Michael Ovitz

Michael Steven Ovitz (born December 14, 1946) is an American businessman. He was a talent agent who co-founded Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in 1975 and served as its chairman until 1995. Ovitz later served as president of The Walt Disney Company for only 16 months from October 1995 to January 1997.

Ovitz was born to a Romanian Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois, the son of a liquor wholesaler. Raised in Encino, Los Angeles, he was student body president at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, a classmate of Sally Field and Michael Milken.^{[citation needed]}

Ovitz graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in psychology. While a student at UCLA and president of Zeta Beta Tau, he began his entertainment career as a part-time tour guide at Universal Studios.

After his graduation from UCLA, Ovitz secured a job in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency. From there, he left for law school but returned shortly (something William Morris normally did not allow). He was soon promoted, eventually becoming a highly successful television agent. Six years later, he and four other young colleagues left William Morris to found Creative Artists Agency.

Dissatisfied with his pay and promotion opportunities, Ovitz and fellow William Morris agents Ronald Meyer, William Haber, Rowland Perkins and Michael S. Rosenfeld planned to form their own agency after raising money. Learning of their plans, William Morris fired them in January 1975. Borrowing $21,000 from a bank, the agents rented a small office, conducting business on card tables and rented chairs, their wives taking turns as agency receptionist.

Ovitz reportedly had three new film packaging deals sold in the first week. Within four years CAA had $90.2 million in annual bookings and was the third-largest Hollywood agency. Under his direction, CAA quickly grew from a start-up organization to the world's leading talent agency, expanding from television into film, investment banking and advertising. Ovitz was known for assembling package deals, wherein CAA would utilize its talent base to provide directors, actors and screenwriters to a studio, thus shifting the negotiating leverage from the studios to the talent. As CAA rose in stature Ovitz became one of the most powerful men in Hollywood; he was so influential that, when The New York Times wrote about him in 1989, industry executives, directors, and actors refused to comment or would only do so if CAA allowed it.

Promoted to president then to chairman of the board, Ovitz's roles at CAA were numerous. He served as talent agent to Hollywood actors Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Costner, John Belushi, Michael Douglas, Bill Murray, Sylvester Stallone and Barbra Streisand as well as directors Steven Spielberg, Barry Levinson, and Sydney Pollack. He also provided corporate consulting services, helping negotiate several major international business mergers and deals including Matsushita's acquisition of MCA/Universal, the financial rescue of MGM/United Artists, and Sony's acquisition of Columbia Pictures. Ovitz's signing of Coca-Cola as a CAA client from agency McCann-Erickson had a significant impact on the advertising industry. He negotiated David Letterman's move from NBC to CBS, chronicled in the book The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night by Bill Carter. He disliked publicity, however, with the Times reporting that "Ovitz is one of the very few people in the world who own almost all the photographs ever taken of them".

Ovitz resigned from CAA in 1995 to become president of The Walt Disney Company under chairman Michael Eisner. Ovitz quickly grew frustrated with his role in the company and vague definition of duties. After a tumultuous year as Eisner's second in command, he was dismissed by Eisner in January 1997 and left Disney with a (previously agreed-upon) severance package valued at $38 million in cash and an estimated $100 million in stock.