Bill Murray and Michael Ovitz in Conversation

How about that United Nations. And they're all here, and they're all. None of them are very good drivers, it appears. Well, it's nice to be back here in the Y again. What's the one on 63rd street called? Is that the McBurney? This is the Lawson Y, Right. Or is that the Lawson who's a member? Okay. Anyway, for a while, I lived in that y over on 63rd Street. And that's where the song came from. And all I remember is I had no money. I had a single bed, and they had green soap, like a big green bar of soap. Anyway, how times have changed. I could use a shower right now. Okay, well, it's not movie night tonight. It's book night here at the Y. And it's wonderful. I didn't realize you all got a copy of the book Just for coming. This is like Oprah, right? This is pretty good, right? Everyone gets a book. What's going to be under your seat when you leave? You never know. Okay, so this is very, very funny. So this fellow who's going to be here in a minute, he used to be my show business agent back when I was in show business. And he became famous for being very good at it. He really changed the way people did it. And there are People say all kinds of things about him. Really, really all kinds of things about him. And I've said all kinds of things about him, too. So feel free to just shout it out. It's like it's practically Tourette's night here tonight. We can just. Anything you're feeling, I'm with you. This is the why. You know, we are many hands. Everybody, everybody, just. Can you grab the hand of the person next to you? Just grab the person next to you and look them in the eye and say, whatever I say about you, I'm going to mean later on. Okay. All right. So he's here to answer the question. Let's not waste any more time. Let's bring him out here. His name. His name is Michael Ovitz. Michael.

Okay. You have never lost it. Thank you.

So I'm going to talk for a long time because Mike's got no chops. No chops whatsoever.

I am petrified.

When he asked me if I would do this thing, he actually asked. He used a very professional technique. I think he asked, like, 21 people, and I'm the only one that answered the phone. It's who. Richard Benjamin told that joke. So. And when I got the book and it has the. Who's got a big red Copy. He'll show it up. It looks like that. And I said, he's written a book. And the copy, the title is who is what really looks funny is if you take the red cover off. Can you do that now? Can we all take a moment to take your red cover off? And when you look at the spine, it says, who is Michael Ovitz? Michael Ovitz. Who could possibly be less qualified to answer the question? Right? No kidding. This is ridiculous. It's hilarious. I laughed maybe for like a whole minute straight, just looking at it, shaking, looking at it every direction. It looked funny upside down, looking at this thing. Anyway. Anyway. What made you think that anyone wanted to hear your story?

Thank you. I have to go. It was really great. I have to go now.

Really. It's really. It's so much fun. I'm just going to keep talking because he's blushing. Isn't it great to see the most powerful man in show business blushing? Great. Like it. But as when I was asked to do this, I have really no questioning skills. I don't do very well. I can't get directions in a car. I listen to him nod my head and then drive in the wrong direction immediately. But aside from looking at this thing over and over again, which I'm going to do, I immediately did what any one of us, any sane person, would do. I went directly to the index to see if I was actually mentioned in the book.

Right?

So I go and I look to see, am I in the book? And there's that horrifying moment where you go, like, newsweek, Newman, Metropolitan Museum. Wait, I'm not here. And then all of a sudden, you see it and you're like, okay. And then you can't resist looking it up. And what I find so charming is I immediately look to the stories that I'm involved in. And Mike's version of the truth is so shaky. He really did not see it the way I saw it, really, ever. So this is an experiment for me to see what people can get away with when they write a story and tell their version of it. And I've learned that the last guy living gets to tell the story. So I'm trying to take great care of myself. This is just black coffee. Nothing in it. There's no Jameson's in it yet. It's just black coffee. So how do you go about telling a story that. And I don't want to. And one thing I told myself was, I wasn't going to say there's a famous. I don't want anyone to shout it out to just because you get around or anything. But there's a famous Japanese movie that for a period of about 12 years, everyone in Hollywood just say, oh, yeah. And then they would say the name of this famous Japanese movie which is famous for showing how like six different people look at the same same event and tell the same story from different points of view. So there's also the one about the guy in the cave with an elephant and all those kinds of things. But how do you have the nerve to tell a story knowing that it's a bubbling story? It's like there's popcorn underneath the story. Like when you tell. You've got some really good ones in here. There's some powerful moments in the sort of modern history of show business. You were there for them, you created them and then you described them. How do you write that piece without seeming incredibly either falsely humble or accidentally arrogant or vain or something? How do you try to write that story in a sort of even handed way? Tell us about what it's like to reflect on those stories after. I mean, the heat of them in the moment must have been very exhilarating and frightening, frustrating, hilarious. But how do you write about it and tell it as a storyteller?

