that he would become Hollywood’s number one agent. At CAA, they kept a dashboard of every project under way 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 them an edge at their 8:30 a.m. staff meetings (which were scheduled sixty to ninety minutes ahead of their competitors). Ovitz consulted the dashboard several times a day, looking for opportunities for clients, potential film packages, or new business, the crazier-sounding the better. With such an attention to detail, it was only natural that their nationwide scrutiny would lead to worldwide domination.
Barry Levinson was one of four directors (alongside Martin Brest, Sydney Pollack and Steven Spielberg) who turned down the chance to direct Rain Man. When Michael Ovitz worked for the William Morris Agency in the mid-seventies, Barry was his first client. By 1987, nostalgia and favours went a long way. In 1975, Ovitz called Barry to let him know that he was a starting a new agency. All of a sudden, Barry and his wife got a call from someone at William Morris. Before they knew what was going on, the couple were having lunch with six WMA agents who they had never heard of before. Because of how creepy their timing was, Barry and Rudy De Luca stayed true to Ovitz.
In the early days, so many people in Hollywood wanted to help CAA because they were tired of WMA’s monopolizing ways. It wasn’t too brave of a move for the CAA founders to defect from WMA since most of them were liaisons to the West Coast network programming executives: Rowland Perkins was responsible for CBS, Bill Haber represented NBC, and Mike Rosenfeld repped ABC. Each man had a rolodex of contacts that was literally networking. As for Michael Ovitz, Barry Levinson was his ace card because he was on a writing team for Mel Brooks. Michael saw comedy as CAA’s initial calling card. CAA’s success was that other agencies couldn’t understand how Saturday Night Live would be a meal ticket, movie-wise. Also, acquiring TV producer Aaron Spelling in 1979 resulted in him becoming CAA’s biggest cash cow in the eighties and nineties.
For all of the snobbery aimed at TV, Frank Price went from working at Universal Television to running Columbia Pictures, Bob Daly went from working at CBS to running Warner Brothers, and Michael Eisner & Barry Diller came from ABC to running Paramount. As a WMA agent, Michael Ovitz was aware that the Department of Justice was probing William Morris for monopolistic practices in their TV work. When WMA used a powerful attorney to punish five former employees for starting CAA, Ovitz had to get out of it by bluffing that he had a friend who worked at the Justice Department. The gamble paid off. As a means of self-preservation, CAA refused to represent a client who used the attorney’s services. Within five years, the law firm was defunct. When CAA began, it was mainly as the go-to agency for TV workers. But income only got steady when literary agencies used CAA as a liaison to Hollywood buyers.
When CAA was formed, Michael Ovitz was publicized as one of the minor members among the five founders. His climb to power is best understood when learning that he handled the day-to-day finances of the company. What wasn’t mentioned in his memoir is that he persuaded Bill Carruthers to fire one of the models on a game show called Give-n-Take so as to let his wife, Judy Ovitz, to present on the show. Bill wasn’t thrilled with the request but he was emotionally blackmailed into it because he owed Ovitz a favour since he sold Give-n-Take to CBS. Similarly, Amy Grossman went from being a WMA secretary to being a CAA agent because she dated a TV producer who passed the word to Michael Rosenfeld. The producer went unnamed in the 1997 biography about Ovitz, but was namechecked Robert Greenwald in the 2016 oral history book. The dating detail was left out.
As a sign of his monopolizing ways, Michael Ovitz made CAA a bigger agency by pooling their resources with an independent middle-aged agent (Marty Baum) who had equally aged clients of a high stature in the film world. CAA’s plan was to get so many clients that the power went from the studios to the agents. Michael’s business partner, Ron Meyer, sometimes had to remind him that he can’t put all of the smaller agencies out of his business e.g. Sandy Bresler only represented Jack Nicholson. There were a number of times when other small agencies wanted to merge with CAA, but it never happened despite a couple of close calls. In 1983, an agent named Rand Holston joined CAA after leaving a literary agency called Adams, Ray & Rosenberg. Rand brought Stephen King, some other writers and Paul Brickman (the director of Risky Business). Ironically, CAA almost merged with ARR had it not been for Lee Rosenberg being sceptical about the possibility of representing the biggest names in the business.
