Whole Foods Market Founder, John Mackey's Journey of Love, Life, and Capitalism: Hippie to Heavy Hitter

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altiger Show. Today on The James Altiger Show. You probably were breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the hours in between after working and calling clients. I think you mentioned you made, like, 400 phone calls a day. 300. 300 phone calls a day. And I honestly can't imagine working that hard. Fear is a phenomenal motivator. I didn't wanna go backwards. You know, look, at the end of the day, there's something everyone forgets. We started a business on a card table in late 1974 in the most cutthroat, competitive, difficult business in the world, which is the entertainment business. It's a business that defies description. It's unregulated. It is all about human beings and their ideas. Your capital comes from complex places. Your ideas come from complicated people. And putting one complicated person together with another complicated person takes you to the 100th power of how complex it is. And everyone is competing with everyone else in a very hard and heavy handed way. And frankly, we came in and just did it better. So happy to have the legend, Michael Ovitz here, author of the new book, Who is Michael Ovitz? But also, the creator of the biggest talent agency in in Hollywood, CAA. Then he went on to become the number 2 guy at Disney, and he's had so many reinventions in his life since then. But, Michael, I would say there's there's you could correct me if I'm wrong. There's 3 stories in this book. There's the one story which is you're kind of this historical influence in Hollywood and American culture, to the point where I could say there was pre Ovitz Hollywood and post Ovitz Hollywood. Would you say that's true? I I I wouldn't say that, but it sounds good. Well, okay. Here's what I'll say. Let me ask you this. What movies would I have not seen if if not for your existence? Okay. So I'll I'll give it to you. Which movies would you have not seen? Yeah. Well, it's hard to say. You know, great projects always find a way to the surface. So You say that, but I see the effort in the book you did to put together movies that nobody thought was possible. Just just, you know, as if this was a black and white question, give me the give me the answer. What movies would I have not seen if not for you? I think it's possible you wouldn't have seen Rain Man. It's possible. All these Oscars. Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Barry Levinson. I it's hard to say because the filmmakers are so talented that hopefully, eventually, the work gets done. You know, sometimes it would take 10, 15 years for a movie to get made. It's not like they happen instantaneously. I think what I the way I might answer the question a bit differently is I think we probably accelerated the process. Okay. Well, then let me throw out some movie suggestions for you so you don't have to be and so I'll I'll I'll you could be humble, and I'll I'll brag for you. So Ghostbusters? Ghostbusters was an interesting project. It was a Dan Aykroyd one liner, and we loved every second of what he put together. He then wrote a script. And nobody thought comedians could play in kind of this paranormal ghost, movie. It it was a concept that people doubted because it was New York City, which is about as real as you can get. But putting the the the ghost paranormal part of it in was a little on the odd side. Also, I had another movie, Schindler's List, my all time favorite movie. Well, I think that Schindler's List would have been made. I'm just not sure who would have made it. Right. Because I mean, maybe tell the story of the difficulty of making it. For one thing, even your fight to and Steven Spielberg's fight to make sure that it was shot in black and white was a fight with the studio. Well, it was a fight because in those days, the ancillary rights would have been very difficult to sell if not in color, particularly video cassettes. Why is that? Just a thought process that no one was interested in black and white film, and Steven was adamant about it. And by the way, it's interesting. It goes with my thesis that the creative people are always right. Steven was a 100% right. That movie needed to be in black and white. The only color in the movie is the very end with the little girl. And he couldn't have been more spot on in his desire to make that movie in black and white. And then the little girl, the girl in the red dress, that's almost the cue to cry every time Yeah. When you see her running or whatever. It's a very emotional film for for everyone. Universally, it's an emotional film. Jurassic Park? Jurassic Park, look. I I personally I think Jurassic Park was a no brainer, and I think anybody would have made that movie. That it was just too good to be true. The book read as a page turner. And from the time Crichton pitched me the idea, I think anyone that picked up that book would have wanted to make it into a movie. But I think the critical role you played there was, you know, Michael Crichton had this period of depression in between books and movies, and you kind of were the buffer between him and Hollywood. So Hollywood wasn't quite always aware what his next project would be. And I think without you kind of holding everybody's hand, perhaps that project wouldn't have been shepherded through. Well, Michael was a close friend, not just a client, and one of the most gifted creative people I've ever worked with. He was he had complete and total writer's block. I mean, it was extraordinary, and I've seen a lot of that. It is something that is not unusual, particularly with very skilled creative people. And he just couldn't get anything done. He wasn't feeling great, and he just couldn't get himself started on anything. And we had no choice but to let the community think that he was working on original material. And lo and behold, we ended up being right because he he wrote Jurassic Park in 5 months from the time he told me the idea. And it really just got him going again, and it's one of the best things he wrote. And and Spielberg, I was so impressed that year seeing both movies. It's amazing how much Spielberg got accomplished that year that changed cultural history. Steven Steven is an extraordinary person. I mean, he's not just creative, but he's ex incredibly productive. I