Who Is Michael Ovitz

I taught our agents to reach for the club every day, but to never—or almost never—pick it up. Power is only power until you exert it. It’s all perception.

(During Good Morning, Vietnam I sent roses to Barry’s wife in his name—“I miss you!”—so she wouldn’t feel neglected.)

What should have been the greatest night of my life had just become one of the worst.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first give a gift.

Agents used to be like firemen: they ran from one crisis to the next, reacting to offers and ultimatums, never knowing what tomorrow would bring. At CAA, we prided ourselves on making tomorrows.

“What’ll play against this? And that?” The Tonight Show had always seemed unassailable because nobody could match Johnny.

I always tried to plot out, at the beginning of any complex negotiations, the desired end point. After we discussed the problem from every angle, it became clear that CBS was our desired end point.

Still, I told him to keep an open mind. It was a vital part of my self-presentation not to reflexively pronounce as most agents did, but to address questions or difficulties by taking a beat, then saying, “I’m not sure about that,” or “Let me look into it.” I wanted it clear that I didn’t just make shit up.

It also won on the crucial perception question. Jay Leno was pulling a 4.9 rating at 11:30, while CBS was languishing at 2.7. A 3.8 on CBS would make Dave a hero; the same number on NBC would be disastrous. For someone with Dave’s strong fear of failure, that was a weighty detail. Flipping the frame to emphasize the positive and to spark Dave’s competitive nature, I said, “If you go to CBS, you’ll have the chance to beat NBC’s pants off.” Peter backed us. But Dave was still agonizingly unsure.

That formulation—you’re totally in or totally out—became my mantra. It helped me enormously later. And it hurt me in equal measure, because it didn’t allow for shades of gray. Most of life turns out to be in shades of gray.

I postmortemed everything, and never made the same mistake twice.

Our goal—which seemed amazingly distant—was to flip the power equation by amassing so much talent the buyers couldn’t go around us.

did it out of concern, but I also wanted them to know I was keeping a watchful eye.

So I aimed for us to seem formidable. Regrettably, we overshot the mark and became fearsome. —

I happen to hate clams. But if Paul Newman loved clams, then I loved clams.

I was now able to put executives in place at the studios and then sell our projects to them, controlling both supply and demand.

my rule was that important gifts shouldn’t be disposable: no champagne, no muffin baskets. Instead, rare first editions from Heritage books, ancient Greek coins, paintings and prints, even the occasional car—sturdy, thoughtful presents that would last.

But I worked at being around for my kids, if not always fully present, as much as a workaholic could be. And they knew I’d drop everything for them when it mattered.

If the truth was bad for us, we had to change the reality, and then deliver it as what we’d said it was all along.

That’s a move I still make, getting people’s kids to tell their influential parents what’s really going on. After you hit thirty-five, maybe even thirty, you no longer have any idea what’s coming next, assuming you ever did. I only became convinced Madonna was a true superstar when my daughter, Kim, started dressing like her.

He had fallen prey to the dangerous, entirely human delusion that if you succeed in one arena you can do anything.

At big companies, nobody wants to own a new idea before it’s clear whether or not it’s a stroke of genius.

target to really smash it.” To get where you want to go,

I was a chameleon, becoming whomever I needed to be to make everyone comfortable and close the deal. My basic character was buttoned-up, omniscient, wise, loyal, indomitable. But I could be a sports car aficionado with Paul Newman just as easily as I could discuss fiscal policy with Felix Rohatyn, the banker, or dive into the specifications of the Walkman with Akio Morita, the head of Sony. So to those I worked with I was a control freak. A shape-shifting machine. A Terminator.

Creating a zone of calm, in a chronically overexcited world, proved disarming. Whenever disputes arose with a studio, and I had to deal with an exec sputtering with outrage, I’d go even calmer and say, “I’m confused about something.” Or, slightly more aggressively: “Could you educate me?” They’re expecting you to ream them, and you’ve put them at ease by being neutral and mildly curious. Also, you’ve gotten them talking, and you’re learning. It preserves your options.