The penultimate step for CAA’s quest for world domination was turning TV writers into movie writers and directors, even if they were already represented by other agencies (i.e. ICM rejected Steve Gordon’s Arthur script before Michael Ovitz sent the script to a film company called United Artists). The aforementioned Barry Levinson was encouraged by Ovitz to write a screenplay based on his youth, hence Diner being his directorial debut. Getting to writers involved socializing with executives who they trusted. Ted Ashley, the chairman and CEO of Warner Brothers, introduced Ovitz to Warner’s production head: John Calley. Things snowballed when it was revealed that John was a speed-reader, so Ovitz sent him piles of scripts, and even books that could be adapted. As a token of his appreciation, Calley guided prestigious screenwriter Robert Towne to CAA.
The final step was befriending an entertainment lawyer named Gary Hendler, who represented Sean Connery. It was Gary’s idea for Michael Ovitz to speak to Sean, Never Say Never Again (1983) came about and the rest is history. Gary was overworked, and Barry Hirsch was restless at his firm, so Ovitz recommended that they combine firms. As a result, CAA represented 50 of their clients within a year. CAA helped TriStar by packaging The Natural (1984) and Places in the Heart (1984). This benefited Gary because TriStar was run by him. Adding to the common ground was that Hendler installed CAA client Sydney Pollack as the studio’s creative consultant. CAA helped TriStar by packaging The Natural and Places in the Heart. This benefited Gary because TriStar was run by him. Adding to the common ground was that Gary installed Pollack as the studio’s creative consultant. Furthermore, Places in the Heart starred Sally Field - who had been Michael’s high school classmate. She had been in an earlier CAA-driven project, Absence of Malice (a 1981 Pollack film).
Michael Ovitz was like a spy in how he seized talent. He had a car telephone where, because of the radio frequencies, he could hear another agent talking to his only assistant. After two years of courtship, Ovitz finally stole Pollack from Evarts Ziegler in 1981. As a consolation prize, Ovitz offered Ziegler $750,000 for his agency, plus a lifetime royalty for the ensuing work of his clients. After six months, Ziegler passed. However, Ovitz poached his assistant - Steve Roth. Like Marty Baum, Steve taught Ovitz a lot. Adam Fields, Marty’s assistant at CAA, believes that it’s because of Steve that directors were seen as stars who could be the main selling point of a film. He turned out to be unengaged when quality was being sacrificed for money, but Ovitz didn’t fire him; he just “promoted” him to work for Columbia where CAA already had a couple of films in the pipeline: Stripes (1981) and Tootsie (1982). The casting for the latter was even done in a CAA office.
In 1979 (four years after CAA was formed), 90% of CAA’s avenue was from TV. By 1982, 60% was from film. By this point, Michael S. Rosenfeld, retired from CAA (who bought his shares for $750,000). Michael Ovitz had a motto that an agent should be able to talk knowledgeably about what their clients love. As such, he insisted that the agents have a reading list: a national newspaper, an international news magazine and a special interest magazine. Ovitz had 2000 magazine subscriptions, and he would skim the magazines as he was on the phone. Ovitz told the staff that they should know every news story days or weeks before it was in Variety. This was achieved by having an inside track with studios. The vice presidents they handled would give them tips. Representing so many executives meant that CAA could see the entire chessboard. That’s how they helped move Les Moonves from Warner to run CBS, and Brandon Tartikoff from NBC to Paramount. There was a hidden agenda behind this omniscience, Ovitz was letting agents know that if they were planning to leave for a studio job then CAA would know before they even discussed their contract.
