Who Is Michael Ovitz

Negotiation Power

…our agents carried a heavy club: the implied threat of terrible consequences if the buyer didn’t do what we wanted—a boycott by our talent; all the best films going elsewhere; total humiliation. 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. I was that club. The most persuasive point our agents could make to a stubborn exec was “I don’t have the authority to close the deal at that number, so you’ll have to talk to Michael.” That was the last thing the exec wanted, because he or she knew I’d ask for even more. Better to close at an unpalatable number now than to be upsold into stratospheric realms once I got on the phone.

When conducting business, I was so soft-spoken I made people inch their chairs closer. I rarely lost my temper (which was an enormous strain because I’m a perfectionist, and everything—everything—bothered me if it wasn’t just so). I drank barely at all, I didn’t use drugs, I didn’t even dance.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred people, their act is who they are. But anomalies like me manufacture their characters from bits and pieces of those they’re with. I was a chameleon, becoming whomever I needed to be to make everyone comfortable and close the deal.

When a painter paints, other painters may be jealous of his success, but they don’t believe he’s personally screwing them over with every brushstroke. It’s not a zero-sum game: there’s room for everyone to do his best. When an agent agents, though, the list of the personally embittered lengthens with the size of the deal. If we poached a new client, his old agency hated us. If one of our movies went to Universal, six other studios hated us. CAA’s goal was to have all the clients, and therefore all the conflicts; we used to say “No conflict, no interest.” It was a heroic goal, but it cost us. And it cost me.

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.

Ron was the soul of CAA, to hear everyone tell it, and I was the ass-soul. He wore sweaters and jeans and Cole Haan loafers; I was buttoned up in a blue suit. He was perpetually tan and relaxed and charming; I was perpetually pale and tense and vigilant. He was the velvet glove; I was the iron fist. But we were like Siamese twins, with one brain and one heart.

“Make your clients think they’re your friends—but remember that they’re not.” Yet it would be my clients who’d stay loyal, for the most part, and my friends who’d betray me.

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. So I’d like to think that these betrayals were random, and flagrantly unwarranted, and that I was the victim of some perverse instinct that destroys all human intimacy. I’d like to think that the problem was just that the tools and stratagems I’d used to get to the top inevitably created resentment, even among those who shared my success. That everyone hates a winner.

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

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.

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.

I’d wash my hands thirty times a day, and insist that my assistants not touch my food—which seems bizarre, I know, but I was in a people business, meeting dozens every day, and I was determined not to get sick. (And I never did, until one of my rare vacations, when I always collapsed.)

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.

Letterman Deal

We wanted Dave to realize that he was in demand. But his contract prevented him from talking to his would-be suitors, and in our discussions with NBC the network was adamant about holding him to it.

It occurred to me that Dave wouldn’t be in breach if we confined our talks to what might happen after he became a free agent. You couldn’t kill a guy for planning his future.

I always tried to plot out, at the beginning of any complex negotiations, the desired end point.

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.

“I can’t believe you did this to me!” Michael said, launching into his customary guilt game: Disney was the greatest company in history. Therefore this was a strategic mistake, an immoral decision, downright un-American. He spent more time trying to make you feel bad so you’d give him the next deal than he did trying to win the deal in the first place.

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.

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.

His self-respect was even more important to him than his childhood dream. Dave didn’t want to hear this, but he needed to.

A seasoned agent like Lee could read his body language. Agoglia was following Bob Wright’s orders against his own inclinations, and he didn’t want to close. Agoglia followed up not by faxing the deal points to us, as arranged, but by reading them over the phone.

Before we could inform NBC, Agoglia pulled the network’s proposal. We guessed that Carson had told someone he had spoken with Dave, and the grapevine did the rest. To cover its ass with Leno, NBC then held a press conference to deny any offer had been made. Uh-huh.

Family Pressure

My mother’s mother, Sarah, was a blunt-spoken widow who lived with us for years. She played on my mother’s resentments, telling her, “You deserve more.”

She paid attention to me and seemed to think I was special—she was my second mother—and I felt horribly conflicted when she’d tell me, “You can be better than your father.”

Indicating Sam, Sarah would whisper to my father, “Why can’t you be like that? Why don’t you own a hotel?”

Sarah kept dosing me with this poison until I was fourteen, when my father finally kicked her out of the house. By then her incantations—a dark version of the immigrant’s creed that in America you can be anything you want—had cast their spell. Instead of trying to emulate my father, a kind and loving man, I would be what Sarah expected of me. I would succeed at all costs. She was depressed, of course, sunk in her own miseries, so I’d save her by taking extraordinary measures to reward her faith in me.

I read everything I could, but my favorites were biographies of successful men: Andrew Carnegie, Winston Churchill, Nathaniel Rothschild.

I was also impressed by an Errol Flynn western where he drew a line in the dirt during a mutiny and said, “You’re either with me or against me.” 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’m sure I came across as a brown-nosing kid in a hurry. But I was an effective brown-nosing kid in a hurry! I ran for tenth-grade president and won. The following year I ran for student-body vice president.

Early Work Ethic

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.

The other guides worked from nine to six, but I came in at seven each morning and stayed until nine at night.

I had carte blanche at the busiest film and television studio in the world—and I was getting paid for it!

What I learned at Universal, the way glorious films blossom out of an intricate mesh of mundane practicalities, enthralls me still. I went in even on Sundays, when I could wander the empty soundstages to my heart’s content.

I once disturbed some props on a TV set marked as a “hot set”—meaning one in the midst of shooting—and the director chewed me out the next day. I said, “You’re one hundred percent right—I’m new. I’m sorry, and it won’t happen again!” I postmortemed everything, and never made the same mistake twice.

I was a great guide because I believed in the product. By eighteen, I’d absorbed a basic rule for success: love what you do. (Too many people fight their job, a battle they cannot win.)

He looked at me, unsmiling, and said, “How’s it going with the tour; are you enjoying it?” “I’m enjoying every second of it!” I said. That was our last conversation for twenty years, until we went at it hammer and tongs over Robert Zemeckis’s directing deal. I never reminded Lew that he’d given me my start in show business, though maybe I should have, just to piss him off.

By fall I was working sixty-hour weeks while going to school full time. If I had a midday class, I’d hop into my ’65 Mustang for the ten-minute ride to campus and dash back an hour later. I parked in a corner of Fox’s parking lot and changed out of my jeans and white J. C. Penney T-shirt, the college uniform of the day, and back into business attire. My bosses were never the wiser.