So first of all, there are a number of stories about you and I which I'm sure we will disagree about, but it's in the book and it's in writing. So we'll wait for your book. I was really lucky in that I kept notes from day one.

Really?

Yeah. I had notes on almost everything. The notes that were troublesome were eliminated. But basically I decided to try to tell something from my point of view. But this book started in a different way. It started with a conversation I had with Adrian Zakheim, publisher, editor. And we were gonna do a book called 10 Deals. And in the 10 deals were 10 of the most interesting deals that I thought I had done at C. It's.

Sort of like a Rachel Ray thing, you know, 10 fast meals, but 10 deals. So 10 deals. Yeah. And what happened to that? That sounds like a good. And what. What's the name? What company is this?

It's Penguin. Penguin Random House.

They're legit. Penguin.

They're legit. Actually, the truth is that's what's on the COVID But this was really one of those self publishing deals on the Internet. Anyways. 10 deals, 10 deals. And as I started writing it, I started turning in pages and then working on it. Some friends were helping recall the events, calling around to different people that were involved in the deals. And then Adrian kept asking for more and more, and I started filling things in. And then four years ago, my oldest son, Chris, and his wife, Era, was pregnant with what was going to be my first grandson, who was sitting here someplace, but I don't know where.

We have to hold for applause. Now he's got a grandchild. Come on.

Thank you. I decided that it would be good to put everything down for posterity and then let it fall where it falls. And I'm sure a lot of people would have the same point of view you did. There's two sides to every story. I put my side in.

No. And it's true. Even people say to me, oh, do you remember that time such and such a thing happened? And you go, let me tell it. And then they tell it, and it's not at all like it happened. It's just sort of funny.

Well, it just happened when I mentioned to you in the green room that I forgot when you called me from the Taj Mahal when I couldn't find you, when you were about to start.

Why didn't you look at the Taj Mike?

Because I just. I missed it. So we're about to start Ghostbusters, and we can't find Bill calling everybody. You could think of every number. We had. All of his friends called his brother Brian Doyle. We called everybody, couldn't find him. And all of a sudden, I'm sitting in my office and I get a. My assistant comes in and says, bill Murray's on the phone. I said, oh, thank God. Start date was, I think, two, three days later. And he said, how you doing? I said, oh, I'm doing great, but, I mean, we're a little concerned. You need to be on set. And he said, well, I'm at the Taj Mahal. And I said, yeah, sure you are. And he said, hey, hold on. He started putting people on the phone, and lo and behold, he's at the Taj Mahal. He wasn't kidding. So I thought that was before Stripes. And I realized, as we discussed, which makes your point about two sides to every story, but it wasn't before Stripes. You disappeared before Stripes as well. That one. We couldn't find you. And the best thing is, when you showed up, you hadn't read the script yet, which I thought was really interesting.

I'm a quick study.

What he's not saying is that an enormous amount of that movie was improvised and brilliantly by him, and which happened also again in Tutsi, as a matter of fact.

Why am I Sweating up here. Why do I feel like I'm in trouble?

Because you started in on me, and I'm just telling you.

First of all. Yeah, first of all, I wasn't going to look at the Taj Mahal. I was looking at the carriage house.

It sounded better.