mean, he was, cutting one movie while he was shooting the other. And the idea of being able to do 2 really major pieces of creativity simultaneously is almost impossible to fathom, and Steven did it. But, we could you know, again, not going not tooting your horn so much, but we could almost say the same about you, which I wanna get to in a second. But the other way I think you changed Hollywood is not only shepherding all of these great projects, because like you say, who knows what would've, happened if you weren't there? Maybe they would've they would've happened in one way or other, or other great projects would've happened. Who knows? But I think your concept of CAA, of not just representing an actor and trying to see what roles at the studios they could fit. Your concept that was really innovative was, hey, let's get the producer, directors, writers, actors, and we have one big package, and the studio either says yes or no. And this idea of going horizontally and packaging a whole project was very innovative and would then become it had this network effect, almost like a Silicon Valley network effect, where the more clients you had, the more ways you could package, the more clients were gonna come to, the more projects you were going to get. Well, our goal was to shift the leverage from the buyer to the seller, the seller being the creative people. And when we got into the agency business all the way back to our days at William Morris, the studios, the publishing companies, the record companies, the networks, they had the leverage. And they were buyers, and they would buy material. They would control all the creative elements, but separately. What we tried to pioneer was the idea that nothing would go out of the house unencumbered. Everything would be put together between different creative entities. So if we were given an idea by a writer, we didn't want the writer to sell the idea to a studio. We wanted to put other elements with it and there go and ergo package the entire project into one package so that we could sell that and get a better deal for all of our clients. Not only get a better deal, but give the writer the best chance of success of his creative creative idea happening. Because if an unknown writer is going into a major studio to pitch, and he has Tom Cruise sitting next to him or whoever or Steven Spielberg sitting next to him, it's much more likely to to happen. And I think, you know, what what normally would have been a long shot becomes almost a sure thing in in some cases. And then the other thing is you're you say the creative people almost as if they're different from the agents, but I feel CAA was Creative Arts Agency was the real first creative agency where you're formulating these pro projects before the studio even sees them. You know, people were pitching you, not the studio. Well, we tried to act as a studio, frankly. The whole concept was we were trying to be MGM of the thirties and forties where we had this giant stable of talent, and we were trying to create options for them. So it was either their ideas or our ideas. We actually had a group of people internally that worked on ideas. We had a book department that was always feeding material to the clients, particularly the writers and the directors. Our goal was to create ideas for clients or to take their ideas and then create packages with them so that they were protected. You're a 100% right. If a writer walks in with an element where they've got a director or an actor with them, they're gonna have much more protection than if they're on their own. And and, again, this is why I say there's the pre Ovitz era and the post Ovitz era because now I you my guess is you probably can't be an agency without at least thinking of these components when you go in to pitch a project. Well, I think that all agencies are functioning that way now, but I do think that the leverage has gone back to the buy side. I think that with the star system flaming out the way it has, which has happened over the last several years, particularly predicated on viewing pattern, shifts, I think that the leverage has moved away from the creative people back to the buyers. I mean, you what I wanna talk about is a lot of you know, there are real key ingredients to how not only you created success for yourself, but you created this massive agency. You you created these, you know, cultural transformations. But I wanna I wanna hit a little bit on what you just said and and some other Hollywood aspects. First, do you think there should be star power? Like, now it it it was the case, like, oh, if Tom Cruise is in a movie, let's pay him $20,000,000 and give him a percentage of the of the gross in the movie. But, really, there's a lot of good actors out there who probably would be just as good in movies. Was there really such a thing ever as star power? Oh, god. Yes. I think if you go back to the thirties forties and you start looking back at some of the great actors, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, all of these extraordinarily gifted people that actually there was a mystique around them. I'm a huge believer in the star system. Like, right now, what movie would you watch because a certain star was in it? Whereas if if that star wasn't in it, you wouldn't watch the movie. Well, I think that it's a very different time right now. I mean, the stars of the films right now are the concepts as well as the branding. So if you have a Marvel film, you got a real leg up. If you got a Lucas Star Wars film, you've got a real leg up. There are, a number of stars that interest me a lot. I I love watching Jennifer Lawrence work. I love watching Zoe Saldanha work. I love watching Bill Murray work no matter what he does. Put aside that we're friends, I think he's just I think he's a genius that he can do comedy and drama just effortlessly. But it's different than it used to be where you could find, so many projects for these different stars to do, and they would draw. You know, you had the Hoffmans and the Pacinos and and De Niro and Redford and Newman and Sidney Poitier. And I can go keep going forever. There were movie stars that especially when they were put together with others. I mean, you look at Paul Newman or Robert Redford and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I can't imagine anybody else playing those roles. I just can't. I I guess you're right. Like like like, imagine a movie like Heat with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Probably a lot of people saw that movie just because both of them were in it and then which was so rare. And And they seem so alike in some ways. A movie brilliantly directed by Michael Mann and totally engaging. 