As Michael Ovitz reached his breaking point at the all-powerful talent agency C.A.A., which he had run like a warlord since cofounding it in 1975, he did the unthinkable: He insulted a superstar. It was 1995. Barbra Streisand was on the phone, complaining at length about sexism and unequal pay for women in Hollywood, when Ovitz blew a fuse. 'Barbra,' he said, 'you know my 15-year-old son? All he and his friends think about is girls, but you’re no longer on their list.' ... Ovitz is in his 70s, and claims that he’s trying to make peace with his rivals and amends for his terrible reputation. He’s written this book hoping to accomplish that, but the memoir defines him better than he might like. Who is Michael Ovitz? A killer turned would-be sage. A visionary who won’t look inward. A guy who can’t get over who he used to be.
Few careers in the entertainment business have been as tumultuous as that of former Hollywood super agent Michael Ovitz. After co-founding Creative Artists Agency in 1975, a powerhouse that represented the likes of Robert De Niro, Bill Murray and Paul Newman, Mr. Ovitz built a reputation as one of the most powerful and ruthless men in Hollywood. He left CAA in 1995 to join Disney , expecting one day to run the company. Instead he was fired 14 months later. Industry executives excoriated him in the press. 'He created a lot of enemies,' a 'Hollywood power' told Fortune ... More than two decades after his ouster, Mr. Ovitz, now 71, is telling his story in a new memoir, 'Who is Michael Ovitz?'.
Michael Ovitz answers these questions [about his celebrity clients] and more with flair and no false modesty ... this book is delicious, and, yes, a bit malicious, as it settles scores. The writing engages and amuses throughout, even the sideswipes.
By the mid-1980s, Michael Ovitz boasts, he was the most feared man in Hollywood: 'I was a control freak. A shape-shifting machine. A Terminator.' ... Given what a huge name he once was, it is surprising how little is known about him, but he always believed that 'mystique was better than publicity' and rarely gave interviews. He claims in this memoir that he was a perfectly normal, laid-back young man until he arrived in Hollywood, but that seems unlikely ... He spent 15 years designing and building his dream home in Beverly Hills to house his art — it would be 'a miniature MoMA with bedrooms' — but 'The worst day of all was the day I moved in, because then it was done.' He still owns the old CAA office designed by IM Pei that he was so proud of building, but when he recently revisited it, empty, 'It felt small.' The same might be said of him. But we can conclude, at least, that this book is mostly honest, and therefore a useful contribution to the history of Hollywood, because it is so self-damaging.
Who is Michael Ovitz? reads more like an essay question than the title of a book but it is a good one, since most people will have forgotten the former Hollywood agent ... Ovitz’s memoir is a fascinating study of how one agency managed to alter the balance of forces in an industry, usurping the role of studios by cornering access to talent ... There is an absence from Who is Michael Ovitz? that somehow feels symbolic. The book has no acknowledgments, nor any mention of the ghostwriter — an extremely skilled one, to judge by the result — that Ovitz appears to have employed. No one is permitted to share credit with the star.
Is Michael Ovitz, the confessional diarist, truly changed? The delightfully self-deprecating kickers at the end of many sub-chapters in Who Is Michael Ovitz? could certainly make you think so. 'I had become everything I detested in the sixties when I was a bleeding-heart liberal at UCLA — the very symbol of the establishment. I had become The Man,' Ovitz writes of his now-gone power persona. 'The win, nowadays, is breaking even. But I’ll take it,' he says in summing up a late attempt at reconciling with David Geffen. As for his final thought about show business, it is purely personal. 'I miss the people,' he says. But can you trust it? Does Ovitz really at least half-regrets the self-described vindictiveness, meant to instill fear in enemies of CAA, and convince clients and agents that they would be much safer inside the fold than out? Or is this just another construct, a tactical lie designed to soften the Ovitz image in old age, and make him seem more approachable, more Yoda-like, to the younger Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with whom he now works ... So is the memoir a genuine bid for redemption? Or is it one more deceptive tool in a bottomless kit? Even Michael Ovitz may not know the answer.
Who Is Michael Ovitz? is no better written than an email from the boss to the guys. But that’s its proper and very readable style. We should guard against Ovitz’s calm vanity in interpreting all the deals. Some have seen the book as a grandiloquent and self-serving celebration of the way efficiency killed Hollywood, following decades in which the business had been lyrically unbusinesslike. But while there can be no doubt that Ovitz was a uniquely obsessed operative, if it hadn’t been him it would have been someone else. There was once an age when uneducated vulgarians who had escaped Europe made raw pictures that thrilled the world. But their business grew so large it became part of the conglomerated media industry. In the process, the vibrant mainstream picture – dreams for everyone – died, and expertise is part of what smothered it.