CAA was the first agency to orchestrate the entire development process of a film. They would take an idea (a yet-to-be-published bestseller, a magazine article, a news story), turn it into a script and shoe-horn as many of their clients into their project as they could. Unlike assembling a TV show, CAA didn’t take a packaging fee for the films that they put together…just their usual commission from the fees of their clients. Barry Levinson’s The Natural (1984) was the first time that CAA had a film featuring only their clients. CAA monopolized Hollywood enough that they owned 45 of the fifty top-grossing directors. By 1985, CAA had about 600 clients. Two 1985 films released by Universal were CAA packages: Out of Africa and Back to the Future. The latter is especially worth noting because it originally began as a Columbia deal. In the early to mid eighties, Michael Ovitz was doing a lot of deals with Columbia chairman Frank Price. Here are two examples: The Karate Kid was a between CAA and Frank whereas Frank was the only person willing to distribute CAA’s Stand by Me. The original star of Back to the Future, Eric Stoltz, was a client of Landmark Entertainment at the time. By the time that it was 1994, even he was a client of CAA (albeit he eventually returned to Landmark).
What sealed the deal for CAA overall was the gift-giving. If a client was paying them $500,000 a year in commissions then CAA would spend $5000 on a gift for them e.g. a rare first edition of a book. Not everyone could be bought. Meryl Streep stayed loyal to ICM, as did Julia Roberts, Richard Gere, Jodie Foster, Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson (despite Lethal Weapon being a CAA package). By 1992, the heads of the Directors Guild and Writers Guild were CAA clients. This one of those stories where what you know is just as important as who you know. In the case of Sylvester Stallone, he had a family friend who was a casting director: Caro Jones. She had cast him in Rocky, and had cast a film that he had made called Paradise Alley. Caro was a friend of CAA agent Ron Meyer, so the dye was set for Ron to meet Sly. When Sly signed to CAA, it was a deal that might as well have been cast in stone. You have to ask yourself who is more powerful - an agent who is close with a studio head or a casting director who is on good terms with a director?
Tom Cruise’s agent, Paula Wagner, had a peculiar advantage. She used to be an actress when Rick Nicita was an agent for WMA. He didn’t sign her, and she became an agent for Susan Smith’s agency. A year after they joined CAA, they divorced their partners and started seeing each other. Like a spy movie, you have a mole but in reverse order. Jack Rapke was a WMA agent but left when it was revealed that he was married to a CAA agent, Laurie Perlman, who worked as Ron Meyer’s assistant. In fact, Jack knew Laurie through the CAA guys. In Robert Slater’s 1997 biography about Michael Ovitz, it was exclusively revealed that her first encounter with CAA had happened on the beach. She was with a male friend who worked for the Columbia Pictures story department. He was reading a script that CAA had submitted to them.
In the Powerhouse book, director Ivan Reitman noted that Michael Ovitz was doing a lot of deals with Columbia’s Frank Price. The common denominator was Michael’s high school associate who would only sign up with CAA in 1986 after Paul Newman’s success story with Scorsese’s The Color of Money. The aforementioned Sally Field turned down Ovitz after her Emmy win in 1977 for Sybil because she didn’t think that CAA would last long. It remains to be seen if Ovitz was aware that she attended the Columbia Pictures acting workshop where she was chosen over 150 other actresses to play the lead role in the 1965–1966 TV series Gidget. Was she a friend of someone from Columbia? Was she related to someone in Columbia? Was she dating someone at Columbia? It would have been easy for Ovitz to keep tabs on her because he was a friend of her brother, Rick.
Having a monopoly can result in a humongous backfire. The people behind Spy magazine found out that, with the exception of Michael Ovitz, CAA’s agents didn’t have a complete list of clients. After a year of research, Spy published the list much to everyone’s horror because it showed that CAA represented almost every big name. CAA’s strategy was that clients were the left hand who didn’t know what the right hand was doing. Many clients were upset. For example, Dustin Hoffman was angry that he lost out to roles which went to Al Pacino. Same feeling vice-versa. What wasn’t revealed in the September 1988 issue of Spy was that Ovitz was cultivating relationships with high-level politicians, investment bankers, athletes and the art world. He truly wanted to be king of the entertainment industry. He certainly succeeded in reducing the client lists of William Morris, Sue Mengers and ICM.