2 movie stars that never would have worked together. They were both represented by us. We encouraged, Hoffman, De Niro, and Pacino to work together as much as possible. That came out of that. But the film itself is fantastic on its own, but I can't picture anybody else in those roles. There are some films you can watch, not important to mention them, where you can say, I could see somebody else doing that. But these are the kinds of movies that are iconic. They're classic. And they work because all the elements make them work, and you can't see anybody different in the mix. The the flip side of it, though, is a studio can say to you, hey, we love this idea. We love this writer. But you're this is this is self your quote your famous quote is no conflict, no interest. And studios can say, hey, you represent everybody in this package. There's kind of a conflict here. Like, what are we gonna do? And and how would you kind of sort through that with the the studio? We didn't. We just basically functioned on the basis that we wanted to represent anyone who was talented, and we wanted to put them together to work together. And we presented it to the buyer, and they either wanted it or they didn't. If they wanted it, fantastic. We try to make a deal work. If they didn't want it, we get somebody else to do it. And, you know, one you know, everybody always describes you, and you even refer to it in the book, everyone always describes you as cutthroat and, you know, Michael Ovitz gets what he wants or whatever. But it seems to me there's a lot of diplomacy you have to do. Like, if you're pitching, Paramount and, MCA on a on a deal and, ultimately, you have to pick 1 studio or the other, they're gonna the other studio is gonna get upset at you. Like, how many phone calls did you have to make in your career to say, hey. I'm sorry. We'll get you the next one. Or, like, how were you diplomatic when you rejected a studio that was bidding tens of 1,000,000 of dollars for your projects? No matter how diplomatic we were, it never worked. At the end of the day, there's always someone who's disappointed. If you take Jurassic Park, when Steven Woods made the director, there were 50 directors that thought they should have been made the director. When it went to Universal for distribution, there were 7 other studios that thought that they should have been the distributor. No one was ever happy. And what would you say to them? We just you know, there is a reason for everything, but there was very little to say. In the case of Jurassic Park, both Spielberg and Creighton wanted it to go to Universal. Steven had a relationship there, and Michael was fine with it. But that's the reason that it went there, and we had to respect that relationship. It doesn't mean that Paramount or Columbia are gonna be or MGM or any of the other companies were gonna be happy about it. They weren't, and we got those phone calls. A lot of those calls come too to make you try to make you feel guilty so that next time out, you choose the company that's made you feel guilty. It's a big game. And then you took it one step further, and this is kind of, alluded to at first in your story in the book about Jacqueline Bissett, where you're trying to pitch her, and you say, view yourself not as Jacqueline Bissett, the actress, but as JB Inc. And there's lots of different ways your revenue streams could go. And I think, actually, you viewed yourself this way, and I think this is good advice for everybody. Don't just view yourself as having, like, one skill that you need to kind of squeeze all the juice out of. View yourself as, you know, Michael Ovitz Inc. And all the different possible directions you can go. And I think that thinking and that mentality led you to extend CAA far beyond the traditional agency. Like, you were an ad agency for companies like Pepsi, and then you were an investment banker. Coke, not Pepsi. Coke. Sorry. You said a a The the horrible thing. Word. Yeah. It's it's a bad word to Coke. But then and then an investment banker. You you were you were involved in, at least in the stories in here, at least $13,000,000,000 worth of deals on movie studios, and then you were also a headhunter for movie studios. Like, you there was nothing it seems like there was nothing no line of business you would say no to both as Michael Ovitz and as CAA, which were almost 1 and the same for a while. So I'm a strong believer that everyone has a potential to do more than one thing and that they have to think broadly. My point of view was that we could extend our basic business into other core businesses, and that's exactly what we did as long as it had some beneficial relationship to the core business. Selling movie studios had a very strong beneficial relationship because at the end of the day, there were studios that were struggling. Those were our financiers. Without them, there were no movies. It was very important to us that they stay healthy. I remember when Universal stock started to head down into the low twenties, a lot of, New York, what they called at the time raiders, corporate raiders, that's what they were termed as, were taking positions in the stock. And that was really dangerous for us. Why? Well, because if you're gonna take a position in Universal, at $20 a share at that time, that was about a $2,000,000,000 valuation for the company. That was about the value of their real estate and probably the value of their library, which means if you're a corporate raider, you're gonna break that all up. That was the last thing CA wanted was to lose a major buyer. So for us to go get money to plug into the company to keep it alive, and we did. We sold the company for over $65 a share to Matsus**ta Electric. And they financed the company for the next 5 years, which meant we got, you know, another, let's say, 30 movies a year times 5, another 150 movies made, maybe more. That's without television shows. That was critical to us. And if we didn't do it, we thought it was gonna all fall by the wayside. So so again, though, it's it's thinking in every single