The three people, my relatives. Like that one. I like guest house. Okay, so. But you didn't answer the question. You said a little bit about the different points of view. What did you write this thing on? And what kind of material did you use? Were you on a typewriter, a keyboard, a touch screen, pencil and paper? I mean, I'm already disappointed because he took notes. How many of you studied and took notes in high school and college? Raise your hand. See, I. You, Billy, I never studied. And anyone that took notes, I didn't trust, and he. From day one, he took notes. That's amazing to me. It's amazing.

I had a calendar, so I kept the notes.

Okay, so what did you write this thing on?

I did an outline longhand. I worked with some friends. I did most of it verbally and then had it all typed up and then edited and edited and edited. And I was really fortunate. I had terrific editors, Will Weiser, Adrian Zakheim. And I had friends that helped me get passages right, and I had a couple of friends who would ask me a lot of questions, and it pulled a lot of things out of it. Out of me.

Right, so you. No, I wrote a book, too, and there are no copies available this evening. But. And I. I remember reading sort of Celebrity, and you qualify as a celebrity because you're famous or you're going to be after this book comes out. And I was always amazed by. They seemed so lightweight. They seemed like wafers, the books. And I realized later it was because people dictated the movies, dictated the books, and they would just transcribe them. And for an actor to write a book that's transcribed is like losing half of his tools. He doesn't have his face, he doesn't have his body, has no timing, doesn't have any timbre to his voice, nothing. So when you read it flat, it seems very, very flat. So when I had to write a book, I did the very same thing, and I dictated a lot of things. And then it was transcribed, and I went, no, this can't be what I said. This can't be it. Because it comes. Comes off so dull. But yours does not come off that way. It comes off much more powerfully. And there's a beautiful passage at the very end for those of you who really don't want to read the book. Just go to. There's a beautiful passage at the very end. And all I can think was, wow, that's very, very moving. Who wrote it? Who wrote this last thing? Mike.

Who wrote it, which was the last thing.

I know it was just you walking around the old building that you built on Wilshire Boulevard, the old ceiling building. It's a beautiful couple of paragraphs at the end there. I found it moving.

Thank you.

And I thought that's pretty good. And it had real feeling to it. It really sort of. It's funny to watch, to read this thing and see you bounce all over the place. Because people think there are people that have dolls of Mike. Beautiful, ornate dolls with gorgeous, gorgeous ruby, sapphire and amethyst pink pins stuck into various parts of Mike's body. But then there are other people that find him to be just hilariously amusing. Once a year, Mike would let go. He's like my son Luke, who keeps it together, gives you the straight face most of the time. But once a year, I'd get on the phone with Mike and I really adored this moment. And you could see him prowling around this big floor to ceiling glass office of his that he could see the whole horizon of Hollywood. And I could just visualize him walking with the headphone attached. And he would just start talking about like an executive at that studio. And he went from. I could see his head turning. Paramount, Universal, just going across town and he would just tell Savageness. Just rip every single one of them for about an hour. And it was funnier than any comedian that I knew. It was really funnier than anything. Much funnier than I ever was. About the same people. But it was fun. You would keep it in for the whole year and then let it go. So this is not that.

No, this is not that. Actually, it's your next book. Because you were the only person I did that with. You were a great listener.

Well, I, you know, we hated the same people. We disagreed about something, but we hated like brothers, like Knights Templar. We were so hateful of. Was great. Okay, so you wrote this thing on a. What? You wrote it longhand and then you sort of someone people were helping you. But then did you ever. Did you ever get. I want to know about what the sensation was when you actually put pen to paper or pencil to paper or your fingers on a keyboard.

So, you know, it's not what happened to you then.

That's what I found most interesting.

Not similar to what you used to do when you'd call me and say you wanted people on the set. Which I thought was an amazing, amazing idea. Because when you're doing comedy and you didn't have people to play to, it was vacuous. It was like a. It was like playing an open air theater. So you'd call and you'd want to have people on the set. And I never really understood it really well, I thought that it made some sense that you'd want an audience beyond the crew. And then when I was doing this, it was really important to be able to talk to somebody because you have to get feedback and you need people to pull things out of you. And I remember on when you did Ghostbusters and Stripes, you wanted to have people out.