Watching how David worked taught me the efficacy of elegance and understatement, how to sell by not selling. When MoMA was launching a capital campaign, David took Judy and me to dinner, and during the three-and-a-half-hour meal never once mentioned a donation. He just talked about how great I was, how great Judy was, and how magnificent the museum was going to be. Somehow, by the end of the meal, we knew we had to give at least the minimum: $5 million.

Andreessen Horowitz aims to forge long-term relationships that might eventually prove helpful at a future start-up, or as part of future deal flow.

Nothing in Hollywood is anything until it’s something, and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief. If you keep insisting that a shifting set of inchoate possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one. Sometimes.

“Don’t ever think that what is, is—because it isn’t. Never count on anybody or anything.”

Families always want you to stay the person they think you were.

Every actor, writer, or director believes he or she is responsible for his or her own success. All I did was sell that belief back to them.

But off to the side I saw Gene Hackman and Alan Parker, the star and director of Mississippi Burning, both clients, and both losers that night. They were visibly seething. I had signed them, and though other agents represented them day to day, I felt a sense of responsibility for their successes and failures, just as I did for all our clients. I felt particularly sorry for Gene, Dustin’s old roommate, who had been superb in a tricky role as a conflicted FBI agent. I also felt like a father caught favoring one child over another. I was adept at palliating conflict—or at least I thought I was—so I walked over and congratulated them. They turned away, snubbing me dead. They were convinced that I’d somehow fixed it so Rain Man won.

I was everyone’s chief psychiatrist, legal adviser, financial adviser, fixer, cultural translator, and shoulder to cry on. With so many clients’ very lives seemingly our responsibility, I obsessed about what might go wrong for them—and for the agency.

I always wanted credit for everything I accomplished, the small and large miracles I achieved, and I was upset when I didn’t get it—but I was mortified on the rare occasions when I did. So, for the most part, I gave, and people took. Every day I felt like each of my clients had installed a spigot in my gut and turned it on full blast. With 1,350 spigots in my gut, I often felt drained by noon. It’s a thankless business, but you can’t say that. You’re getting paid, and that’s your thank-you.

Because it’s human nature to resist being sold, I avoided cold-calling prospective clients. Better for them to come to me; better to be wooed than to pitch.

I’d chosen those pieces to compel attention and announce our values. When I gave visitors a tour, I’d stop by the prints and talk with actors about composition and mood, with directors about the power of the images, and with execs about being well rounded and having a life outside the business. The art works were secretly my favorite feature of the building because they always made me pause, made me feel something, made me remember the person I kept hoping to become—a man very different from the personage Dave and Peter had come to see.

My pitch ran the risk of sounding fulsome: another salesman, full of blarney. But it’s only blarney if you can’t make it happen. If you can, then it’s the truth—and the truth is the supreme sales tool. When I accurately foretold future events, my client: (a) felt good about getting the outcome I had predicted; (b) thought I was a genius for predicting it; and (c) spread the story, which helped us sign the next client.

I always tried to instill the negative in advance, inoculating my clients against the worst things our competitors and buyers would say about us. It was like vaccinating them against the flu. With eleven companies eager to land Dave, the odds were high that at least some of them would try to stick a wedge between him and his advisers.

Sometimes, representing a client’s best interests means not getting him what he thinks he wants. The judgment part of the job requires knowing when to redirect a client’s desires.

I was a great guide because I believed in the product.

Standing up to Al Dorskind taught me two things about myself. One, for reasons I cannot explain, I was fearless in confrontations. Two, I liked the entertainment business.

It would have been easy to tell Chad to take his $90,000 and run. No one would have slammed us for putting him in a bad TV movie. But we killed the offer without a second thought—and that moment established our business bona fides. We were not going to be flesh peddlers. We would put our clients’ long-term interests first.