direction, how to both expand your business, protect your business. There was no there was no lazy moments. Like, you had to, every day, think about how to push what you had and protect what you had. And that was hard. No other agency was doing it. Well, no. Well well said. It was all about moving ahead and also protecting your backside. But we were incredibly aggressive. By the way, I make the point in the book probably too aggressive, but we were very aggressive. Where were you too aggressive? I think we, I think we probably could have accomplished a lot of what we did and probably backed off just a drop. And Like where? Like, what's an example? An example would be, in the amount of talent that we represented. I mean, we put a lot of people out of business by taking clients from them. Not small agencies, but even the big companies. When I say out of business, not out of their basic business, but out of the movie business, for example. We dominated the film and television business in a big way. But you kinda had to do that because the packaging model requires you have almost all of the talent. And that's was the idea at the time of the and I agree with you. We felt that it was important to have all of the gifted people. But at the end of the day, we probably could have done just as well with a few less. But then but then I I I'm I'm not disagreeing. I'm just playing the devil's advocate. Then you don't have as much of that network effect, which is the the more talent you had, the more talent that had to sign with you in order to be part of your packages. And that was the idea, and it worked. Yeah. So you could look in retrospect and say, okay. Maybe we shouldn't have put these mom and pop agencies out of business. But it sounds like in some cases, you tried to make good deals, like, where with early on, you did the deal with Bernie Brosteyn where you took a lot of his comedic talent, made him executive producer on their projects, but you were able to control the not control is a strong word, but you were able to use those those clients for your packages rather than having to deal with Bernie on each project. Well, Bernie was also somebody who was in each project, so it made it much easier. Since he is the executive producer, it was to his benefit to make it all work, and he did. To correct one thing that was said, though, we didn't put mom and pop businesses out of business. The people we went after were the big agencies. Those were the people we went after. We had a a rule in the company. We couldn't take clients out of small agencies. Oh, yeah? Okay. And, but we ended up getting them because they would fire their small agents and then come to us. And it was that was a difficult I remember calling an agent telling him that one of his big directors, a small agent, they had a very minimal number of clients and 2 agents in their company. And I remember calling him, telling him I got a call from their biggest client who wanted to come with the agency, and I tipped him off so he could try to save it. And he tried and tried and tried, and 6 months later, the client still fired him. And I wasn't happy about that, by the way. It it wasn't helpful to us because, anyway, he sliced it, it looked like we stole the client, and I didn't want us to have that reputation. You know, but, you know, now and we'll get to this more later, but you're spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley. You you're you're advising and consulting on various huge, well known companies and venture capital firms. Peter Thiel, well known investor and and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, he wrote the book 0 to 1 where he basically says competition is bad for capitalism. You to create the best products, you wanna be a monopoly because then you have the most profits, and you're able to be the most innovative. I love Peter, and I love his thesis on monopoly, and I couldn't agree more. I'm a monopolist. I felt I feel strongly that if you're in business, you have to own your business line. It's not a popular thesis, by the way. But, you know, look. At the end of the day, there's something everyone forgets. We started a business on a card table in 19 late 1974 in the most cutthroat, competitive, difficult business in the world, which is the entertainment business. It's a business that defies description. It's unregulated. It is all about human beings and their ideas. Your capital comes from complex places. Your ideas come from complicated people. And putting one complicated person together with another complicated person takes you to the 100th power in the area of how complex it is. And everyone is competing with everyone else in a very hard and heavy handed way. And, frankly, we came in and just did it better. And that did not make us particularly popular. I I and I think because well, there's your work ethic, which I'm gonna get to because I think the second part of your the second story being told here is your personal philosophy about work, which I think is so valuable and important. But with CAA, again, I think the the innovation of viewing this talent as being talented in more than one area and and being able to put people together as packages was was so innovative that it just it just changed everything. But what did you I'm curious. From a from an agent point of view, how did you identify talent? Like, when you saw Meatballs, for instance, how did you say, okay. This guy, Bill Murray, I wanna represent him. He's a quirky, weird guy. I'm gonna I'm gonna go after him. You know, it's interesting. I remember sitting in the screening at Paramount Studios, a rough cut of Meatballs. And I remember a series of simultaneous emotional events that I went through. First of all, I couldn't stop laughing. 2nd of all, I loved the guy on screen. I said, my god. I want this guy to be my best friend. 