“Michael,” he said, “you stole Gray Line from us. It’s inappropriate, and I’m not sure it’s legal. You need to stop.” I should have been cowed. Al—bald, tanned, fit, and rough around the edges—was Lew Wasserman’s hatchet man. Instead, I felt a strange rush. “The last time I checked, this is America, and competition’s a good thing,” I said. “But I want to thank you for calling, and I’ll certainly refer this to our legal department.”

WMA Mailroom

One, for reasons I cannot explain, I was fearless in confrontations. Two, I liked the entertainment business.

I went to get a coffee at the student center and spotted a gorgeous blonde reading a book. There were a dozen tables open around her, but I walked up and said, “Hi, is that seat taken?” “No,” she said, eyeing me like I was deranged. An hour later, without my ever having told her my last name—I was just “Michael” to her for some time—she agreed to our first date: pizza and a Hollywood jazz club called Shelly’s Manne-Hole.

The way you got ahead at WMA was nepotism: everybody was somebody’s nephew. It was an old, soft, corrupt place.

I told the head of personnel, “I have a proposition for you. I think I can learn all I need to know to become an agent in 120 days. If I can’t, I’ll give back everything you paid me.” I was agenting him, and he knew it. He broke out laughing. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” he said. “But I’m going to hire you. You start Monday.” My salary would be $55 a week. I said, “I’d like to start tomorrow.” I showed up at 7:00, two hours early, to learn my way around the building.

There were twenty mailroom trainees, which meant I had nineteen rivals for advancement. I set out to finish my route in half the allotted time.

I was embarrassed by the low pay, embarrassed that I could take Judy out only to Mexican restaurants, which were the cheapest.

Judy gave me the line I’d use later when I recruited people to an entry-level job at CAA: You’re investing in your life.

I viewed those files as an encyclopedia of entertainment, albeit a helter-skelter one, so I helped the woman who ran the file room, Mary, with her mimeographing. And I brought her little gifts—a box of candy, a scarf. One day I said, “You know, I’d love to read some of the files.” She told me to make myself at home. Within a week she was letting me stay on after she left. Then she gave me a key. While other trainees waited to be told what to do and read and learn, I entered Mary’s domain each morning at 7:00 and every evening after work. For ten weeks I made my way from A to Z, through the client files and the network and studio deals.

Though my promotion came in record time, I’d missed my own deadline by three months. I felt like I had to catch up before the world got away from me.

I’d gotten drunk once, at a frat party, and that was enough. I didn’t like the feeling of losing control.

Breaking Away

One day I ran into Michael Eisner on the set of one of our game show pilots. He headed up daytime at ABC. I asked him how he liked the show, and he noncommittally said, “Well, my wife liked it.” So I sent roses to Jane Eisner, with a card. Michael called me and said, “Do not agent my wife!” He was kind of angry about it—but that sort of stunt got my name out there…

Believe it or not, in those days I was affable and considerate, with never a bad word about anyone. But you need to pick a persona you can inhabit without strain, and I knew I’d do better as the opposite of Ron—as the all-business tough guy who’d protect you. I could see that that’s what the biggest stars and directors wanted. So my persona became the “I’ll make your dreams come true” guy, mixed with the “I’ll fix your problems” guy. Ron was the good cop and I was the bad.

Underneath the roles, though, Ron and I were always more alike than even our colleagues realized. Ron’s easygoing demeanor hid a personality as calculating and determined and tightly wound as mine was.

Ron spoke up, suddenly, to suggest that we go after some of CMA’s biggest clients, some actual stars, to even the score. Sam Weisbord’s eye started to twitch like crazy and he lost his mind, shouting, “You don’t know what you’re talking about! She’s a star!”

I’d played by the rules at William Morris, and so far it had worked. But I began to ask, What if? What if guys like Ron and me had more of a say? And then: What if we could run a company of our own?

I had brought in close to $2 million in commissions on a weekly salary of $400, William Morris had given me a $7,500 bonus. In 1974, the agency’s leaders recognized my seven pilots by upping my bonus to $15,000, which they thought handsome, given that all of us “could do better.” Meanwhile, every day we walked past the office of Joe Rifkin, a Lastfogel crony who read the newspaper for hours with his feet up. There were three or four guys like that around, big wheels from way back when who were just diluting our bonus checks. The only way they’d leave was feet first. It drove Ron nuts.

“They put my name in the computer and it came up wanting.” The man who made confident agents quake, who taught me the meaning of strength—that tough, tough man broke down in front of us. That lit the fuse. At dinner one night, Ron said, “Why don’t we go into business for ourselves? We’ll make more money, and they’ll never be able to do to us what they did to Phil.”

Judy and I were the fair-haired couple at the company. I had more to gain by staying than Ron, and more to lose by leaving. Seeing me hesitate, Ron said, “You have no gamble in you. Sometimes you have to step up and roll the dice.”

CAA Startup

If we busted in three years, I could land a new job and start over. But I wasn’t about to gamble on a two-man boutique. If we left William Morris, I wanted to build a giant agency and beat them at their own game.

It seemed to me that we should take advantage of the fact that we were young and aggressive—Ron, Bill, and I were all under thirty—to try out new ideas that could reshape the ways the town did business.

It was standard procedure in the agency business, when a client called with unpleasant news or a dangerous rumor—“I hear I’m getting fired off the film”—to say “Don’t worry, I know all about it and it’s fine,” even if this was the first you’d heard of it. We would pioneer the calm, no-bullshit approach, saying instead, “Let me look into it and I’ll get right back to you.” We’d be better agents because we wouldn’t agent you. The other thing that would differentiate us—and it was a big one—was that we would create work for our clients, not just field offers. Everyone agreed. Suddenly, the revolt felt real.

You couldn’t call Sam Weisbord personable, but he’d given me my first break and treated me with respect. Had he told me that he was hurt and that he wanted me to stay, there’s a very good chance I’d have backed down and asked Ron to do the same. I felt no obligation to Bill and Mike and Rowland. If Sam had played it smart, he might have broken up the whole thing before it started. Instead, he fixed me with an arrogant stare and said, “You’ve really screwed yourself this time.” His bad eye was twitching up a storm. I said, “Look, it is what it is.” I went to my office, packed up my Rolodex, and left the building for the last time.

Two weeks later we scraped together $100,000 by putting up our homes as collateral.

CAA was a prototypical start-up. We brought in folding chairs and card tables for desks, and our wives each came in one day a week to answer the phones. We had one paid assistant—a bookkeeper—and two cars among the five of us.

