HIDE! IT’S OVITZ ON LINE 1
How uber-agent ruled H’wood like a Mafia don
ERE’S just one example of the power ththat Hollywood super-agent Mike Ovitz wielded: In the mid-1990s, Ovitz’s art dealer Arne Glimcher — who’d directed one movie, 1992’s “The Mambo Kings” — decided that his follow-up would be a courtroom thriller called “Just Cause.” Ovitz, eager to please, told Glimcher that client Sean Connery would star. One problem: No one told Connery. In a conference call among Connery, Ovitz and Ovitz’s junior agent David O’Connor — known as “the boy” — Connery laced into Ovitz. “Well, me and the boy both agree that this movie is a piece of s--t,” Connery said. Ovitz apologized to Connery and slipped off the call. Moments later, l O’Connor was told to report to Ovitz — an instruction every employee dreaded. As O’Connor approached, he saw Ovitz on the phone, speaking into his headset.
“As soon as he saw me,” O’Connor recalled, “he looks at me, takes off his headset, and is so f--king pissed that he throws it down on his travertine desk and it shatters all over the place. I even got hit wwith the shrapnel from it, right? And he comes around his desk and he gets right up into my face, and he’s bright red. His veins are popping out of his face and neck and he starts screaming at me, ‘You don’t know what the f--k you’re doing! You’re a f--king amateur! I don’t know why I f--king pay you, and you’re done with Sean Connery! You’re off the Connery account! F--k you! Get the f--k out of my office!"
O’Connor wwas sure he’d be fired. Instead, Ovitz, a master of dark arts, got Connery to do the movie by sacrificing his agency’s commission. That, at least, is the official line. “Ovitz scared the s--t out of me and intimidated me every single day of my life that we worked together,” said O’Connor, who survived to become the current CEO of Madison Square Garden.
This is just one of the horror stories recounted in the new oral history “Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency” (HarperCollins). As author James Andrew Miller reports, by 1995 Ovitz was the most feared and reviled power broker in the film business. Directors, actors, writers, studios — he controlled them all.
Ovitz hasn’t read the book, a spokesman for the former agent tells The Post.
“Mike Ovitz carried a heavy hammer, and he swung it like he was Beverly Hills Thor,” Sylvester Stallone told Miller. “He went around smashing people, sometimes I think just for the fun of it. He did things to me that I thought were beyond unfair . . . Is he beloved? That’s a rhetorical question.”
THE Creative Artists Agency, or CAA, was co-founded in 1975 by Ovitz and fellow agents Ron Meyer, Bill Haber, Rowland Perkins and Mike Rosenfeld, who’d all decamped from the established William Morris Agency. They took out a $21,000 bank loan and relied on their wives to work as assistants.
By the early 1990s, no agency in town had a client roster as eclectic and extensive as CAA’s. Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Madonna, Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Prince, Rob Reiner, John Hughes, Whoopi Goldberg, Warren Beatty, Bill Murray and Stallone were just some under the CAA umbrella. Massaging and manipulating so many egos, among clients and agents alike, was an art form.
When CAA was about to sign Streep, client Glenn Close worried that Streep would eclipse her as a priority. Redford avoided Ovitz whenever possible. One agent hid from Madonna whenever she was in the office. Client Steven Seagal became a personal trainer-turned-action star when his devoted student Ovitz de- cided it should be so.
Ovitz was CAA’s bad cop, and co-founder Meyer (whose daughter, Jen, is now married to Tobey Maguire) was its good cop.
Their strategy was based on the old Hollywood studio system: Use their vast stable of actors, writers, producers and directors to package a film top-down, then sell it and collect on multiple commissions. “We were a studio,” Ovitz told Miller. “We went to people with movies ready to go. We did all the development work. We did all the casting.”
At his height, Ovitz made between $10 million and $20 million a year, and he ran CAA on fear. Everyone, from executives to assistants, was expected to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Ovitz was more demanding than any movie star. “There were certain rules,” said former assistant Susan Miller. “Never touch his food; never tell anyone who he was talking to or meeting with; always dress the part, and that meant no open-toed shoes . . . I was petrified.”
Other underlings were tasked with baby-sitting Ovitz’s children, changing their diapers and driving around Ovitz’s wife, Judy.
Upon being summoned to work Ovitz’s desk in 1988, assistant Michael Wimer was pulled aside by CAA executive Ray Kurtzman.
“He said, ‘You have to know that on Michael’s desk, you are going to see things in how he handles his life and his business and how he treats his wife that you won’t see anywhere else . . . Coming from Ray, it was clear what he was saying — Mike is going to ask you to do stuff and be party to stuff that you are going to find pretty awful.”
