Michael Ovitz: commitment

Transcript context

…That's wild. So we're talking about this point in history where you had already become this big successful agency, you were already representing these people branching out into things like trying to take on Coke's advertising. Can we hear the entrepreneurial story from you of how CAA came to be in the first place? Because you really started with nothing, like zero. It's actually pretty simple. I'll try to give you the highlights. A group of us, there were probably 15 young agents at William Morris, maybe 20, all in our 20s. I was the assistant to the president at the time. Bill Haber ran the TV talent department. Ron Meyer was a first class talent agent. Rowland and Mike Rosenfeld were TV packaging agents. Basically, we noticed a disagreement philosophically with where they were taking the business. Crazy as it sounds, CAA was born out of a bad staff meeting at William Morris, where the guy who worked for him who was head of the television department, his name was Sam Weisbord. He announced with great pride and passion that he had signed Anne Miller, which will mean nothing to you two young guys, but she was a 50 song and dance queen and a Broadway star. We sat in a staff meeting. We all sat in the back. We weren't allowed to sit at the table because we weren't senior enough. One of us got up and said, look, Anne Miller's a talented lady, but we should be signing Bob Redford, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Sean Connery, and Sidney Poitier. We should be signing those people, not Anne Miller. This is William Morris. We've been around since 1898. We're on the wrong track. The older guys went ballistic. You then saw division at William Morris that never healed. Then they made a cardinal tactical error. The head of the training department that trained all of us was the former roommate of the president Sam Weisbord, his name was Phil Weltman. He was a tough ex-marine drill sergeant, and he trained everybody. Bottom line, they fired him. He called us down and he was almost in tears. This was a guy that used to get up on the top of his desk screaming at us at the top of his lungs. This was before people were woke. This was like, we were trained the old fashioned way. We felt, my God, we were embarrassed. It was debilitating to watch this. This guy was destroyed. That was the beginning of the end. We started talking, all of us. We narrowed it down to five people that we wanted to be in business together. We made a decision to leave and set up our own business and do it our way. That's it. No more, no less complicated than that. 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?…

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