Who Is Michael Ovitz? by Michael Ovitz

Author:Michael Ovitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

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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. I was convinced that, decades hence, we were both going to end up divorced but living in retirement side by side at the Motion Picture Home, still going through the old routines, like Walter Matthau and George Burns in The Sunshine Boys.

Ron and I vacationed together with our families, going to Venice, Lake Como, the Kahala Hilton in Hawaii. We had the same raw sense of humor—outside the Guggenheim in Venice, in 1987, we took a photo of ourselves with The Angel of the City, a Marino Marini sculpture of a man with a huge erection riding a horse. Knowing that the producer Ray Stark had the same sculpture, only in a version lacking the erection, we sent him a Tiffany box containing the photo, with the caption “Ray, we found your dick!” We then prevailed on the Guggenheim to help us cast a model of the penis, and presented it to Ray as a dinner gift.

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.) So we punished the agency, taking first a number of their agents, then more than seventy of their clients in the first few years, mostly television writers, producers of daytime television, and character actors. As we grew, so did our appetites. After the death of Stan Kamen, WMA’s top film agent, in 1986, we picked off Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, and Chevy Chase. Even as late as 1989, I dogged their client Kevin Costner hard to get him to come over. He was a big star, and I believed I could make him into Gary Cooper, but it certainly added to his allure that he was with WMA. People called it a war, but it was an unrelenting conquest: Morris didn’t take from us.

Even minor misdeeds got punished severely. After Bob Shapiro at Warner Bros. stopped returning our agent Laurie Perlman’s calls, Ron and I told everyone in a staff meeting, “No one call Bob back.” After a week or two of this, Bob’s wife, Sandy, phoned me in a panic and I explained, “We’ll be happy to call Bob back when he calls Laurie.” He immediately called her, apologized, and life went on.

A little while later, I grew incensed at the

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