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Who Is Michael Ovitz?, in detail
Who Is Michael Ovitz? is the memoir of the man who built Creative Artists Agency into the most powerful talent agency in Hollywood and then, in the space of a few years, lost nearly everything. Ovitz co-founded CAA in 1975 with four other junior agents, and by the late 1980s the agency represented virtually every major Hollywood star and director. He pioneered the package deal — bundling clients together into a single offer to studios — and used that leverage to shift power in the film industry from studios to talent for the first time.
The first half of the book is the rise. Ovitz describes building CAA with a discipline and secrecy that he explicitly modeled on the CIA and Japanese business culture. Agents shared information internally and protected it externally. He worked punishing hours and expected the same from his team. The culture he created was admired and feared in equal measure, and the book is most interesting here, when Ovitz is describing how an organization built on information asymmetry actually functions day to day.
The second half is harder to read. In 1995 Ovitz accepted a role as President of Walt Disney Company under Michael Eisner, a decision he describes as the biggest mistake of his career. The Disney tenure lasted fourteen months. Ovitz paints Eisner as a manipulative, vindictive boss who isolated him from the moment he arrived, and the subsequent legal battle over his severance package — which ended with Ovitz receiving $140 million — consumed years of his life. He also addresses, carefully, allegations that he used intimidation and blacklisting to silence critics and enemies.
The memoir is largely self-serving, and Ovitz is aware enough of that reputation to address it directly, without fully escaping it. There are passages of genuine candor — about his ambition, his tunnel vision, his damaged family relationships — and passages that read as score-settling dressed as reflection. Readers looking for a fully balanced account of Ovitz's career will need to supplement with other sources. But as a window into how power actually works in the entertainment industry, and how quickly it can evaporate, the book is worth the time.
The big ideas
- 1.
Packaging deals — combining a writer, director, and star from the same agency into a single offer — shifted power from studios to talent agencies and became the dominant model of Hollywood deal-making.
- 2.
Ovitz modeled CAA's culture on organizational principles borrowed from the CIA and Japanese corporate structure: strict hierarchy, internal information sharing, external opacity.
- 3.
The same ruthlessness that builds power rarely translates into the consensus-building required to hold institutional authority. Ovitz was far more effective as an outside operator than as an inside executive.