Finally Rowland’s wife, Diane, took it and gave it to Rowland. We were all horrified—I think that was the beginning of the end of their marriage. Rowland slipped the check to Mike under the table, but he didn’t have a credit card, either. I was the only one who did, so I picked it up: $2,000 that we didn’t have. Joe and Renée did sign with us, without ever having any idea how close they came to putting us out of business. Broke as we were, we had to fake it till we could make it.

“We’re going to represent all of them,” I said. I suddenly knew we were going to try to get as near to the whole market as it was possible to get, to crush all comers. Our plan had been to wait five years before branching out to movies, but I was never good at waiting.

But I never asked him to sign a letter of engagement. I thought written agreements were not just overrated—because clients could void them if they went ninety days without work—but downright counterproductive. With no papers to renew, our clients had no anniversary to jog them into thinking about leaving us.

CAA had four commandments: (1) Never lie to your clients or colleagues. (2) Return every call by end of day (or at least have your assistant buy you a day’s grace). (3) Follow up and don’t leave people guessing. Every desk phone at CAA bore the message COMMUNICATE. After our Fred Specktor heard me use that word in every speech I gave, he stuck the plaques on Ron’s phone and mine—and when we admired them, he stuck them on everyone’s phone. It was our version of IBM’s famous imperative to THINK. The last commandment, and the hardest one to follow, was (4) Never bad-mouth the competition.

We built our company around positive thinking. We had no hierarchy, no titles, no reporting lines, no nameplates. We killed ourselves to take everyone’s point of view in meetings, to make everyone feel empowered.

We worked insanely hard, but we fostered the illusion of working impossibly hard. I believed momentum was everything—once a company relaxed, it was done for.

And I wrote memos to everyone about everything: the advantages of Pan Am over Continental for flights to New York; the imperative need to look for “any post–1900 female biographical characters that have not been covered in the media” for our client Sally Field to play; specifications for the cake for Marty Scorsese’s fiftieth birthday party

I wanted worldliness to be one of a CAA agent’s defining qualities—Be able to talk knowledgeably about what your clients love. This will encompass pretty much everything.

The weakest link broke the chain; being human and fallible broke the chain. It was a tough business—Freddie Fields and the producer Ray Stark were tough sons of bitches, and you had to be just as tough, or tougher, to earn their respect.

The more deeply I understood painters and sculptors, the better I related to film artists. Art deepened my feel for writers, in particular. When one of them pitched me an idea, I had a stronger visual sense of its possibilities than before. I could see how it might work on the screen (or not work). I had a frame of reference for production design, even lighting and costumes. I could be a more useful part of the conversation.

We gave them to nonclients, too, working the theory that a nonclient is just a future client who hasn’t realized it yet.

Every year I wrote up a one-year, three-year, and five-year plan for us. At year’s end I’d destroy the old ones—I feared another agency getting wind of our plans—and write new ones. The one-year and three-year plans proved to be the most useful: often we accomplished the three-year plan in two. But Ron and Bill had no strategic instincts for that kind of thing. Ron was a purist who just wanted to represent more and better clients, and Bill didn’t want the extra work of new challenges, though he always did the work, and superbly, once I’d cajoled him into it.

Other than to publicize their films, we advised our clients to keep their heads low and their mouths shut. In those days, Tom Cruise’s profile as a Scientologist was minimal because we’d told him, “Keep your religion and your work separate, just like anybody else.”

I finally focused on aikido, a blend of dance, chess, and combat in which you redirect your opponents’ force against them. It felt a lot like being an agent, where you had to redirect a client’s passion for doing something ruinous in a new and more productive direction.

Morita was an ebullient guy who spoke candidly about the VCR wars, a humbling defeat for his company. Sony’s Betamax, the superior machine, had lost to the VHS consortium led by Matsushita. “I don’t want to get beat again,” Morita told me. “If I had owned a movie studio, Betamax would not have finished second.” He was a believer in synergy, or what he called “total entertainment,” a mesh of hardware and content.