Alarmed by our package-fee discount, William Morris had deputized Fields to harass us into relinquishing our name and starting over, a mortal blow to an infant company.

Ron and I had just run into a young WMA agent at a party. “You know what the betting is back at the office?” he said. “That you’ll be out of business in six months and working as casting agents.”

I told my partners my plan, and, very anxiously, they finally agreed. They thought it was a lousy idea—but no one had a better one.

Fifteen minutes before the deadline a messenger arrived with a new letter from Kaplan. In the space of an afternoon he’d moved from cease and desist to cease-fire.

That day forged our siege mentality. To defend our tiny position, we unleashed hell on anyone who crossed us. For starters, we refused to take on any client who used Kaplan, Livingston, and within five years the firm was defunct.

Early Clients

…a few years later, when Jack Weston told a friend of Ron’s that he wanted to come to CAA, Ron replied, “Tell him he can go fuck himself. Not if he was the last client on earth.” One of the strongest bonds Ron and I shared was a belief that any betrayal must be avenged.

When you’re twenty-eight years old and you’ve quit your job and there’s no going back, and then the industry leader tries to smother your baby in its cradle, you steel up pretty fast. Kaplan’s letter taught us to play hardball, and hardball we would play for the next twenty years.

Our top client was Chad Everett, who played Dr. Joe Gannon in CBS’s long-running Medical Center. When a TV movie script came in with a $100,000 offer for Chad, it was a godsend. The $10,000 commission would float us for another month.

…the movie was crap. Chad was Bill Haber’s contact and Bill led off on speakerphone to warn against the project, but we all chimed in, unanimously recommending a pass. 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.

Buyers liked new agencies: the more sellers undercutting one another, the more leverage for them. In those days buyers ran roughshod. If one agent balked at a studio’s terms, there was always another, more desperate agency that represented a client who’d serve equally well. Our goal—which seemed amazingly distant—was to flip the power equation by amassing so much talent the buyers couldn’t go around us.

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 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.

Mike said, “You can’t look at her like she’s a corporation—she’s an actress.” I said, “I don’t agree. We have to differentiate ourselves from the other agencies, and this is a great way to do it.”

Shōgun’s first night, a three-hour installment in September 1980, told us we had a hit. Viewers loved the romance, the loyalties, and the betrayals—the Asian soap opera of it all—and they made it one of the highest-rated programs in NBC’s history. (It remains the second-most-watched miniseries, after Roots.)

James had persuaded Paramount to allow him to deliver our $1 million package commission. It was by far the biggest payday we’d ever had—nearly $3 million in today’s money. Shōgun had languished at William Morris for three years. CAA got it made. Never mind that the deal almost fell apart twenty times; deals always almost fall apart twenty times. That was the first time we took a client’s far-fetched dream and made it come true.

Hollywood was an archipelago of talent, thousands of separate islands—but directors and stars were the keystone islands. We needed to build bridges and connect the islands to make packages, which would turn us into a kind of studio.

Talent Packaging

I had started a private project (one that took me ten years) of watching every film that had won one of the five big-category Oscars.

But to get to the directors, there was a further step: we needed writers and their material. Directors wanted great material a lot more than they wanted to chat with me about the opening crane shot in Touch of Evil.

We wooed Steve Gordon, a TV writer with a screenplay about a millionaire alcoholic with a romantic dilemma. Steve’s agents at ICM couldn’t or wouldn’t sell it. I sent the script to United Artists, which ordered the movie with Steve attached to direct. After Arthur became a surprise hit, Steve signed with us. We’d poach by assumption: behave as if we were the client’s agent already, make their dream happen, and then they’d sign.

I was close to Steve, and his death stunned me. But I’m now astonished when I realize how quickly I put it behind me and got back to work building CAA. It took half a day. Don’t look back; someone was definitely going to be gaining on us.

This became the pattern for how I’d sign a star: start by politely criticizing his choices; tell him he needed to see and choose better material and better directors; promise him both. I made no promises that he’d work with specific talent, because the easiest way to lose a client is to make a promise you can’t fulfill; the client always remembers.

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.

I appealed to Micheline. At first she took Sean’s side. But when I explained why the job would position Sean for the next decade, she gently brought her husband around. I called Sean again and said, “Sean, you have to play this role. And with no hairpiece. It’s time.” You have to risk alienating your clients. When you tell someone the truth, all they can do is get upset—they can’t call you an idiot. Sean finally gave in.

I could tell I was scoring points with Lisa—she’d grown up near me in the Valley, and I felt instantly comfortable with her—but Dustin was harder to read. On impulse, I said, “Try us out and I won’t charge you anything until you think I’ve earned it.” It was the only time I ever offered to take less than 10 percent, much less work for free. If word of the arrangement got out, the haggling with other clients would never end. But we desperately needed a top-ten film star like Dustin Hoffman. I deluged him with material, and signed him six months later.

Leadership Tensions

Sydney handled Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand so lightly that they didn’t even notice the bridle. The famously skittish Streisand seemed to trust him completely. As I watched them, a vision of the future came over me: I’m going to have all of these people someday, in an agency that will represent the whole food chain and flip the power from the studios to the artists. Even then I had the odd feeling that Sydney would be my master key.

In 1979, when I was thirty-three, Ted Ashley at Warner Bros. took me aside and said, “I’m going to give you some great advice.” He grinned ruefully. “And, knowing you, you’re not going to take it. But here it is: I could have worked ten percent less, and it wouldn’t have made a difference in my professional success. But I would have been a lot happier.” Ted was absolutely right on both counts—it was great advice, and I didn’t take it. I see now that I could have worked as much as 20 percent less, and it wouldn’t have cost me. If I’d worked even 10 percent less, across thirty years, that’s three whole extra years of life I’d have enjoyed.

Rowland wasn’t bringing in any income, and Mike, who’d always hoped that CAA would be a boutique agency, was clearly sidling toward the exit. I said that if I didn’t get more than the 16.67 percent that each of the six partners owned, I’d have to consider other options.

I replaced Rowland as the firm’s president, and got a larger allocation of shares. In 1982, Mike would retire and we’d buy out his shares for $750,000. Professionally, mission accomplished. Emotionally, though, I had just hit the self-destruct button—only it would take sixteen years to go off. Bill Haber never forgave me; he would later say, “Agreeing to give to Michael some of my own shares is the only professional regret I have in my life.” Even worse, I never suggested to Ron that his stake also be increased—I wasn’t emotionally aware enough to realize that he’d feel slighted if I moved up and he didn’t. Ron wanted Bill’s shares, and he wanted him gone. The problem was that Bill was a magnificent head of television.

