Michael Ovitz: evaluation

Transcript context

…Back to the studios being in financial trouble, literally, you have the reverse problem of the Wasserman back in the day when you now have the power on the sell side, you need fragmented buyers. I needed people that are buyers with money. So I started building relationships in Japan. First relationship I built was with a division of Matsushita Electric. I hoped that I would be good enough in the meeting that the division would recommend to Matsushita that they meet with me. Before I got to that, I was representing people that were involved with Sony. I got involved in the sale of CBS Records to Sony and built a relationship with Norio Ohga, who was the number two at Sony, who ultimately introduced me to Akio Morita. I became Morita's and Ohga's consultant. We consulted on the sale of CBS Records. Then Mr. Morita came to see me and wanted to get into owning content because he was upset that Betamax—which was a superior technology to VHS—was losing to VHS. He wanted to own a studio, so I started calling different entities that I thought made sense and brought Morita into meetings. The first entity I called was Kirk Kerkorian, who owned MGM. I had a meeting at my home one late morning, pre-lunch with Akio Morita, Kirk Kerkorian, and myself to discuss selling MGM to Sony. Mr. Morita was a very clever guy, and we were a great team. He came with a box and he stuck it in the middle of the table. Kirk couldn't get his eye off that box. Halfway into the meeting, Morita opened the box and he pulled it out. It was a tiny little video camera, which was a prototype for a videotape recorder camera. Kirk was blown away by the fact that when Morita would take video of us in the room with natural light and play it back through our TV set. Kirk went nuts. It's the equivalent of Steve Jobs putting an iPhone on the table in 2005.…

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