Well, Tootsie was the one. Let's talk about Tootsie a little bit.

Tootsie was. Well, let's first tell the audience. When the script of Tootsie was done, there was no role for Bill's character. It didn't exist. And we talked a lot about it and Bill liked the idea, I think, of working with Dustin and Sidney. And remember when we went over there that time?

See, that's another one. I'm gonna get the story straight for you now. Okay? So he tells the story completely wrong in the book. And when you get to it, I want you to stand up and say, no, I'm not gonna stand for this. But that was a case of. Mike was really good of at. What they do in his business is they get a piece of everyone in the movie. And if they can get all their people in the movie, they get everyone in it. Then every time everyone gets paid, he gets paid. It's great. We should all have such a job. It's like Amway, but better. But better. But better. Who's got. We're not talking Amway money over here. Kay, folks, but that was an interesting case. And since we're talking about Dustin Hoffman, I just want to say Dustin Hoffman is a great man and a really good guy. And I heard what happened to him. And Dustin Hoffman is a really decent person. He's a crazy, like a borsch belt flirt. He has been his whole life, but he is a really sweet man.

Why don't we talk about when we went to the to meet them?

Yeah, okay. Yeah, so this is a good story. So he sets this up. It was an example of it. So it's Dustin. No one even remembers I'm in the movie. It's Dustin Hoffman's in the movie and Sidney Pollack is the director. There's a man named Frank Price who's the head of the Columbia Studios and his wife is having a birthday in New York. Why they're in New York, I don't know. But somehow Mike figures out to get me invited to this party. Now I kind of know Frank Price because I made a movie over there. I don't really know his wife. I don't know Dustin, I don't know Sydney, I don't know Lisa, Dustin's wife. I don't know Claire. I don't know any of these people. But I'm there. But given a bunch of Hollywood guys in an Italian restaurant in New York, I come off the funniest. It wasn't that hard, ok? And my wife Mickey was there. And we're looking at each other going, what are we doing here? I don't know. So it turned out that Dustin and Sidney had this funny relationship where they would. Have we boring you yet? Tell me when it. I want just to you hold them up slowly, okay? They had this funny relationship where they would fight about everything. They just fought about everything. I don't know why. And they fought about everything. And so after the dinner I actually know how to drive a car. So I gave Dustin and his wife a ride home. I said, you want a ride? What? You know, you have a car? Do you drive a car? So I drove him home. And the next day he calls up Sidney and says, I don't want Larry Luckinbill to play my roommate. I want Bill Murray to play my roommate. Dustin Hoffman had known me for like four hours. But it was an argument of a point to make an argument with Sidney, you know. So Mike acts like he didn't do this, but he did do this. There's no reason I was at this dinner. So it turns out that I end up getting the job. And then says, Mike says, come on, we're going to go over to CBS studios on 57th Street. We're going to meet him. And Dustin, God bless him, he's the greatest. He threw a screaming fit that was hilarious. That went on for like 20 minutes. And you'll excuse my language, but he said, I ain't fucking Robert Redford. Which when you yell that because Sidney Pogg made about nine movies with Robert Redford, you know, so they have pictures of each other, you know. But he would just. That was just his go to. Whenever he didn't have anything else to say, that's what he would say. And it was great because I'm sitting there, he's going over here to Close the deal. And it's, you know, it's like soundproof glass, you know? And you see Dustin, the veins and the neck. And he's standing up on stuff, and he's slamming stuff down. And I'm looking at it, and he's humiliating. Mike's too totally embarrassed. And I'm going. And I know it's like 70% show business. I'm not worried at all about it. It's very, very funny. But it comes to the idea of getting with the people in the crowd, and they were fighting in the movies already in the papers, I've talked too much. But when I got to the first day on the set, first after ripping up the set, saying, who lives here? The Son of Sam. They showed me.