…several times a year some minor issue would make him send us an overwrought letter of resignation announcing that he was going to go work with blind children or help save the bats from extinction. Bill just wanted to be heard and respected—to be courted a little—but Ron yearned to call his bluff.

Ron looked at Lee and saw Bill’s replacement, but I didn’t want to mess with our success. I wanted everything to stay the same, except that I’d get more. What I should have done for Ron was give him some of my own allocation of shares, and then figure out how to handle Bill.

Bill never had an inkling of Ron’s animus. I was amazed at how well Ron hid his true feelings from someone he saw every day.

We even had a no-fly-by-day rule: if you flew to New York, you took the red-eye so you didn’t waste a workday in the air.

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.

The lack of hierarchy was a myth, of course, a management tool. Nothing happened that Ron and Bill and I didn’t want to have happen. We were democratic dictators.

I began to talk about the philosophy of the Chinese general and military strategist Sun Tzu, whose The Art of War I’d read in college. We took his ideas on loyalty, on teamwork, and on how having complete information was the key to decision making. The book also resonated with me because it prioritized strength and toughness. Ron and Bill thought my emphasis on Sun Tzu was crazy, until they realized that it worked—that our team bought in. In truth, though, the Chinese general was always a bit of a prop. It wasn’t so much what he said that inspired CAA, as the idea that we, a five-year-old company, were adhering to a philosophy from 2,500 years earlier. It gave us instant roots.

Soon we represented so many executives that we could see the entire chessboard. The instant we sensed someone was unhappy we’d be thinking about where to move them, and whom to move into their place. We knew about openings before the executives themselves did.

Agency Power

If we filled a movie with clients, and only with clients, we could present the whole package to the studios, giving them nothing to do except say yes or no. This was a crucial shift: we began to view studios as little more than banks and distribution vehicles—they’d finance the movies and get them into the theater, but the films were essentially ours.

The buyers’ historical advantage was their stranglehold on distribution. At our apex, CAA matched this advantage with a near monopoly on keystone talent: we had forty-five of the fifty top-grossing directors.

We’ve seen each other many times in the decades since then—and never spoken about Mr. Mom. Maybe it didn’t bother her for long. But it was her very agreeableness about the whole extortionate process that stays with me. She was too nice. That meant that people had to be nice to us now; that we had the power to compel. No part of the transaction I muscled through was about helping talented people pursue or refine their vision. It was zero Creative Artists and 100 percent Agency. I had become everything I detested in the sixties when I was a bleeding-heart liberal at UCLA—the very symbol of the establishment. I had become The Man.

Early on, we’d always let the studio or network make the first offer—we didn’t want to negotiate against ourselves, starting lower than they were willing to go. But by 1988 or so, we had so much clout that we were setting the price. We weren’t negotiating anymore, we were just telling Warner Bros., say, “I have a package of A, B, and C, and it costs X—you have twenty-four hours.”

Coca-Cola, which owned Columbia, had replaced Frank Price as chairman with David Puttnam, an upper-crust Englishman. Puttnam viewed American studio executives as overspending morons, American directors as clumsy rubes, and American actors as ill-behaved adolescents. After he denounced Bill Murray on the front page of Variety as a “taker” and the poster child for Hollywood selfishness, I immediately counterattacked to defend my client…

“What can we do to fix this?” Dick asked. “Short of getting rid of David Puttnam, I can’t think of anything,” I said. “Bill is beside himself. Our response will not be direct—we have too much respect for you both to attack you in the media—but it will be consequential.” Columbia owned the Ghostbusters franchise, but no one could stop us from sitting on it. At that second board meeting I moved that we shut all projects down—seconded, carried. Only after Puttnam was fired, after just sixteen months in the job, did Ivan and company begin making plans to return to work. That’s why there was a five-year gap between the first movie and the sequel.

Unlike most film royalty, Paul understood the trap of stardom. He told me, “You know, I’ve been a movie star for a long time. And no matter how hard I try to tell myself I’m just a normal person, I keep hearing how wonderful I am. It gets to the point that you start to think you’re something you aren’t.”

I had never bought the Agenting 101 rule that representing two similar stars is a conflict of interest. Instead, I preached, “No conflict, no interest”—we wanted all the conflicts because that gave us leverage; the studios couldn’t threaten us that they’d opt for a similar piece of talent at another agency.

Personal Costs

My growing art collection made me feel I’d escaped the Valley at last. But escape is never painless. One day my dad came to our house in Brentwood and saw my first Picasso, which I’d bought for $100,000. He looked at it, looked at me, then looked away. Neither of us said anything.

My mother was grateful in a general way, but she complained that I never spent enough time with her: she was a guilt expert. She increasingly reminded me of a demanding client, the kind you can never satisfy no matter what you do. Families always want you to stay the person they think you were.

When Lew was good and hammered, I said to him, “Listen, you’ve got Julia Child doing cooking segments on Good Morning America. She’s great, but why not give Wolfgang a trial of three appearances so you can bring in some younger, hipper viewers? As you can see, he’s a natural. If he does well, he’d be a great regular contributor.” Lew said: “You write it up and I’ll sign the contract.” At that point he would have agreed to pretty much anything. “Great!” I said. I pulled out a pen, drew up my plan on a napkin, and had Lew sign it.

I asked when Wolfgang could expect to go on the show. Lew said, “What are you talking about?” He had no memory of that part of the evening. I said, “I’ll send the contract over.” I had a kid from the mailroom drive to ABC’s offices in Century City. He was immediately ushered into Lew’s office. The kid opened his sports jacket and there, safety-pinned to his shirt, was the napkin Lew had signed. “Give me that,” Lew said, reaching for it. “I’m sorry,” the kid said, closing his jacket and backing away. “Mr. Ovitz told me to let you view the contract you signed, and then return it to him.”

The day before he went on, I sent around a memo telling everyone in the agency to have their relatives call ABC’s switchboard the following morning, after Wolfgang’s appearance, to say how much they loved the new chef. Switchboard calls were the networks’ way of measuring heat in the mideighties, an early version of Twitter followers. ABC was blown away. I never pulled that trick again; it’s something you can only do once.