3rd, I watched him interface with kids. That's really hard to do as an actor. It's really hard to do. And then I watched how he worked off the other adults in the movie. I just thought he was brilliant, and it just seemed natural to me. I didn't find anything odd about it. When my brain and my stomach connect, it's a hit. What's what's an example of, an actor or actress who went on to become huge that was totally unknown when you first identified talent? Well, I don't know that anybody we identify with totally unknown ever. I mean, we found Tom Cruise in a small movie. A producer had called Paul Wagner in our office, after looking at, his play his role in, Taps. It was a small role, but a really meaty role. And he surely didn't look like the Tom Cruise that we see today. But when you watched him, and we went and watched these scenes that he did, Paul and I, looked at each other and said, boy, this is a really special young actor. And Paul in particularly was really keen on him and stayed with him involved with him for most of the rest of his career. Yeah. And then, you put together him with Paul Newman for the color of money, a sequel to the the hustler, and pool became literally, pool and billiards became a phenomenon across America because of that movie. Well, that was because of, Scorsese, Newman, and Cruise. They made it popular. Yeah. So so, what about in terms of agents? You obviously couldn't have done what you did without the best agent supporting you. You know? And there were plenty of people trying to break into Hollywood, and agenting was a good way to go. How did you find how did how did you identify what were qualities you look for, and what qualities would you dismiss? Would would you get rid of people? Well, we didn't get rid of very many people. We rarely, got rid of anyone, frankly. Or or you wouldn't hire us. Yeah. We we not hiring is a different issue. We we did 2 things. 1, we had a a great training program. So we had an average of 30 to 35 trainees in any given moment in time, sometimes as high as at one time was almost over 40. And we had a very rigorous training program that a a man named Ray Kurtzman, may he rest in peace, who was like our gray hair at the time was a lawyer. It come from, William Morris to work for us. And he ran the training program, but everyone was involved in it. And we treated the trainees in a very unique way and that we wanted them to be successful. And then the other thing we did is that at the beginning of almost every meeting in the company, we asked the agents who they like that was out there they were competing against. Who did they see that they thought was really interesting or was giving us a run for our money? And that's how we got great people. I see. So the agents themselves would say, hey. I'm competing against this other guy at William Morris, and you would call that guy. Well, I had the agents call the person. And that way, they were invested in the hire. And one of the things that was so great about our culture, if you got in the door, you were accepted. There was no, transplant rejections. And the reason was is that the people in the field were doing the recruiting. By the time it got to me, I knew everyone wanted this person, and then we would hire them. But we didn't have any transplant rejects. Right now, I see a lot of that going on in the community where people move from one agency to another, and there's a built in competitive motive. We didn't have any of that. I think because, like you said earlier, all the agencies now run with the similar business model to you had. It's agenting has become commoditized with many of the agencies, you know, working with the same playbook. And like you said earlier also, the the star power, going down and more power is going to the the studios or the buyers, I think now it's it's it's become a little more being hired has become a little bit more of a commodity. Well, it's it you know, the business has changed. I mean, the business has changed because the process has changed. I mean, when we were in the business, you didn't have Hulu and Netflix and on demand. It didn't exist. When I started in the business, if you didn't go see a movie in a theater, and this was in the sixties, if you didn't go see a movie in the theater, then you missed it. The next time you got a chance to see it was 3 years later on the ABC Sunday night movie at 9 o'clock at night, and you got to watch it with, you know, 6 to 8 minutes, an hour of commercials. Your work ethic, which on top of the innovations, which, you know, has now spread through, you know, all of Hollywood, there's you specifically. Like, you were a a kid doing, you know, studio tours on the MCA or Universal lot, and you were working 60 hours a week. And then, of course, when you started CAA, you probably were breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the hours in between and after working and calling clients. I think you mentioned you made, like, 400 phone calls a day. 300. 300 phone calls a day. And I honestly can't imagine working that hard. Well, but it's to each his own. You know, I came from a background, as I write in the book, that I wanted to get out of. So fear is a phenomenal motivator. I didn't wanna go backwards, and I didn't wanna live the way I was brought up. Not that it was bad. It's just I didn't wanna be in a position of having to spend the rest of my life in the San Fernando Valley. And I wanted out, and I wanted better things for my life. So I was incredibly motivated to work and work I did from the time I was 9 years old. When I got into the agency business, I worked just as hard at William Morris when I started as we did at CA. It was a lifestyle, not a job. Well and I and I remember too when you were discussing your your first big, m and a deal where you were working with Sony, you were going back and forth to Japan. You mentioned, once a week, often for only Once a month. Once a month only for 24 hours. Like, that's that's a lot of traveling. It is, but it for me, it was great. In those days, being on an airplane before they could reach you was incredibly relaxing free time. Today, being on an airplane is no different than being sitting here where you have access. People can reach you on a plane now. I mean, you've got phones and Internet and, you know, even your texts work on a on a plane. On a plane, I still pretend I can't be reachable. Well, you are you're a better man than me. I I don't know about that. But, when you and also part of this work ethic was not just that you had put in the hours, but, like, when you were winning over a client or a studio or the head of Sony or whoever it was, you it would all it was almost like this shock and awe strategy. Like, you would surround them completely. Like, you would touch base with them. You would call them. You would send gifts to their wives. You would it's like it's like everywhere they looked, they would have to see