Let's talk about that.

Yeah, this is in the book. But they say, okay, you're gonna. You can read the book and you can hear the story. You can get it over with. This is books on tape. Okay.

Sort of. Bill comes down to the first of all. When we went to the. To see Dustin and Sidney, we were in a director's booth. It had one entrance, one exit. And when we got in, Bill kind of looked at me like, what have you gotten me into here? And as we started to try to walk out backwards, Dustin very skillfully blocked the door, if you recall, and just kept going. So we got to watch this. It lasted quite some time.

It was amazing. It was really a movie, just the two of them going. But I think Sidney holding.

One of the best moments for me is when you came to the set of the apartment that you and Dustin shared. And the set was designed by Sidney Pollock's brother, Bernie Pollock.

No, not exactly. See, this is the storytelling again.

Wait a minute. I've got that wrong.

Siddy's brother was the costumer.

I have it wrong. You're right. You're right.

It's the costumer.

You're right. I have it wrong. But Bernie was there, by the way.

Bernie was there.

He was there.

And they said, oh, you're going to shoot tomorrow morning, and here's your bedroom. It was in a loft apartment. And I walked into it, there was, like, a bed, and there was like a serape on the wall. You know, something like that. And maybe it was like a piece of celery in a glass or something. I don't know what. And I just said, who lives here? The Son of Sam. This is insane. This is. And I started throwing everything around and moving stuff around it. The crew all just went, huh? Okay. This ought to be Fun. But that's what happened was to get people interested in the movie. They were these two camps. They were Sidney's friends and Dustin's friends. And no one wanted to be near the camera because they were always fighting. Everyone was always back in the bar getting a drink. No one wanted to be watching the movie. And so I had to stir up a lot of trouble just to get people to come in and watch. And then once they all got in there, then we all got funny. And it's a funny movie. It's one of the best American funny movies ever, I think. It really is. And Dustin was great. And Elaine May was the one who said, you know, Dustin should have a roommate. So God bless Elaine May. She's really like the queen of everything as far as I'm concerned. If I'd met her when I was a young man, I'd have just. I don't know what I'd have done. Chained her to a typewriter is what I would have done. Tried to be funny, but. Okay. More stuff for you. You want to talk about your book? Okay, there's a couple. I made some notes and it is going to be Books on tape, because I did. I just thought, when I read this, I thought, oh God, this is too good. Someone's got to hear this out loud. Okay. And this is the kind of stuff that. Where it's interesting to me where you go back and forth in this thing. So you're talking about Michael Crichton. Everyone knows who he is, right? And you're talking about this, a pillar of CAA. That's his agency. CAA. CAA's philosophy was that we told our clients the truth. That didn't mean we told everyone else the truth. I often had to offer more than I could deliver in order to be able to eventually deliver what I had offered. If the truth was bad for us, we had to change the reality. Sounds familiar. And then deliver it as what we'd said it was all along. Right. In the meantime, well, you'd get creative. One of our best cover up jobs was convincing the town for two years that Michael was hard at work when he was actually curled up in a ball. We didn't get caught on this kind of smoke screen because it hardly ever served the client we were protecting to throw us under the bus. I never viewed this kind of misdirection as lying. Lying to me is a point blank misstatement with no purpose in mind. I viewed what we did as positioning, molding, manipulating, taking fact sets and making them work for the Result, we wanted that mindset underpinned every single conversation we had with the buyers and they had with us all day long. For instance, a studio exec calls me, that's enough. But that's just a wonderful piece of reading, isn't it? I don't view this kind of misdirection as lying. And there's a lot of this stuff. It's sick. It's really sick. It's all through the book. And it's almost. You're going to be pushing the person next to you in bed saying, you have to hear this. But so that kind of. And there's wonderful sequences in here where you guys just throw stuff out at each other. And I used to laugh at it. I used to just hold the phone out like this and just like visually just hold the phone away from my head like this. But. So now let's talk about the misdirection is lying thing. Now, you must have thought about this one a lot before you talked about this.