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. “Look, you’re going to make it with or without us,” I’d say. “But we can keep you at the top, because we see every project first, we develop for you, we represent every important studio executive—so we can match you with the perfect projects. And we take care of all your other personal needs so you can focus on your work. Going with us is just like taking out career insurance.”

The smarter clients could see what I was doing, see how it worked, but it worked nonetheless because everyone wants to be wanted.

I signed Kevin Costner, in 1989, in part by convincing him that he needed to take $3 million for directing and starring in his passion project, Dances with Wolves. He wanted to take just a million, to keep the costs down so it could get made. I told him he had to trust me, and that he’d understand why later. So he took the $3 million, and when the production ran out of money, as I knew it would—first-time directors on big projects always run out of money—he was able to draw on the extra salary to finish shooting. I’d gotten him the insurance he needed to finish his dream film.

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.

I resented it when people called these techniques agent tricks. I viewed them as tactics for achieving a preconceived strategy. My whole affect was transactional: I was soft-spoken because I wanted people to have to work hard to hear me, to have to move closer. When I did explode, which was rare, it was almost always expedient.

We pioneered the start-date gift—the $500 “survival kit” food basket that would arrive in an actor’s dressing room, on some remote set in Malta or New Zealand, the first day of shooting. We gave them to nonclients, too, working the theory that a nonclient is just a future client who hasn’t realized it yet.

Except for start-date gifts, my rule was that important gifts shouldn’t be disposable: no champagne, no muffin baskets.

Managing the Firm

All the senior people passed down their top artists as soon as younger agents could handle them, by slow-rolling the return calls. Manipulative, yes, but the pass-down process took pressure off signers like Ron and Bill, allowed younger agents to get in the game, and spurred CAA’s continuing growth. Warren Beatty once told me, “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.

Hundreds of others thought of me as their agent even if I really wasn’t. So I was working harder than ever. Agencies are built on the lie that your agent will give you his total attention—but there simply isn’t anywhere near enough time in the day for that.

Clients would often ask to be set up with other clients, but I had no interest in being the house pimp. One of the most excruciating requests came from a movie star who wanted me to set him up with a woman he’d spotted in our mailroom. I temporized, put him off, hoped he’d forget about it—but he kept hounding me. I finally said, “It would look like I was asking an employee to go out with a prized client. You can see why I can’t do that, right?” He glumly assented.

Barry was one of my closest friends, but I would have done that for any client. 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.

After being a chameleon all day at work, it took me an hour or so to figure out who the fuck I was when I got home. And all the time the phone would keep ringing, which drove Judy crazy. She would want to discuss my day, to feel closer to me, but I was exhausted by my day and didn’t want to talk about work in front of the kids; I wanted them to feel normal and safe.

In 1986, we got Rowland and Marty to sell us their equity in return for a million dollars each and lifetime contracts paying $500,000 a year. After that, I owned 55 percent of CAA, with Ron and Bill splitting the balance, 22.5 percent each.

That same year I bought a Learjet 35A with Sydney Pollack for $750,000, with just 10 percent down. It was CAA’s plane, and I used it so I could visit two widely separated sets in one day and still be back for work the next. Over the years, I kept upgrading the plane. One of Ron’s complaints was that I didn’t let him use it enough, and he was right.

Ron and I spent all our time together. We shared everything, from mundane work issues—should we fire this guy or can he learn on the job?—to the deepest secrets about our marriages and our kids. We finished each other’s sentences. And increasingly, as I played different roles with different clients, becoming the man with a thousand faces, the font of power and granter of dreams, it was comforting to know that there was one guy, in the office just below mine, who liked me for who I really was, warts and all.

We were also united in how we treated our enemies. We never forgot how William Morris had tried to put us out of business or how they had behaved toward Phil Weltman. (Indeed, we put up a plaque to Weltman in our offices, dedicating the agency to him.)

People called it a war, but it was an unrelenting conquest: Morris didn’t take from us.

So before Bernie next dropped in for a meeting, I told everyone that no one should speak to him. Ron backed me, but we both knew it was a radical step, because Bernie’s daughter worked for us as an agent, and he and I had been close. Bernie came in and started chatting, pitching a few ideas—into dead silence. It was a very short, very uncomfortable meeting. Bernie called me afterward, humiliated, and said, “That was horrible!” He was right, but nonetheless I told our agents that Lorimar shouldn’t get any CAA material while Bernie was there—and his tenure lasted less than two years.

When Judy Hofflund and David Greenblatt left us to start InterTalent, in 1988, Ron got furious at them, particularly after he came to believe that Judy, his former assistant, was the source of an unflattering story about him that had appeared in Variety. They took Ari Emanuel from us, one of our greatest trainees, as well as a few smaller clients, and Ron decided to crush them. First he fired Tom Strickland because Tom had known about the impending defection and hadn’t told us, and because he assumed Tom was going to InterTalent anyway (which he then did). Then Ron unloaded in a staff meeting—one of the few times he sounded like me—and told everyone to bad-mouth them all over town. We were breaking our own fourth commandment, but we no longer cared. Our agents began calling studio and network execs, in the guise of being friends of the court, to subtly disparage InterTalent’s lawyers, leaning on the execs to make lowball offers, saying InterTalent’s business affairs guys wouldn’t push back. Ron set up hit teams of five agents to call each of their clients, seeking to rattle, undermine, and poach. Within four years, he put InterTalent out of business.

We rose in tandem and amplified each other. I counted on Ron’s candor, and he periodically reined me in: “You’re pushing our people too hard. Ease off on the gas a bit.” He was always right. It was hard for me to let up: by 1985 I was taking home more than a million dollars a year, and additional wealth and power seemed just around the corner. The fear of poverty had receded, but I was like an athlete who wanted to keep topping himself, setting new records.

Over the years I’d split off most of my feelings and emotions, the human part of me, and let Ron display them for both of us—just as he’d off-loaded his cunning, ambitious side and let me express that for him. As a result I got the credit as the agency’s visionary, and he got to retain most of his soul and to serve as the caretaker of mine.

The first time I saw the rankings, anxiety shot through me, head to toe. 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.

Betrayal and Paranoia

There was no hint he gambled for astronomical stakes. He must be a phenomenal poker player, I thought. He has no tells. Then again, he must be a shitty poker player because he’d just lost five million dollars.

I put my concerns to rest, happy to sweep it all under the rug. And I never did tell him, “Hey, I’m worried about you. What’s going on, and what can I do to help?” For the next year and a half, Ron and I worked harder and more closely than ever. Then one morning, he closed my door, took a seat, and looked at me with a funereal expression. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but …” Another poker game, an even bigger loss: $6.5 million.

