Power of a Hollywood mogul

Michael Ovitz,  the former Hollywood agent, who earned a reputation for ruthless negotiation, brilliant strategy and fierce loyalty to his clients, who writes “We are lucky to work in a golden age of commercial film, in the 1980s at the helm of Creative Artists Agency, which wrested superpower and influence from film studios, its directors, and actors that it represented. Money flowed from the blockbusters CAA helped to package and its agents took $350m a year in commissions from their clients.  

Ovitz was pushed out of Walt Disney in 1997 after having left CAA, Sumner Redstone, the influence of 95-year-old patriarch of CBS and Viacom once wielded over the content of film and television screens. Redstone realised the best way to become US media mogul was to grab a territory as he knew what brought to the sunrise Drive-in the Long Island cinema founded by his father Max Rothstein. The content was King, as he used to declare triumphantly after acquiring Paramount Pictures and MTV. Ovitz was pushed out of Walt Disney 1997 after having left CAA, explains the nostalgic lunch with David Geffen, the music producer” we were two guys in our seventies, looking to fix what we’d broken”.

Ovitz devotes a chapter to “My friends who’d betray me” than the opposite. Today territory is contested globally rather than with familiar rivals over lunch in a few joints of West Hollywood.

Ovtiz’s fascinating study of how one agency could wield so much power that they managed to alter the balance of forces in an industry usurping the role of studios by cornering access to talent. “ To get actors, we need directors, and we also need writers and to get writers you often had to get to the executives they trusted”.

The five founding partners of CAA, including Ovitz, broke away from William Morris in 1975 to become a whirlwind over the next decade. Ovtiz came on top in Hollywood by “rolling through 300 calls a day talking till my throat was raw .. submerging myself – drowning myself – in the lives of my clients”.

Ovitz’s father, a salesman who dreamt of owning a liquor store, as “ a sweet, hard-working, conscientious man”. Ovtiz was a master of detail, attending parties with two assistants to whisper the names of other guests and forming a “ gifts office” with a budget of $500, 000 a year to lavish clients with trinkets. Ovitz demands a higher stake than his partners and grabbed the presidency saying “ We were a more efficient assembly mechanism “ than studios. It was a story factory that could put together entire films written and directed by CAA clients, with CAA actors. “ I was a great friend and ally but an implacable foe,” he said. Ovitz’s towering ambition changed the way that Hollywood worked for a while.   

 

 Who is Michael Ovitz? By Michael Ovitz, WH Allen £20/Portfolio $30, 384 pages.