Even the world of music wasn’t safe. An agent named Rob Prinz was converted from being Madonna’s agent at WMA to her agent at CAA. While at the latter, he signed Stevie Wonder, Van Halen and Ricky Martin. Michael Ovitz had what I would like to call self-serving generosity, because CAA was taking in so much income that he deliberately overpaid the agents. The idea was to inflate their egos so that no-one else in Hollywood could afford to hire them should they choose to defect. When Mike Marcus left CAA to run a movie called MGM, it was on good terms. This meant that he could enable CAA even more. According to Michael Eisner, Ovitz began to bristle at California state laws that restricted him as an agent. That’s when Ovitz began investment banking.
On a more charitable note, Michael Ovitz knew the best doctors to consult and the best hospitals to be treated at. If a client’s son or daughter had an automobile accident, Ovitz could refer the client to the right doctor, the right hospital, and if need be, the right lawyer. He could also recommend the right educational institution, be it college or private school. If a studio was hiring an executive and needed to get the executive’s kid into a private school, Ovitz knew the heads of each and what buttons to push for admission. In the mid-nineties, Magic Johnson suggested to Ovitz that he could run a studio. Ovitz countered that he already ran them all. He almost owned Universal, but turned it down, and his sidekick Ron Meyer became the owner instead. Even when he left CAA, Ovitz did not lose his crown as the ruler of all things Hollywood.
In the mid-nineties, people closest to him had to ask permission when being approached by Robert Slater for his biography project. Make no mistake about it, Ovitz is an authorized biography where the biographer actually interviewed the subject many times along with a host of other people. It’s necessary reading for those who have read the 2018 autobiography (Who is Michael Ovitz?) and the 2016 oral history book (Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency). It’s only in the 1997 book that it’s revealed how the Jim Beam company provided college scholarships, and that Michael had actually studied psychology. Another detail omitted from his memoir: he was given an award for merit at high school for being a class con artist. There are even more surprises: he actually knew Frank Marshall when he was at UCLA. Both friends talked about going to law school. Ovitz entered Loyola Law School in February 1968 but dropped out in June.
Intriguingly, he learned about the machinations of the entertainment industry by inquiring from the in-house attorneys at the Williams Morris Agency. A few months short of turning 24 in the fall of 1970, Michael Ovitz had announced that he was leaving the WMA to return to law school. It took several months for him to tire of his law studies, just as he had the last time. Back to the aforementioned Frank Marshall, he wasn’t mentioned in those 21st century books. This is particularly odd because, right at the beginning of 1975, Ovitz had a lunch with Marshall where he told him about his plan to start a new agency. Frank was sceptical about CAA but was told that the agency would work because they wouldn’t take commissions for a year, and their wives would help in the office. It’s ironic, then, that Frank was convinced by Ovitz to co-produce Walter Hill’s The Driver. Ovita was Frank’s agent, and went on to be one of the producers for Back to the Future.
When CAA made it as far as 1979, Michael Ovitz realized that some entertainment attorneys in Hollywood had progressed to managing the careers of their star clients. As such, he began to realize that the best way to get closer to the stars was to build strong relationships with their attorneys. He paid Bert Fields a dollar per year so that it would be difficult for Bert to represent someone who wanted to take legal action against either Ovitz or CAA. Their relationship progressed that they sent movie scripts to one another, but the best gift that Bert was offering Dustin Hoffman as a client. Another example of manipulation is signing Sydney Pollack on March 9, 1981. Ovitz only signed him because he was a friend and collaborator of Robert Redford, who was signed to CAA on March 25. Tom Cruise was signed on March 10.