The phone call came from inside the house.

Despite my 360-degree paranoia, I hadn’t seen any of this coming, which scared the crap out of me. I prided myself on reading people and forecasting from subtle clues.

And here I hadn’t been reading Ron right for ten years. That fact was so shocking to me that I instantly tried to forget it. I couldn’t, though, and from then on I was constantly worried that Ron would take the agency down. Still, it never occurred to me to think through the logic of the way Ron introduced himself to people as my agent—to think about how much any agent keeps secret from his client. And it certainly never crossed my mind to worry that Ron would take me down.

Discipline and Self

If you want to be happy, forget yourself. Forget all of it—how you look, how you feel, how your career is going. Just drop the whole subject of you… . People dedicated to something other than themselves—helping family and friends, or a political cause, or others less fortunate than they—are the happiest people in the world.

I soon learned about the danger of a little knowledge. When I tried my beginner’s judo moves on a bully named Scott Craig, he beat the crap out of me. After I lost, I thought, I do not want to keep being terrorized by a bully who only lives a few blocks away. So I congratulated Scott on beating the crap out of me, praising his power and technique. After that, whenever he came around the corner on his American Flyer bike, I’d wave and call out. A few weeks into my charm offensive, he became my friend and then my protector. It was a great lesson in how to make your enemies your friends.

But he stopped, because it was hard: it required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped. I didn’t stop.

Japan and Sony

It may seem like ancient history now, but in the eighties, America was fascinated by Japan. It was the little-understood, much-feared Asian force that China is today.

Their cultural values—homogenous, self-deprecating, hard for outsiders to read—made them seem formidable. Who knew what they’d buy or disrupt next? As former vice president Walter Mondale remarked about the future, “What are our kids supposed to do? Sweep up around the Japanese computers?”

Morita was a chameleon CEO: an Asian in Asia, a European in Europe, an American in America. But I was the only person I knew with a copy of his book, and it served me well.

When CBS’s board rejected the deal, Morita stayed calm, and he ended up paying $2 billion, which many people thought was too much. But Morita was very shrewd. By assuming sole ownership of the record company, Sony gained hundreds of millions of dollars in Tokyo real estate, an item somehow overlooked by CBS’s auditors.

Morita was a salesman even when he was buying, and he’d come prepared. He set down a box that contained the latest Sony Watchman, their portable pocket television. Kirk stared at it throughout the meeting. At the end Morita said, “I’d like to show you what we’ll be releasing.” It was the first color Watchman, and Kirk would have killed for one—it was the beginning of the tech age, and it was really cool to have a gadget no one else did. Then Morita packed up his Watchman and left. If you want one of these, you’ve got to make the deal.

When we arrived at the Kahala just after Thanksgiving, Sandy asked his Matsushita counterpart about their preference for attire. The exec responded that “it is very considerate of you to suggest no ties”—which we hadn’t suggested.

“We are not here to discuss business. We’re going to be in a social staring contest, and we cannot blink. You will want to gag at some of the stuff I’m going to talk about. Hold it in.”

We avoided all reference as to why we were there. It was oblique, maddening, hilarious, tortuous, and absolutely necessary. It was on-the-job training in the Japanese way.

During the final round of toasts, I took stock. Judging by the other side’s bland faces, I concluded, glumly, that this visit had been a mere sniff around. Then Hirata turned to me and said, “You know, we are interested in learning what it would take to acquire a motion picture studio. We would like to know what you would charge to help us.” I had had my answer planned for weeks. “We’ll charge you nothing,” I said, “unless the job we do makes you happy. If you’re not happy, we’d like only our expenses—no fees.” Hirata said, “And if we’re happy?” “If you’re happy?” I looked him in the eye. “We’d like you to hire a Brink’s truck loaded with gold and send it to our office.”

If the deal fizzled and we didn’t get paid, I’d get pilloried—with my partners at the head of the line. I’d be the Wizard of Oz after the curtain rose and the mic died. But I was never one to dwell on the downside. CAA had gotten where it was by blazing new trails. Besides, we knew where Matsushita could start shopping.

Matsushita was thinner skinned than Sony, so secrecy was even more imperative to them. They knew they were copycats, but they felt that if enough time passed before this deal broke, it wouldn’t look as if they were brazenly emulating Sony. “If this gets out early,” Hirata told me, “we’ll deny it and be done with it.” Our memos were handwritten and shredded after they’d been read. The only people who knew my whereabouts were my wife, my assistants, Ron Meyer, and Bill Haber. In Japan, for reasons I never discovered, Matsushita asked that I use the code name Mr. Nelson.

He immediately hit me with a trick question, my first brush with Matsushita’s barbed-wire politics: “Why do you think we need to do this deal?” “You don’t need to do the deal,” I said, “but it’s a great insurance policy. If Sony controls content, it could control the VHS market”—which Matsushita was making a killing in. From the closed expressions around the room, it was hard to tell if I’d said the politic thing or not. In Osaka we had no Akio Morita to squash disagreement, and no Norio Ohga to ram things through. Sony was beginning to seem like a model of transparency.

Hirata’s smile grew wider as I leafed through them, and I understood: 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.

“Michael, could you explain creativity to us?” I groaned on the inside and blurted out God knows what. I still haven’t figured out a stock answer to that one.

The real culture gap wasn’t East versus West; it was hardware versus software. If you’re the industry leader in videotape recorders, you design a dozen different boxes, but the pieces inside are the same. Your engineers tell you how long each part will last before breaking down. It’s all hard numbers. A movie idea, on the other hand, has no intrinsic worth. Give the same concept to ten directors and you’ll get ten different films. Film artists don’t make a garment from a bolt of cloth—they create the cloth. The finished product’s value is subjective, your taste against mine.

Strong emotion washed over me; it was the largest and most demanding deal of my career. At $6.5 billion, it broke Sony’s record for a Japanese acquisition in the United States. I had convinced the last mogul to sell out before he went under, to a company he’d met with only twice. I had proved myself in M&A. I had won. Hirata made good on the Brink’s truck. He gave me a colossal check to distribute as I saw fit: $135 million. After paying the bankers and all the consultants, I was left with $60 million for CAA (worth $110 million today).

Even as everyone from Ted Ashley to Ron to my wife was telling me to slow down, I wanted to speed up.

When I did business overseas, I took my cue from Akio Morita. I tuned to the local environment as soon as I stepped off the plane. But Lew was an American from the old school. He expected the world to adapt to him.

