Who is Michael Ovitz?
Corner Office from Marketplace
Marketplace
4.8 • 545 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2018
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You may not know the name Michael Ovitz, but you almost certainly know his work. For years, he was one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, the deal-making talent agent behind “Jurassic Park,” “Ghostbusters,” “Tootsie,” “Rain Man” and “Schindler’s List,” to name a few. Creative Artists Agency, the talent agency he co-founded and ran for two decades, represents Hollywood A-listers like Meryl Streep, George Clooney and Tom Hanks. Ovitz tells us how the practice of “packaging” talent together helped shift Hollywood’s balance of power from studios to artists and their agents. He also reflects on how the industry has changed and Hollywood’s #MeToo reckoning.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everybody, it's Kyle. |
| 0:05.0 | Rosdahl. Thanks for downloading another episode of the Corner Office podcast. |
| 0:08.5 | This one is a special bonus episode with a guy who's not a CEO anymore, but for a lot of years was one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. |
| 0:15.7 | His name is Michael Ovitz. |
| 0:17.4 | Creative Artist Agency, Talent Agency that he co-founded and ran for 20 years represents Hollywood A-listerers like Merrill Streep, George Clooney, and Tom Hanks. Michael Ovitz came into the studio to talk about his new book the other day. It's on his life and his life in the business. It's called Who Is Michael Ovitz? We're expecting you. Don't you ever a seat? Ready to go to work. |
| 0:38.9 | Michael Ovis, thanks for coming to the studio. |
| 0:40.4 | My pleasure. Thanks for having me. |
| 0:41.8 | So the title of this book, Who is Michael Ovitz? |
| 0:44.9 | And I'm going to paraphrase you, except in radio-friendly language. |
| 0:50.6 | In a big part of this book, you come off as kind of a jerk. |
| 0:56.5 | Well, I was pretty honest about what occurred and what was some of the good things that we did, some of the bad things. |
| 1:05.9 | Look, when you're in a service business, you're in a place where you can't please everybody all the time. |
| 1:11.6 | You have a fantastic project and you give it to one studio, you're going to have a dozen others really upset with you. |
| 1:20.6 | We weren't in a place where you could win a popularity contest. You're there to please your specific client and to get their dreams made. |
| 1:30.7 | And there's fallout along the way. |
| 1:33.2 | I jumped ahead a little bit. I want to back up and talk about how you got to be where you are. |
| 1:37.9 | You started as a kid doing tours at the studios over on the west side. |
| 1:43.4 | It was, I got the bug when I was over at the |
| 1:46.9 | universal lot. What was the bug? What caught you? I think being over there with all these |
| 1:52.1 | creative people and watching them take ideas and turn it into something you could read, |
| 1:59.5 | see or hear was pretty extraordinary to me. |
| 2:02.9 | And to this day, I'm still captivated by that ability for people to come up with concepts |
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