Michael Ovitz: evaluation

Transcript context

…This feels like a huge principle of yours and CAA, which is really strength leads to strength. It seems like you were always looking around identifying what's the new way that we've become more valuable and how do we leverage that into the next thing. Can you talk about that and some of the other ways that you just, by sheer force of will or by counter-position against other agencies, how you were able to be different than everyone else around you and win? We were different for one solid basic reason, which is that we basically worked as a team. If the two of you were clients of ours, you didn't have one agent. What we resented at William Morris is that one agent coveted one client, and you couldn't go anywhere with that because human nature is such that eventually, there's a relationship problem. It just is. The longer you're around someone, the more there's a relationship problem. We went ahead and put teams on people. We had some clients that burned through 3, 4, 5 agents, but they never left us. As a matter of fact, in a 25-year period, I think we lost under five or six clients. We never lost clients because we had teams of people on them that they could relate to. No actor ever had a literary agent. We'd have a literary agent on an actor. Why would we do that? It would be stupid not to. Why wouldn't we? What does an actor do? All they do is read scripts to see what they want to do? What does a literary agent do? All they do is read scripts to see what actors' roles are available. So we were in a state of shock that actors didn't have literary agents. When we looked into it, we're saying, wow, are we stupid or is everyone else stupid? Obviously, you all were young, aggressive, and willing to think differently. But why was the competition so weak?…

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