The truth is I had learned, over the years, that creative people were much better at taking candid criticism than businesspeople.

Health and Brand

His wife, Jane, and I repeatedly tried to turn him around on his longtime deputy, Jeffrey Katzenberg, whom he was always accusing of imaginary crimes and planning to fire. There were real crimes to accuse Jeffrey of—he was dull to the point of robotic—but Michael’s main problem with him was that Katzenberg was capable and insanely hardworking, and therefore Michael’s obvious successor.

After I left his hospital room, Michael immediately called Ivan Seidenberg to try to get him to leave me for a similar deal with Disney. When he struck out with Ivan, he called his deputies and had them sign up Americast and GTE to compete with us. Furious, I confronted him, but he danced away from what he’d done, as usual, and he was so sick I didn’t have the heart to press him.

I knew it was a lot easier for a brand to lose prestige than to regain it. When I was a kid, my father drove a Chevy but yearned for a Cadillac. By the time I bought him one, Cadillac had been eclipsed by Mercedes and BMW, never to regain its luster.

But it wouldn’t do for me to come on with a hard sell. I mirrored Roberto and Don’s behavior, which was foreign to Hollywood—courtly, Southern, restrained. Don’t hype me, don’t sell me, just tell me. When…

Ron didn’t say much. I knew he was already imagining our artists calling him to complain: What the hell are these guys doing? They should be working for me. It was a legitimate concern. And there was this, too: by venturing into an arena where we had zero experience, we could be setting ourselves up for a big, fat, public failure. But I thought Ron was missing the bigger picture.

At McCann’s table, Bergin passed a note to the guy beside him. I caught the scrawled message: We’re screwed.

We saved our best for last: vividly drawn polar bears swigging Cokes as they watched the aurora borealis as if they were at a drive-in movie.

Two young McCann creatives shuffled forward like death-row convicts, dead men walking. They made their first pitch, a stiff recitation off handheld notes. They began a second one—and then they crumbled. They broke off in the middle and sat down. Bergin said, “We’re done.” And they all filed out. We had literally driven them from the field. The world’s marquee ad account belonged to CAA.

Coca-Cola Windfall

We billed Coke $35,500, exactly what it had cost us. They sent us $355,000. When we called the guy who cut their checks, he said, “It was Friday, we were closing, and we were sure you’d made a mistake.” No Coke commercial in memory, he said, had cost less than seven figures.

Peter Sealey sent me a check for $10 million for the ads. Not bad, but I returned the check with a Post-it Note attached: “Pete. Let’s discuss this.” We did, and then I called Don and Robert. I was friendly but unrelenting, and Pete finally sent me a new check for $31 million. They thought it was too much. I still think it was too little. I should have insisted on a royalty for the polar bears, which they’ve used ever since.

Ron and Bill were making well over $12 million a year—and in some years, many millions more from our M&A work—which papered over a lot of problems. But Ron still wanted Bill out. I kept telling Ron, “Look, I hear you, but I don’t feel that strongly. If you want to do it, you should do it.” Ron seemed as cheerful as ever, but my stonewalling on this point would eventually drive him, oddly enough, toward Bill Haber. In later years, they’d become very close friends, united, at least in part, by their growing distrust of me.

Disney and Exit

When Frank Wells, Eisner’s beloved right-hand man, died in a helicopter crash in 1994, the memorial service, held at a soundstage at Warner Bros., was packed with more than a thousand devastated mourners. I tried to cheer up Frank’s widow, Luanne, by saying, “If I died tomorrow, there’d be twenty-five thousand people here to make sure I was dead.” She laughed, which was my intent. But it was true.

The truth is I’d always disliked having to see to people’s creature comforts, making sure our actors and directors had fresh guava and the perfect nanny. You’re an adult; run your own life!

I was about to become a very wealthy man. When I was younger, cash was my ticket out. I’d made lots of it since. But I yearned to accumulate money—to build equity—which felt different from merely making it. Once an agent stopped working, there was no accrued equity to fall back on. I watched the runaway growth at Microsoft, where Bill Gates had built one of the world’s largest companies.

And in truth I had always been faintly embarrassed to be an agent. As much as CAA had professionalized our field, it would never be a noble calling. I wanted to be one of the six people who could say yes to a movie without scrounging to assemble all the elements ahead of time.

I was tired of helping people who could help themselves, but who preferred to pay me to do things for them. I wanted to start helping people who couldn’t help themselves, who actually needed the help. I wanted to give back on a large scale, but I felt I needed the credential of a public company job first. I was still looking for respect and validation.

When I called Edgar to pull the plug, it was a short conversation. I hung up and felt another wave of relief. I might have been sick of client service, but I still loved my company. I loved the people I worked with and the building we worked in. I was swamped by a tidal wave of love for CAA. I convened the entire staff in our theater and announced that none of us were leaving. I could feel relief surge through the room, and the whole company rose into a standing ovation. As people hugged one another, I watched the Young Turks—Lovett, Huvane, and Lourd—who were standing together in the front row. They kept their arms folded, resentfully, and I suddenly felt real alarm. I recognized the mulish look on their faces; it was just the way the five of us had felt at William Morris twenty years earlier: restless, underappreciated, ready to make a move. The difference was that they had great clients—whom Ron and I had given them—considerable authority, and financial security. Yet I believed I could patch things up with the Young Turks, if only to buy time for an orderly succession while I scouted our next play. I liked the possibility of Time Warner, where Gerald Levin looked shaky. Ron and I could work miracles there. We could do anything as long as we hung together.

Ron asked to take one more stab for me at MCA. Halfheartedly, I told him to go ahead. I figured he could ascertain whether there remained any chance to make a deal where we could run the company without interference. Early in July, Ron called from New York one afternoon. “Guess what?” he said. “I’ve met with Edgar and there’s been a change in plans. He wants me to run MCA and I think I’m going to do it.” I felt completely numb; frozen with disbelief.

