Michael Ovitz

Michael Ovitz co-founded Creative Artists Agency with four colleagues in 1975. He had worked as a Universal Studios tour guide and entered the William Morris Agency through its mailroom. His early career gave him a close view of how agents, studios and performers worked together. At CAA he helped build a business that combined the work of many agents around a client, rather than leaving each client with one isolated representative. The agency assembled writers, directors and actors into projects that studios could buy. This gave its clients more influence over how films were made and who would make them. Ovitz also pushed the agency into corporate deals and advertising. His own account describes advising on studio transactions and winning Coca-Cola’s global advertising work in 1991. These moves took CAA’s knowledge of talent and culture into other markets. Ovitz chaired CAA until 1995, when he became president of the Walt Disney Company. His time at Disney was brief: he was terminated without cause in December 1996. Later he formed a group of talent-management and production businesses, sold them in 2002 and developed interests in technology investing. His 2018 memoir, Who Is Michael Ovitz?, looks back at both his dealmaking and its personal costs. It is a participant’s account, with the limits that come with that position. In his later interview with David Senra, Ovitz describes service as close attention: learning a client’s frame of reference, finding skilled people and making time for staff problems. He also admits that giving other people advice did not protect him from poor choices of his own. His career offers a useful study of how a service firm builds shared knowledge, expands its work and tests the judgment of its leaders.