In any multiplayer contest, you want to be the outlier. I told Gille, “Everyone you’ve met with is in the business of selling assets. But I’m in the business of building assets, and I think you are, too.”

That’s the tragedy that can befall the company man: we come to believe we are the company.

find that my “value add,” as they say, is advising on how to monetize a technology, how to market it, and how to avoid some of the pitfalls I fell into at CAA. I don’t always know the right move—who does?—but I can often help steer founders away from mistakes of inexperience: from making short-sighted hires, or needlessly alienating a rival who might become a collaborator, or not planning for the long term. Founders are much more interested in my mistakes (which can often be generalized to their situation) than in my successes (which were often particular to the agency business).

I’d made it my life’s work to understand people, to grasp what made them tick. I’d been certain that I was too wary to misplace my trust and too smart to be duped.

I always felt one step inferior to the people around me, and one step superior. I wasn’t as creative or cultured as they were, but I was a lot smarter and more hardworking than most of them. Insecurity and ambition make a powerful cocktail.

Then I took out a car loan and bought five Jaguars for $15,000 a pop (but only $1,500 each down). We ordered CAA license plates, followed by a hyphen and the partner’s initials. The cars were a rank extravagance for a company that would file zeroes on its tax returns its first three years. But in a city of fantasy, a big show was essential.

I viewed our people as my children, and for the first ten years I’d call every employee who didn’t show up at work to make sure they were okay and to see if they needed anything,

“It’s smart of you guys to give so much work and support to the young guys—it makes you look that much more important.” He was right: it was self-serving for the agency’s leaders, but also agency serving. Those impulses felt synonymous, at least at that point.

CAA was the only one to forgo a fee letter. In all our dealings in Japan we never had a written contract. Our attitude was, We know you will do the honorable thing. For an old-fashioned businessman like Hirata, that gesture was definitive. Despite his limited English and my nonexistent Japanese, we were going to trust each other.

Haber and I went to the gym. The five of us met for breakfast and a final run-through before changing into our freshly pressed suits. We looked and felt unbeatable. We arrived fifteen minutes early. Up front were two tables for the combatants and a third for the Coke executives, with several rows of seats in back. Haber and I sat at CAA’s table with Shelly and Len standing to our right. Roberto, Don, Peter, and Doug Ivester took their stations. Eleven a.m. came and went with no sign of McCann. Ten minutes later, two dozen disheveled ad people filed in. Next to our lean, mean team, they were corporate bloat personified: a mistake. After flying commercial out of JFK at 7:00 that morning, they were hungry, tired, wrinkled, and generally out of sorts. Not springing for a night’s lodging in Atlanta: another mistake.

No individual “owns” an account at Andreessen Horowitz; investments are chosen by joint approval of the general partners, with the entire staff having a say. Then the team provides in-house experts to assist its start-ups with recruitment, budgeting, operations, sales, publicity, IPO rollouts—whatever an entrepreneur might need. While other venture firms seek out executive talent for their clients, Andreessen Horowitz goes further. It develops ties with the Valley’s best software engineers, designers, and product managers, helping them with introductions and career counseling. At times it connects these engineers and managers to one of its portfolio companies, but often there’s no direct payoff.

If a potential client was reluctant, I’d say, “You should take all the time you need. No pressure.” And by “no pressure,” I meant, “No pressure until the next time I’m in touch, which may be in an hour.” I tried to avoid coming across as a nudge, while making myself ubiquitous and inexorable.

That sort of when-the-chips-are-down reliability, that total focus on others when it’s life or death, reassures me that I can be a decent person. It reflects the best part of me to myself.

Mystique is ten times better than publicity; it’s much better to be thought of as the great and powerful Oz than to be revealed as merely another schemer behind a curtain.