In October 1989, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who’d just sold “Basic Instinct” for a record $3 million, accused Ovitz of threatening to destroy his career if he left CAA. Miller reports that Ovitz allegedly said, “My foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day will blow your brains out.”
“Afterward, I kept hearing from more and more people that he’d used the same words with them,” Eszterhas said. “Mark Harmon
wrote me this really poignant, heartbreaking letter about the things they had done or tried to do with him because he, too, was going to leave.”
Six months later, the parties came to undisclosed terms, and Eszterhas left. But the damage to CAA’s once impenetrable fortress was done.
STARTING in 1989, CAA operated out of a behemoth that Ovitz had commissioned from renowned architect I.M. Pei. To mark its unveiling, Ovitz — who was obsessed with Eastern philosophy and considered “The Art of War” his Bible — flew in Shaolin monks for a feng-shui ceremony. Chinese dragon dancers performed. A time capsule, including a list of employee phone extensions and a necktie, was buried on site and then “a march of the agents” led the way to a nearby restaurant.
Internally, this was the moment CAA employees felt that the corporate culture went black. Ovitz had always been difficult and demanding, but he’d had redeeming qualities — charismatic, smart, accessible. By 1990 he was an object of fear and loathing.
“I felt that the tone of the meetings was getting, well, darker,” said agent Michael Wimer. “There seemed to be more blood in the water, and the strategies became more about gutting other agents . . . frankly, I had never taken any joy in killing anyone.”
“I found Mike’s callousness at that point very hurtful,” said literary agent Amy Grossman. “By the early ’90s, you couldn’t reach him anymore and you felt expendable.”
“If I saw him walking down the hall,” said agent Rick Nicita, “I would duck into an empty office and wait for him to go by.”
Jay Moloney, an up-and-coming agent known as one of CAA’s “Young Turks,” was Ovitz’s protégé. According to a New York magazine article by Nikki Finke, Moloney was “quick to emulate Ovitz’s ingratiating and manipulative ways.” Finke wrote that Moloney had stolen a screenplay from an acquaintance, was known to spread rumors about a star’s substance-abuse issues or a rival’s sexual orientation and was the instigator of a story making the rounds that an agent at ICM had AIDS.
Moloney regarded Ovitz like a surrogate dad. After one phone call in which Martin Scorsese told Moloney how much he loved working with him, Moloney told Ovitz it was “the greatest phone call of my life.”
“Yeah,” Ovitz said. “And I can take him back with just one phone call.” Moloney committed suicide in 1999, at age 35. Finke didn’t blame Ovitz, but rather “the industry’s aberrant values system, which infects everything and deforms it: Power becomes a weapon.”
Co-founder Ron Meyer began to feel Ovitz was more like a Mafia don than an agent.
“To me, Ron was like a battered wife,” said then-Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., who’d just purchased MCA and Universal Pictures.
“One day I was sitting in Ronnie’s office, and his assistant said, ‘Ovitz on line 1,’ and I saw Ronnie wince like he had just been punched in the stomach,” said Rick Nicita. “When I saw . . . that, I knew things had really changed.”
BY the mid-1990s, 990s, Ovitz, per-perhaps sensing a mutiny, be-began to lookk for a way out. He came close to brokering a deal with Bronfman to run Universal, bringing along Meyer and at least four other agents for between $250 million to $450 million.
According to Bronfman, Ovitz said he planned to give himself 90 percent of that sum, with 6 percent for Meyer. He then began asking for even more money.
“I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to get out of this,’” Bronfman said.
He ended talks with Ovitz and gave the job to Ron Meyer.
“Mike said, ‘You stole this job from me,’ ” Meyer said. “I told him, ‘No, Mike, you left it in the trash can and I retrieved it,’ and then the conversation ended.”
Ovitz resigned from CAA in 1995 for a brief, disastrous tenure running Disney. He got out of the entertainment business in 2002 and today, at 69, is a private investor and top art collector.
He also remains an inscrutable subject of intrigue. In 2015, Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon announced her engagement to Ovitz, despite Ovitz still being wed to Judy, his wife of 46 years.
And Page Six reported that Ovitz would be deposed on April 14, 2016, in the trial of private investigator Anthony Pellicano, who was accused of wiretapping reporter Anita Busch. Pellicano has testified Ovitz paid him $80,000 to secretly investigate at least 15 people, including Busch.
The trial, set to resume in October, began in June, 14 years after Busch found a dead fish on her smashed windshield with a card reading “Stop.”
Of the trial, his spokesman said, “Mr. Ovitz is eager to end this charade, which is based on delusional and dishonest claims.”
If I saw [Ovitz] walking down the hall, I would duck into an empty office and wait for him to go by. — CAA agent Rick Nicita