Contrary to what Sylvester Stallone said (“around ‘80”), he was signed on July ‘81. Michael Ovitz preyed on Sly’s weakness: insecurity - Nighthawks had flopped at the box office. The fortuitous signings in 1981 were so prosperous that Michael Rosenfeld retired in 1982. This is one of those rare occurrences where someone’s early retirement encourages other people to look at an agency with more eagerness. For aspiring agents, CAA was enough to make them eager since all agents were paid better than those at other agencies. Ovitz became more Hell-bent than ever in going after clients. He would find out who their best friend was and where they hung out. Like a journalist, there was a fine line between being an investigator and being a stalker. There was a limit, however, to the Ovitz monopoly. CAA never had more clients than other agencies nor did it ever open a branch office in New York. In this instance, less really was more.
One example of this is when Michael Ovitz convinced Warner’s Terry Semel and Universal’s Tom Pollock to combine their biopic projects about Dian Fossey. Instead of Warner’s Jon Peters and Peter Gruber getting sued for stealing Arne Glimcher’s thunder by making a film called Heaven and Earth, the new film would technically be a merger called Gorillas in the Mist. Ovitz successfully pleaded his case because Arne had already purchased the film rights to adapt Dian’s autobiography before she died. Prior to her death, she had been signed by him to be a consultant for Universal’s production. Death has a way of bringing people together even if it’s a conglomerate that came from the death of a rival agent. After WME’s Stan Kamen died in February 1986, Warner’s Terry Semel convinced his regular clients to join CAA.
By the summer of 1986, all of Stan’s clients had flocked to CAA. However, this was when two of CAA’s founders (Martin Baum and Rowland Perkins) relinquished their share of the business while still staying on board as agents. Reading between the lines, it would appear that they were setting up Ovitz as a scapegoat should any lawsuits or insults come flying their way. Besides poaching clients from other agencies, CAA was poaching agents e.g. WME’s Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane. Michael Ovitz even used Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park as a bargaining (or blackmailing) chip where Steven Spielberg had to join CAA in order to direct the adaptation. By the time that Robert Slater’s 1997 biography was published, Ovitz had packaged 170 films. Before that book came out, there was Stephen Singular’s 1996 biography to contend with: Power to Burn: Michael Ovitz and the New Business of Show Business.
Stephen began researching immediately after having written a book about Mark Fuhrman. This is worth noting because Stephen mentioned in the preface that O.J. Simpson lived in the same neighbourhood as Michael Ovitz. It’s perhaps because of this that Ovitz did not extend the same courtesy to Stephen that he would later do with biographer Robert Slater. While most people would rather skip reading a preface and the acknowledgements page, I recommend reading both back-to-back so as to understand why Stephen had such a difficult time in getting major people to talk about Ovitz. Even a renegade filmmaker like Oliver Stone refused to be interviewed despite adapting a Stephen Singular book that became a film titled Talk Radio. Former agent Mike Rosenfeld demanded that Ovitz prove that he was not a member of the CIA or other investigative agency, which makes me think that Ovitz has a dangerous background. Joe Eszterhas claimed in Powerhouse that murder was on the cards for people who wanted to leave the agency.
There were a considerable amount of people in different fields who were okay with being interviewed as long as they were secured with anonymity. As if to prove his innocence, Ovitz only agreed to be interviewed after everything was said and done i.e. when the book was nearly finished. Even then, he only agreed to have a conversation after asking who the publisher is, who the agent is, and wanting the list of publications that Stephen had used as part of his research. One has to wonder what influence that Ovitz had in the editing of the book, if any. Robert’s 1997 book consisted of 360 pages whereas Stephen’s 1996 book consisted of 218. Ironically, Amazon describes the page-count as 272. While Stephen had assured Ovitz from the very beginning that he didn’t want to write a book that was personal or scandalous, Ovitz was having none of it. Maybe when Ovitz dies, someone will spill the beans…or release the galley edition of Stephen’s book.