I thought about it because we had a, you know, Michael, who as you know, was a close friend as well as a client, and he was having a rough go of things. And it would have been very difficult for us to go out and say that Michael's not working. He's, you know, whatever the actual facts were, to be able to state that would have been really detrimental to him. And what we did is we told people he was working on an original. Now, you could say that that was a lie because was he really working on an original? We kept trying to get him to write, but he was blocked. He was totally blocked. He couldn't write. And for a prolific guy, that was really unusual. This is a man who wrote so many things, from books to movies to television shows. I mean, it's very rare you find someone this talented. And we made a decision. We had to protect him. And it worked out in the end because what came after that two years was he came in, I went to see him actually at his home, and he said, I've got an idea. What do you think? And the idea was, what do you think of three people involved in a park that has dinosaurs in it? And it was Jurassic Park. And I said, my God, what a great idea. Because I liked dinosaurs, my father liked dinosaurs, my son liked dinosaurs. And I just thought it was a brilliant one liner. And he went home and in five months he wrote Jurassic Park. And when he gave us the book, he gave me the galleys of Jurassic Park. We had been telling people, as Bill says, we'd Been not telling the truth that he had been writing. But we kind of told the truth because he wrote Jurassic Park. And when it came out, we put it together, gave the book to Stephen. Stephen read it in one night and committed to it the next morning, which is highly unusual.

Yeah, it is. One thing that I noticed, this molding and manipulation and positioning that Mike used to do. You could hear it. And there was a crazy. The thing about Mike that's so funny is he's kind of lovable. He's kind of lovable. And if. I mean, you can see how lovable he is, can't you? I mean, we have extra security to keep you back. But. And, but this. Mr. When you'd hear this positioning and this manipulating, you just have to cover your head and your face. That's the great thing about working in a telephone business, is that no one sees what the other person is doing on the other end of the line. It's really great. But there was a heart involved in it. That was what was kind of always fascinating to me that there were things that you would just go, oh, my God. But beneath it all, there was a heart beating underneath it. Just like those wonderful dinosaurs you loved as a kid. They too hit a heart. So now you built this company. So you built this company. We're just going to bop around a little bit. How many of you ever seen the CAA building in Los Angeles, California, or a picture of it? It's pretty amazing. It's right there next to flower shops.

And Wilson's House of Suede.

Wilson's House of Suede and Leather was its real competition for the architect, Architectural Landmark and Thrifty Rent a Car. It was all right there. And this fellow, IM Pei, Mike just completely. He's Chinese, right?

Yes.

So he just double talked a Chinese person, which I find charming as heck because I can't understand him at all. The Chinese and I go to PF Chang's and I love their food, but I don't know what the heck. I'm glad they have, like, locals, like from South Carolina working there because I would never understand what was going on otherwise. Anyway, it's a funny thing in the story, in the book. It's all in the book. You got it for free. Don't complain about getting this guy IM Pei. And because we're talking about IM Pei and we're here in New York, I have to remind myself every time I see his initials. I am. I am. He did the Javits center down there, the convention center. Does everyone know this Story. He built that glass convention center that's down there on 34th street, and it's all glass. And about three years after he built it, the city calls up and says, Mr. Pei, the windows are getting all dirty. How do we clean? How do we. We can't figure out how you're supposed to get up and. And clean it. And his response was in true American, he said, I don't do windows. I don't do windows. So when I heard he was building your thing, I thought, oh, I hope Mike gets it. I hope Mike gets a lot of windows. But he didn't get a lot of windows. It's a beautiful building, and it's still there, and you own it. Is that right?

That's right, yes.

And right now it's. What's in it now?

Right now it is empty. Sony Music just moved out, and we're transitioning to another tenant, sort of.

See that? That's what you call molding and manipulating. We're transitioning to a molder. We're transitioning to another tenant, which means low ball him. Just get in there. You could put a rope swing in that place. It's a really fantastic place. You put a bungee. You could do bungee in that place. You really could do bungee. It's got a spectacular central. What do you call it?

