Michael Ovitz: commitment

Transcript context

…To my mind, looking from the outside you all at the beginning of CAA and then everything that would become, no doubt, an absolutely essential and probably the primary ingredient was just all of you collectively and you personally, you're like raw ambition. Certainly, lots have been written about that. I'm wondering though too, is it also fair to say that your background, because most if not all of you came from television, was that kind of a secret weapon? Because a) packaging was more common in television, and b) television was still relatively new. I'm imagining most of the old people at WMA and then also in the studio business just weren't tuned into this new world, right? No. Actually, it's a good question, but let me correct something. William Morris was the top television packaging agency. We all knew how to package television, but it's very different from packaging movies. Because in television, the producer is a key element, and in movies, it's the director and the director/actor. Actors are cast in television prior to the '80s when fading movie stars were brought into television. But the thing about William Morris is they bifurcated TV and movies at a time when they were starting to come together. That was a thesis that we didn't agree with. So that helped us leave, but it was a different business at the time. William Morris wanted to keep them separate. We were asking the head of William Morris picture department and television department to run joint meetings because people could work in both areas, and they refused to do it. That was another nail in their coffin. When we started, we made a conscious decision to be TV only because by SAG rules they had to pay every Thursday. We started our business on $100,000. We never went into debt beyond that, paid that debt off in six months, and never carried 10¢ of debt ever. The reason we didn't is that our TV clients got paid every Thursday, so we took our commission. But in 1978, we made a decision that we needed to be in the movie business, and the only way we could do that was to dedicate agents to the movie business. We made a decision that I would start the movie business in '79. The rest of the guys would stay on television. But Mike Rosenfeld, who was in the movie division at William Morris with me, would start at the movie division at CAA. That's a great insight because you could cashflow the business if your customers, your clients were getting paid every week. But it's pretty hard to run a business when you haven't raised any money if you're waiting 1, 2, 3 years for film projects to come together and then get paid on the back end after it gets made.…

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