After a long silence, when I felt that I could speak without my voice breaking, I told Ron how much I needed him, what it meant to have him at my side. I’m great at pitching even when I’m not sincere, and I was a thousand percent sincere, so it was my greatest pitch ever. I was sure he’d be won over. What came back, in a burst of rage, were all of Ron’s pent-up grievances. How I had undernegotiated for him with Edgar and overnegotiated for Bill Haber because I’d valued them equally in my ask. How I had made a big mistake by walking away from MCA, and how it had always been all about me, never about him. How it was time to strike out on his own, to be recognized as something more than my consigliere. I tried to sell him for two hours, as the knot in my stomach swelled into my throat.…

Both Ron and Bill banked big slices of my corporate deals even though they’d had next to nothing to do with them. But knowing Ron’s feelings, I should have done more. I could have bought Bill out and passed Ron his equity. Or kept Bill and split everything in thirds. It might not have been fair, but it would have…

From the start, CAA was antihierarchical. We dispensed with the usual title pyramid and rotated the heads of our departments; I introduced everyone as my partner. For years my business card had just my name, no title. But once I started meeting with Fortune 50 CEOs, I needed formal standing, so in 1990, I became CAA’s chief executive officer. Ron was named president. I should have made Ron the CEO and called myself the chairman. Because he’d never brought the matter up, it never occurred to me what that kind of recognition might have meant to him. When I looked at my partner, I still saw the brash young man with the cojones to flirt with Geneviève Bujold. I saw the guy who hung out…

Eisner Clash

The biggest problem was that our friendship never quite recovered after I put him in handcuffs for his poker debts. I had instinctively moved to protect our company, rather than to protect Ron from himself. I don’t think I was wrong to do that. I do think I was wrong to behave, afterward, as if the crisis had never happened. It made it less scary for me. I should have taken Ron aside to talk to him about how he…

John Angelo, one of Eisner’s closest friends, had told me flatly, “Michael is incapable of sharing with anyone.” Just the previous year, Michael had told me he was going to fire Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was by then his motion picture and animation chief, and who’d become indispensable after Frank Wells’s death.

But I believed that I was immune to Michael’s rages and suspicions. After Ron, he was my next-best friend. And I thought he could fill some of the void. “Okay,” I told Michael. “I’m in.”

I didn’t know that Michael had recruited Bollenbach by implying he’d replace Frank Wells. I didn’t know that Litvack had his own designs on the job; Eisner had always dismissed him to me as “a functionary.” One came out of real estate and the other out of litigation. Neither had any experience with talent, or with making and distributing films, television, or books. When Michael and I took a break in his son’s bedroom, he seemed as flustered as I was. He stroked people by reflex, promising everyone autonomy, but obviously we couldn’t all have autonomy.

In mid-September 1996, Sandy Litvack barged into my office. “Michael doesn’t want you at the company anymore,” he said, triumphantly. “Go tell Michael to come tell me himself,” I said. After a twenty-something-year relationship with my so-called friend, I thought I deserved to be fired face-to-face. Michael didn’t appear.

In my first week on the job, Eisner told me to fire Bob Iger. He thought Bob was stupid, or so he said. I thought he was being rash and said so: “Bob Iger knows ABC cold.”

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

I’d always thought it was vital to mix business and friendship. I was learning, painfully, that it was better to keep those realms far apart. Business always gets personal.

Venture Lessons

Bill thought we should just work our way through the rough patch, but I suggested that the board members demonstrate their faith in the company by buying stock. Bill, no fan of smoke and mirrors, screamed, “Ovitz, that’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard!” After a shocked moment, everyone cracked up. I bought half a million shares of LoudCloud stock, some of the other board members followed suit, and soon our shares were back up over a dollar. In 2007, Hewlett-Packard bought the company, now renamed Opsware, for $1.65 billion.

As their venture capital firm began to take shape, I coached them about how to make Andreessen Horowitz stand out. The idea that took was to offer a full menu of business services—a novel approach in venture, whose stars tend to be one-man bands who freelance out of a larger firm. In other words, Marc and Ben set out to be the CAA of Silicon Valley.

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.

You can’t kill the good ones. William Morris learned that after we left to start CAA, and CAA learned it when Ari and Patrick rose up to battle them.

Valley Rules

Accustomed to protecting my directors when studio execs got rough, I finally stood and told my guys, “They can’t talk to you like this! We’re going.” The engineers stared at me and said, “What are you talking about? It’s totally fine.”

“You’ve just learned something very important about the Valley. There are no manners here, just brain challenges. It’s about getting to the truth of the idea any way you can.”

If Hollywood is like high school with money, as people often say, the lesson from that eBay meeting is that Silicon Valley is a true meritocracy. The best idea with the best execution wins.

…one way to conceptualize how to think in business is a martial-arts precept: “If you aim at the target, you lose all your power. You have to hit through the target to really smash it.” To get where you want to go, you have to set out to go even further.

Late Reflections

After being together since we were teenagers, Judy and I recognized that our lifestyles had diverged—she drawn to her horse ranch in Ojai; I migrating from L.A. to the Bay Area to New York, always on the move. We agreed to live our lives separately, though we’d remain married and the best of friends. We still talk almost every day.

We had a drink, which became a dinner, which became a conversation that shows no signs of slowing down. Tamara Mellon and I love a lot of the same books and movies and art. We enjoy learning new things in each other’s worlds. Best of all, we find ourselves laughing all the time. Tamara is gifted, witty, and kind enough to laugh at my jokes. She appreciates my eclectic interests and loves that I love what she does. She cofounded Jimmy Choo at twenty-seven, almost exactly my age when we founded CAA.

As a grandfather, I plan to do everything right, to fix the numerous mistakes I made as a parent.

What we were both finally realizing, onstage, was that we’d each unwittingly sacrificed our relationship in order to save CAA—whereas if we’d just focused on making sure we were both happy, CAA would have done even better. The irony was right out of O. Henry.

“My biggest problem with you was that I tried to be your friend, but you wouldn’t be friends with me!” The old me would have argued, would have objected that that wasn’t the whole story. But I just said, “You’re right.” I was there to make peace, and David said he wanted the same. We were two guys in our seventies, looking to fix what we’d broken. Ronnie later told me that David didn’t have anything bad to say about me afterward. That made me smile a little: the win, nowadays, is breaking even. But I’ll take it.

Bullied as a child, I spent my life bullying back.

Bob De Niro summed me up pretty well. Someone once asked him, “Why don’t you leave Ovitz? He’s such a tough asshole.” De Niro said, “Yeah, but he’s my tough asshole.”

I wasn’t out of the Valley yet. I’m free of it in my daily life, and in my bank account, but I’ll never be free of it in my brain. You carry your origins with you. Still, those origins drove me here, and built this place, and attracted so many bright, funny, creative colleagues. In the silence, I discovered that the only thing I really miss about the agency business was the camaraderie: my comrades and friends and the passionate way we spent our lives together. I miss the people.”