Mike Ovitz until eventually they signed with you. Well, as I said, we were incredibly aggressive. And we did have a thesis that we'd have multiple agents work for every client, which was rather fresh in 70 4 5. Right. Because you were able to say to Robert Redford, oh, okay. We've got a book agent for you, a TV agent, a movie agent, me, you know, and so on. Right. Right. But, like like, describe, for instance, how you won over, Paul Newman as an example. Well, Paul Newman, we got lucky on. We brought a man into our company named Martin Baum, who was a, really well, world renowned agent in his day, and then he was president of ABC Pictures. After he left ABC, decided to go back in the agency business, and he had a small agency, one man company, and he had a phenomenal list of clients. He had, Dickie Attenborough, who was a great director and great actor, and he had James Clovell, and he had Joanne Woodward, who was Paul's wife. And, he had Blake Edwards, Sydney Poitier. He had a great list. It gave us a real jump start. Marty gave us a jump start in the film business, but what he really gave us was access to Joanne Woodward who, in a lunch with Mike Rosenfeld, one of my partners, and myself, said that Paul was having a rough time. And we she asked if, you know, we'd meet with him, and I I we yeah. When she asked that, we couldn't believe she even asked that. We almost came across the table to give her a big hug, and she set up a meeting for me with Paul. And he and I just hit it off. We liked a lot of the same things. I felt that the work that he was doing, although great, was with the wrong kinds of filmmakers and immediately talked about how we could turn things around for him, and we did. What does it mean the wrong kinds of filmmakers? Like, how were you able to not that you couldn't, but how how did you make that assessment? So Paul was working with really talented filmmakers, but filmmakers that weren't known to make movies that really weren't, for popular culture. So, if you worked with, and you did a movie that was a cult favorite like Slapshot, at the time, no one went to see it. Or if you did Buffalo Bill and the Indians, nice film, but no one went to see it. Or if you you know? And it it's tough. Bob Altman's a genius director, but aside from M*A*S*H, he made a lot of small films. Paul's a big movie star. You wanna make a small film? Make it every third film, not every film. So Paul had done 3 films in a row that weren't well received, and we turned it around, put him into 2 films where he was nominated Academy Award and then won an Academy Award. And, also, they were incredibly popular. And what's what's another client that you just, you know, hit every angle to sign them as a client? I think almost everybody. I mean, it was the same for everybody. You want someone, you go after them, hard and heavy, and you have to come up with a game plan. Each one's different, by the way. You can't have the same technique or game plan with every creative person. They're all different. So so so give me an example of what a game plan means. So let's say you're going after Sydney Pollack was a very critical client to the agency. He's a man at a young age who had achieved great success. He did a movie called they shoot horses. He did 3 days of the Condor. He was someone that I felt was what I considered to be a key client for the company. There were certain directors that I felt we had to have. Sydney was 1. Marty Scorsese was another one. Michael Mann, Stanley Kubrick. These were people that had gravitas in the community. So Sydney, I knew was a voracious reader, and I started to just bombard him with material. And he wasn't our client, but I sent every book that was being published to him first. He saw every book out of the publishing houses in New York. The minute it was available, he saw it. And then I started meeting with him and meeting with him and meeting with him, and I never stopped. And I'd go to his office almost twice a week and just sit out there until he'd see me. I'd go in and talk to him for 10, 15 minutes, and I always brought a book. Always. And the more we talked, the more we realized we had things in common. And then low and bold, one day, he said to me, you know, I'm gonna take a chance with you guys. We were young. We were aggressive, and he took a huge chance with us. And he was one of the pillars of building the company. So I see. So you would kind of take their particular skill set and talents, you know, align yourself with that skill set, and then just be ubiquitous in terms of how you would, you know, flood the potential client with, you know, both your acumen in the skill set and your access in the skill set, and and then you would just be there if they wanted to talk to you about it. And we also made sure that there was nothing that they didn't know about. We passed on information. And the good news was that his agent was very old fashioned and a little sleepy. Our staff meetings would start at 8:30. Other company staff meetings started at 9:30 or 10. We would get out of our staff meeting at 10:30 when everyone else was just in the middle of theirs and be using all this information that we gathered in a staff meeting to call other people's clients to give them information. We also didn't hoard information. We shared it, which sounds kinda hokey, but it really made a critical difference in how we signed people. No. I think I think, actually, that's a critical thing. I think people are have a scarcity complex when it comes to information. They're afraid to share, quote, unquote, secrets. But, ultimately, a secret from yesterday is common news today. So, you know, living with that attitude, again, it it befriends you with with everybody you're giving information to. And and and it's good. So if you were to try to sign let's say you were starting an agency right now, and you wanted to sign, you you mentioned earlier, Jennifer Lawrence. What would what would how would you start to conceive of a game plan? Well, I just we'd look at her, what she's done. We would look at what we think she should do, and we'd look at what we think she would like to do. And we'd try to put ideas together for that and then find some way to get in to talk to her. And it's a long process. It doesn't happen in a single meeting. Yeah. Like, would you think like, now, superstars like her often get into either clothing lines