Long Hollywood's most elusive man, the all-powerful Michael Ovitz is finally the subject of a full-fledged biography
THE RICH ARE NOT LIKE you or me, the powerbrokers who run Hollywood are a breed apart from them, and, as Robert Slater's biography of agent Michael Ovitz demonstrates, none of them has seen his like since the early moguls invented the place.
Ovitz created Creative Artists Agency in 1975, at the age of 28, after breaking away from William Morris. There, having started out in the mail room after a characteristically busy career at UCLA, this product of a modest Jewish household in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino had found himself elevated to president's assistant within three months, and was a full-fledged agent four months later. When he left, it was with four associates equally stifled by the agency's conservatism, secretiveness and lack of collaborative spirit.
Ovitz decided there was a better, possibly more congenial and certainly more collaborative way to do business. At CAA, agents did not manage personal fiefdoms. As Slater describes it, they worked together, tirelessly and zealously, to benefit the agency and its clientele. And they received generous compensation, not for any personal coups or achievements, but for their synergistic contribution to the group effort.
Ovitz demanded standards of behavior quite unlike anything previously encountered in the traditionally disreputable field of Hollywood agentry. Showing clients the money - and Ovitz proved to be a master at showing his clients more money than they had ever dreamed of earning - was only one part of an agent's responsibilities.
At CAA, agents were expected to return all calls from clients before the end of the work day, which often lasted 14 hours. They were required to deliver, in a timely fashion, on all promises to their clients. And even the lowest-paid messenger was expected to clothe himself in Armani finery -Ovitz's way of demonstrating that Hollywood agents needn't come across as greasy-lapeled sleaze buckets in either behavior or appearance.
Sensing that the studios had become overly passive in structuring deals and projects, he pioneered the package-deal approach to filmmaking. This entailed marketing well-hinged "vehicles" replete with stars, director and writer, to particular studios. Ovitz vehicles, many of which seemed completely improbable when pitched, included the movies "Rain Man," "Tootsie," "Dances with Wolves" and "Jurassic Park."
Almost inevitably, these projects generated both money and acclaim. But these were not sufficient to keep him engaged. What Ovitz aspired to - and what his aggressive early dealings rendered increasingly elusive - was an outlet for a unique kind of burning creativity that he hoped could generate recognition, respect and acceptance. These things were quite beyond the reach of an agent. But they were not, he imagined, beyond the reach of a mogul.
As part of the transition from deal-maker to movie-maker, Ovitz positioned himself as midwife to some of the more momentous Hollywood sales and mergers of the 1980s. Ovitz brokered the sale of MCA, as well as Sony's purchase of Columbia Pictures. These activities brought in vast commissions, and led to a number of astonishing job offers as head of various mega-companies. Ovitz turned these down. What he wanted - and what he thought his best friend of 25 years, Michael Eisner, was offering - was the helm of Disney.
As anyone who has read a newspaper in almost any language in the last year now knows, Ovitz didn't get his wish. Ovitz told Slater that Eisner had hoodwinked him into believing that he would step down as chairman of the company after two or three years, and that when Ovitz had learned the business, he would take it over. Instead, Eisner retained control over all Disney activities, leaving Ovitz to flounder with neither a role nor authority. (After little more than a year as Disney's president, he left, with a $ 128-million severance package, and we're told, is still weighing his options.)
All this, from most accounts, is true. But what Slater doesn't document with quite the same celerity are Ovitz's uncharacteristic missteps and poor judgment calls at Disney, things that garnered even more animus than his years of holding up the studios for more and more money. Ovitz showed up at Disney behaving like the proverbial 600-pound gorilla. The people who had come up through the ranks, and who could point to a healthy bottom line as a result of their efforts, deeply resented him. They certainly lost no opportunity to discredit or undermine his efforts to establish a niche for himself.
THIS POINTS BOTH TO THE book's greatest failing and, alternately, its greatest achievement. Ovitz saw himself as a businessman, not a public figure. He did not understand the public's burgeoning interest in Hollywood's behind-the-scenes machinations, and believed that any exposure, even if flattering, could only hurt him. Ovitz greeted the prospect of media coverage of any kind with the aplomb of an Inquisition victim slated to have his thumbnails removed. And because he was perceived as the most powerful figure in Hollywood, no one - at least not before his Disney misadventure - would discuss him either on or off the record.
But Ovitz also came to understand that his refusal to cooperate with the media on any level ultimately hurt him just as much as, if not more than, a surfeit of exposure. And there was something else, mostly implied in Slater's account of Ovitz's response to a profile in the Los Angeles Times. Hollywood players will always attack any writer or piece of writing they don't like, regardless of veracity. But when Ovitz saw himself reflected in an article he could not immediately discredit, he announced that he would have to take a closer, harder look at what he had become.
In this, as in so many other things, Ovitz broke the mold. And so, after an inauspicious start, Slater found himself, quite beyond his own best expectations, with almost unimaginable on-the-record access to Ovitz. Ovitz also provided Slater with access to many of his clients, friends and associates.
Alas, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him say bad things about you. Despite being pegged as a "warts-and-all" account, and featuring a quote on the back cover from Paul Newman attesting that Ovitz is "a cross between a barracuda and Mother Teresa," "Ovitz" often reads as if it's had a full facial.
There's good stuff in it. You leave it with a sense of what sets people like Ovitz apart from the Great Unwashed. There's also an interesting tidbit about client Michael Crichton's distress when he learned that Ovitz had used Steven Spielberg's desire to buy "Jurassic Park" as bait to pressure the filmmaker to join CAA. On the other hand, Slater gives us very little about Ovitz's Jewishness. We learn that he attended Hebrew school at Valley Beth Shalom, that he's remained married to the same woman for 28 years, and that she's Jewish, and also that their son has had a proper bar mitzvah, but that's about it. And if you were expecting a book with the snide revelations and cattiness of Julia Phillip's Hollywood bridge-burner "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again," hold onto your receipt.