Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Our job was to create products for our clients. We had people dedicated that had no clients that were only involved in creating products. That was their job. No agency did that. We also had 15 readers on staff. Michael, can you take us toward the last few years of your time at CAA? We talked about this period where you're signing your first clients, you went on to represent 45 of the top 50 in Hollywood, talked about your foray into advertising with Coca-Cola. There are two little pieces of this chapter remaining. One is you kind of getting into investment banking, and maybe I should pull kind of there. You definitely turned CAA into an investment bank. I think you were the top-grossing investment banker in the world the year that you did your first deal. Then the second I want to talk about when you explored Universal and potentially becoming a studio head yourself. The first was a natural evolution of what we were doing. The studios were in trouble financially. It became very clear to me that they were going to need financing and traditional financing wasn't going to work. Universal was under siege. People were taking stock positions, corporate raiders out of New York. Columbia was in trouble. MGM was in trouble. Warners, believe it or not, was in trouble. So I was very friendly with a brilliant guy named Herbert Allen. Herbert was an investment banker who taught me a lot about the business. We used to spend a ton of time together. I got this idea that we could bring financing to save our marketplace because frankly, if any of those companies went out of business, so did we. I couldn't afford for Universal, Columbia, MGM, or Warners to shut down or to reduce the scope of their budgets.…

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