Atrium.

Atrium. A central atrium that you. You all. All you could think was, somebody's going to jump. Did no one ever jump?

Did they? Nobody.

You could see these people up there. It was like. It was like that. Whatever that famous old German movie was, you know, oh, yeah, he's going to jump. But no one ever jumped. And there was a Liechtenstein that was up on the wall. That was how far? 70ft high.

The Lichtenstein was about 30ft high.

Is that it? 30ft. It looked bigger.

Looked bigger.

Look bigger. Anyway, it was big. Okay, so I know you have questions because I have them right here. We're going to go in and out. But I just. I feel like I'm boring you. What's. Ok, you want to hear one?

Sure.

Should I just throw them up in the air? What's the movie or project you are most proud of?

Anything you did.

Who did that? Dave Letterman. Do you see that?

I think it's hard to say singularly, but I'm particularly fond of Tootsie, Rain Man, Goodfellas, Ghostbusters, and there's a little movie not known to many people that I liked a lot and we worked hard on called Razor's Edge.

And that's because I'm not taking a fee tonight. Okay. What do you miss about Hollywood? Anything. Anything. Do you miss anything about.

I miss one thing. It's the last line of the book.

It's true. It absolutely is.

Last line of the book.

It is true. And when I read that, I felt that. I felt that that is what you were missing. Okay, well, if I read just the last line, you won't deliver the emotion that you get if you read the last page. So I don't want to. I don't want to rob you. I don't want to read the last page, do I?

They're all going to go read the last page anyway.

Well, not everyone's going to read the whole.

That's why they're going to go to the last page.

Yeah, it's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm going to skip around a little bit. A few months ago, I visited the old CA building, which is a stunning building, it really is, which I still own. After Ron and Bill Haber and Ron Meyer left the agency, I bought them out of the building. They were afraid that no one would want to occupy it after seeing CAA left. And CAA did leave, partly because it was kind of like a thing to Michael, I think to say, we don't want your building anymore. But there you go, operating out of fear is bad business. And then you talk about Sony and the lease. But now the building was empty again, needing a new tenant. So I took a tour. Sony had divided my not huge office into two small offices. Well, fair enough. The atrium was still airy and inspiring, yet it had no one to catalyze anymore, no one to inspire. The building felt drained, empty. Not just of the old bustle, but of the magic, the power. It felt small. It felt like your childhood house does when you go back as an adult. When we first inhabited the building, the whole mighty team of us, we were giants. We could walk outside and reach downtown, the Pacific or Tokyo in a single bound. I was hit by the magnitude of what I'd done in that building. And it seemed kind of amazing. This kid from the Valley with no stature, no tenure, no network to rely on reshaping the entertainment business. Now, I'm going to skip this next paragraph and it says, in my empty fortress, like the man of Steel himself, I realized that I wasn't out of the Valley yet. I'm free of it in my daily life and in my bank account, but I'll never be free of it in my brain. You carry your origins with you still. Those origins drove me Here and built this place and attracted so many bright, funny, creative colleagues. In the silence, I discovered that the only thing I really miss about the agency business was the camaraderie, my comrades and friends, and the passionate way we spent our lives together. I miss the people, and I feel that. I feel that. That's a nice piece of writing, isn't it? That's why I want to know who wrote it. I want to know who wrote that.

So let me, for a moment, just say something that's going to embarrass this guy. We had a.

This is like the Sammy Show. Sammy and Company.

Let me embarrass this. I'm never going to get through this because he's not going to let me. But I'm going to make my best. This was. This dynamic is pretty much what it was like for all the years we were together. But this is a very, very funny man. But what you have to realize, this is also a very brilliant and highly intellectual man. He can't deal with this. But also, there's a soft spot to this guy that's pretty extraordinary. This goes back probably 30 years, but I was sitting in New Haven, Connecticut, with one of my kids who had a. We didn't know what it was at the time, but a medical issue. And I was pretty shook up, and I was by myself. And all of a sudden, there's a knock at the door of the hotel room, and Billy shows up. And he stayed with me, with us for two days and two nights, which was as long as we were there, and stayed and kept me laughing like he has today, and was supportive. And of all the people, and I handle a lot of people. This was a guy that I.