or makeup lines or food lines. Part of the plan, depending on what they wanna do. Some like it. Some don't. Listen, Newman. I used to go to lunch with Paul every couple weeks. It was always fun. We we had the greatest discussions. We both had a passion for cars. And as you know, he was a, a race car driver. I never was that talented. I cracked up my share of sports cars, but I loved driving. So we'd talk about it all the time. And every time we went to lunch, we'd go to the same place, La Scala in Beverly Hills. It's not there anymore, or the old one isn't there. Every time we sat down, the maitre d' would bring Paul olive oil and condiments to make salad dressing. And while we're talking, Paul's mixing salad dressing. And in the course of that, one day, we were talking, and he was running out of Paul was incredibly charitable. But in order to give money away, you have to make it. And Paul's income was flattening out as he got older, and he wanted to give money away. So we came up with this idea to sell his salad dressing. At first, he thought it was kinda dopey because he didn't think anybody would buy it. We did a test in Beverly Hills at a local, market, Sold hundreds of bottles out in a couple hours, and it was the beginning of Newman's Own and which is a 100% of the profits go to charity. That was Paul Newman. And then how how did he expand that to to get shelf space basically in every single store in the country? Well, he did what is a really good business principle. He conquered each silo and then went to the next. So when salad dressing really went through the roof, he then went into popcorn and then did a chocolate, and he went into marinara sauce. And he just took one at a time. He didn't do them all at once. So so after all of this, you're 20 years CAA. You decide, hey, I wanna be on the other side. And, after, you know, maybe a mishap in the negotiations with MCA, you settled on working with your old friend, Michael Eisenberg, and becoming the number 2 guy at Disney. Right. And so my my my first question there is, you know, although the book, of course, is written in retrospect, it seems like a lot of your dealings with Michael Eisner, when when you were when you were an agent weren't necessarily the most positive experiences. You were good friends with him, but it didn't seem you know, like, what could you say he did for Disney as a leader before you joined? Oh, he did an amazing job for them. They were kind of a sleepy has been company making one animated movie a year. He went in and reinvigorated everything. He reinvigorated their film business, which was nonexistent, their television business, which was nonexistent, and did extraordinary, creative things with their theme parks. So when he when he offered you this opportunity, was it, like, a no brainer that you would take it? Like, did you feel you're, okay. I'm gonna be the successor. I'm gonna eventually run this. About being a successor. I was at the time, I was in my late forties. I was pretty much done being an agent. I it was a a grind that I just didn't wanna do anymore. And, frankly, I didn't think there was much more I could do from what I had done. So I was looking for something to do. The MCA thing, for a whole series of reasons, just didn't seem right to me. And, Disney this what happened with Disney, which was interesting to me, is they were gonna merge with ABC, which I knew way ahead of time because he told me. And then he had a heart attack. And we were close enough and that I spent enough time with him in the hospital where it was very clear to me that he needed help and that I could possibly come in, and the 2 of us would be an amazing team together because we had this behemoth companies, the 2 of them, to run. And secondly, we talked about great teams, Roberto Goizueta and Don Kio, the chairman and president of Coke, Bob Daly and Terry Semmel, the the chairman and president of Warner's, Tom Murphy and Dan Burke, Cap Cities. These were these were really amazing teams, executive teams, and we thought Eisnerovitz could do that too. And then I figured I'd spend 5, 6 years there, and then I could go into public service. And it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. But, like, you take, like, Bob Daly and Terry Semmel. It was hard to tell at Warner Brothers where one ended and the other began. Like Right. But that seamlessness is a great team. Right. And but with Michael Eisner and you're so good at kind of looking at a person and understanding them and what their talents are and what you could do with them. Did you see any warning signs in advance that, hey. There might be a little too much ego. This a lot of people can't have a number 2. I didn't see it at the time. Mainly, what mitigated it is is health. So I assumed that was gonna make it pretty easy for us to do this. And naive or not, I if I look back on it, I'd probably, calculate it the same way. I mean, you could probably could have done something similar to what, you know, Spielberg and Katzenberg and Geffen did, which was find a bunch of people and start your own studio. Talked about it, but I really had done started a business. Starting a business is really hard. It's when I'm up in the valley working with these young entrepreneurs, it is hard. And I can under one of the reasons I get along with a lot of these young men and women up there is that I did it. And I know there are not enough hours in the day or the week to do what you have to do. So, you know, then you get to Disney, and some of the things that you proposed to Disney were amazing. Like, for instance, you could have bought, an early stake in Yahoo for for pennies of what it would have been eventually worth, or you could have, you know, brought on all you know, exclusive deals with people like Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, these amazing authors, or you could have brought Janet Jackson on board. Like, why do you think on what's or you could have bought the the book company Putnam. Why do you think, on such no brainer deals, Michael Eisner just simply said no? It's kinda the difference between Eisner and Bob Iger. Eisner wanted everything homegrown, and Iger has gone out and bought Pixar, Marvel, and Lucas, which has changed the face of the business. Eisner didn't want to buy anything. He wanted to grow it all. But he bought ABC? He did buy ABC. It was the only thing that he