Creative Artists Agency - Who Is Michael Ovitz?

I couldnt sleep last night, so I slipped downstairs and started watching Terminator 2 on television. It was so late it seemed like no one else was awake anywhere. From my living room, high in Beverly Hills, the glitter of Los Angeles below felt like key lights burning on an empty soundstage.

As I watched Arnold Schwarzenegger bulldoze his enemies, I had a sudden realization. That was me. I was a Terminator. When we built Creative Artists Agency, Hollywoods premiere talent agency, Id get banged around, hurled through a wall, plaster dust exploding everywhere... and then Id climb out from the rubble, red eyes glaring, and hurl my opponents through the wall even harder than theyd hurled me. I completed my mission. The fear my opponents felt derived from sheer hopelessness: How could they beat someone so tireless, so relentless? So inhuman?

That was the image I took great care to project, anyway. It was an image I grew to hate. Who wants to scare the living shit out of people? But it was so effective. Our sell was simple: if you were with us, as an agent or a client, CAA would protect you 24-7, take care of your every need. At a time when other agencies were full of solo acts, we had teams of four or five agents on each client. By working longer and harder and smarter than the others, we became a mighty fortress. You were either with us or you were against us, and if you were against us, our phalanx of agents would stream forth from our stone walls, eager for combat.

We could demand $5 million for our best directors, double what theyd gotten at other agencies. We could package the stars and the writers and the directors of huge films like Ghostbusters and Forrest Gump and Jurassic Park and insist that studios make the film we gave them. We could collect almost $350 million a year in commissions from our 1,350 clients, who included everyone from Isabelle Adjani to Billy Zane, from Pedro Almodvar to Robert Zemeckis, from Andre Agassi to ZZ Top. And it was all because our agents carried a heavy club: the implied threat of terrible consequences if the buyer didnt do what we wanteda 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 neveror almost neverpick it up. Power is only power until you exert it. Its all perception.

I was that club. The most persuasive point our agents could make to a stubborn exec was I dont have the authority to close the deal at that number, so youll have to talk to Michael. That was the last thing the exec wanted, because he or she knew Id 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.

Most of our 175 agents uttered some version of that threat five times a day. My name became a kind of hex, a conjuring. In just twenty years I went from a complete unknown, to a comer, to being hailed as the most powerful man in Hollywooda man the press invariably described as a gap-toothed, tightly scripted, secrecy-obsessed superagent. After a few years of that, I became the most feared man in town. And once I left CAA, when it became safe for everyone to vent, I became the most hated.

Mike Ovitz was such a potent bogeyman because he wasnt a person, he was a specter. I avoided red carpets; Id enter and leave parties through the back door; I kept the rights to almost all photos of me; I didnt do any press for the first ten years, and very little after that. 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 Im a perfectionist, and everythingeverythingbothered me if it wasnt just so). I drank barely at all, I didnt use drugs, I didnt even dance. I never understood why youd want to shower and change for a dance just so you could go get all sweaty. This set of traits made me seem freakishly composed and controlled. And you know what? I was.

My clients played characters on-screen; I played them offscreen. 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 theyre with. 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.

Yet the private me, the one only my closest friends saw, was ultrasensitive to every slight and constantly concerned about threats from every direction. This me, the man with back pain and uneasy memories, wandered into my living room to look at Jasper Johnss White Flag, his 1955 masterpiece. I bought it from a bankrupt Japanese construction company years ago, and a condition of the sale was that I couldnt show it in public for a year because the company wanted to hide the state of its imploding finances. So for that year I kept the painting in an empty room in my house behind a locked door, the way Bluebeard guarded the secret room where he was truly himself. Id go look at White Flag every day, and sink into a reverie, admiring Johnss talent, his fluidly expressive brushstrokes, his extraordinary will and imagination. Great art brings out the boy in me, the insatiably curious kid who has to know everything about everything.