bought. He wanted a I always think he bought ABC, a, because he wanted a broadcast network, and b, because he worked there. And I think it was kinda like old home week for him. By the way, it was the right thing to do. He made a good move in buying ABC. Nothing wrong with it. But look. I you have to look prior to the things that I brought in to understand that they never were gonna work from the day I walked into his house before I even had my first day. And the CFO and the chief legal officer announced in front of me, they weren't gonna report to me. And instead of him backing me, he just sat there and didn't say anything. Right then and there, I knew that it was done. It was over. What could would do you regret anything you did in terms of, like I mean, that was 2 years of your life. Like, could you have turned out turned away, walked out the door, and started something else? Couldn't have done it. It was too late. I already had a contract. If I quit, I would have lost any of my rights for that contract. I'd already turned CA over to 9 other guys. Ron Meyer had gone to Universal. We were done, and we had had our chapter in the agency business. So I was committed to see it out. Naively, I thought that I could turn it around. I figured, you know what? I'm gonna go in there. No one works harder than me, so I'm gonna I'm gonna work my way through this. Unfortunately, the harder I worked, the worse it got. And, you know, you left, Disney in in 97, and there's been now you you you masterfully reinvented your life completely out of Hollywood, and you spend now you've you've spent and spend a good amount of time with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz, entrepreneurs ranging ranging from, you know, Peter Thiel, who we mentioned earlier, to Airbnb and and many others. What skill set did you bring from Hollywood and CAA that kind of worked very well when you brought it into the Silicon Valley world? So it's really interesting, and it's a great question. It's all the same. So to me, my whole life has been about discovering talent, and it's about sitting across from someone and trying to decide very quickly, do they have some talent and in what area? I am up in a neighborhood that is very similar to the neighborhood I was in in the sixties seventies when we started CA in 74, but in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties entertainment business. The valley is flush with young men and women who have great ideas. It's collaborative. There's plenty of money to finance. There is this can do attitude that we can do anything. Everything's about disruption, which has really always been interesting to me because CA disrupted an entire business from top to bottom. So I'm up there, and what do I do? I meet with young people, and I'm incredibly, lucky that I get to sit across these talented people. I just have to make sure that I pick the right ones. So, yeah, what what are the metrics you use? What what tells you someone and and you have this enormous skill at it. What tells you someone is talented, whether it's in Hollywood or Silicon Valley or Wall Street or whatever? Well, first of all, it's a combination of when my stomach and my brain meet, something clicks in me. A lot of it has to do with sitting across from someone and listening to them talk, understanding where they come from, their ideas, how their their views on things. It's a it's a kind of locus of points. Reminds me of a Seurat painting. You know, you look at a Seurat pointillist painting, which is a series of dots, and you look at 1 inch square, you don't see anything. You look at 2 inches square, not much. 3, 4, 5. 6 inches square, maybe you see something. And it's the same thing with sitting with someone. You start to sit and you listen and listen and listen and you talk, and then you get some sense from the person. And it's just a feeling. There's no this is an art form. It's not a science. And so, finally, you know and, again, when I first got this book, I I couldn't put it down. I just I read for 8 hours straight. I woke up the next morning, kept reading. It was just it's just a fantastic book because it's titled, you know, of course, Who is Michael Ovitz? I love how the cover is so spare. It's just got the title on it, then the the red. And there's so many stories about kind of the cultural history I grew up with, plus being able to see and analyze your success. And, but at the very last line of the book, is is sort of poignant, and it's the last line is called, I miss the people. And what what do you mean by that line? Well, it it it hit me when I was walking through the building that we built for the agency. And the juxtaposition of being in the building empty versus 20 years before where you'd walk in and the energy and excitement in the building was contagious. The atrium was filled with electricity from the 600 people that were running around there doing business for the clients. And I walked around, and I just looked and looked and looked, and it just dawned on me. I don't miss the day to day insanity of the agency business. I don't miss coming home to 30 phone messages after dinner. I don't miss the schedule that I kept from, you know, 5:30 in the morning until 1 o'clock in the morning every single day working. But what I do miss are the relationships with the people. We had a great group of people working together and relationships with some of the clients that we had. Just the human being part I miss a lot. And what what do you look forward to now? I just love going up to the valley. I'm very interested right now in biotech and bioscience, and I feel like I'm a freshman at UCLA again and learning about things in a vocabulary that is all new for me, so that's exciting. Well, Michael Ovitz, thank you so much for for coming on the podcast. It was so great to read Who is Michael Ovitz? I again, if you're interested in the history of Hollywood over the past 50 years, if you're interested in success, if you're interested in Michael Ovitz, this is such a great book, and I've I learned a lot from it in addition to being entertained from it. So thanks for answering my questions. Well, thanks for having me. It was great, and thanks for reading the book. Oh, you're very welcome. And you really read it. Yeah. Yeah. No. I this is marked up. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Michael. That was Thank you. That was great.