It's hard to find a hotel room in New Haven, right? Am I right? I mean, it's like going to a ski town. If you can get into someone's room, you drink as much as you can and you pass out on the floor. That's what I did there.

This guy was the most standup guy. And.

Wait, here's a question. Michael, are you leaving? Bill, anything in your will?

Wait a minute. Did you write that?

I did not write that.

Yeah, you. You put something.

God bless you. God bless you, little person, whoever you are.

I give up. I give up. There's no. There is no competing with you. You. It's not possible.

Okay. Were there risks you took in business? Kind of a tongue twister that paid off. But looking back, you think were still bad risks to have taken?

Well, we took risk almost every day. Every day. And I think advising creative people is a risk in itself. As you well know, when somebody has an idea, you have to give them the best advice you can. Is there something like it in the marketplace? How do you put it together? I'm mesmerized by the entire creative process coming here. Tonight, for example, I will tell you, our preparation time was less than zero. And I get a text from him yesterday after he let me sit for a week, not letting me know he was showing up. And he says to me, he said, I'm on my way. And he said, I have a plan. So I text him back and then he texts me again. He says, how long are we on? And I said, I don't know, hour, hour and a half. Next text.

45 minutes.

45 minutes. He says to me, do you know any songs? So I told him to be here because it was starting at 6:30. Of course he showed up at 6:40 plus. But we really started at 7, which was safety, little safety zone.

Still molding and manipulating the facts. Molding and manipulating the facts.

That was for self preservation.

That was a fact set 6:30 start. And then there was the reality. And it's just the way you look at it. What's the craziest thing you ever had to do for a client?

I think when you woke me up in the middle of the night at the Sherry Netherlands Hotel with Hunter Thompson. So I got off a plane, it was about, I don't know, midnight. I went to check in to the Sherry, took a bunch of sleepies, probably the entire bottle. Had to get up at 7am for an 8am breakfast.

God, those were the good old days when people were hooked on sleepys, right?

All I know is about 2:33 in the morning, I am awakened by somebody standing at the end of the bed. And I look and I go, bill. He goes, yep, get up and get dressed. He gave the maid or the night maid or somebody some money. And they let him into my room. And he was. This was in the we're the Buffalo roam time. And he and Hunter took me out. I was drugged out of my mind. And Bill and Hunter took me to a series of bars.

It's all right, officer. He's had a couple sleepies.

Well, that's pretty drugged up for me. But we went to a bunch of bars. I never got to sleep. And that was that. That was pretty. That's the best answer.

That was. That was Mike's drug period right there, folks. That was it. There's a good story in here, which is kind of fun just to make any of you want to read this at all. At a certain moment, Mike was in the music department of. Was it William Morris still then, or were you? Yeah, William Morris. And he was in charge of music. And they put him in charge of counting the gate and making sure that Sly Stone went on stage. Sly Stone, okay. And so having to find Sly, it was in the Forum. In the Forum, which is about as big as Wall street, you know, and it's just tunnels and it's. And finally finding Sly Stone and going, sly, I'm with the. I work with the agency. You gotta go on, man. Sly's like, yeah, okay, let me find my band. Which was somewhere like hundreds of yards away. They were all far apart. And Mike walks into the dressing, where the band is just a cloud of smoke. And Mike's pretty much dressed like that 1979 or something. And someone just screams, narc. Narc. Everyone to the toilet. Just flushing everything.

That was my last night as a musician.

This is his last night in the music department. He wrote a memo saying, this is what happened. They moved him into television. Television the next day. It's good. So here's one more. And then we'll go. And then we'll go sideways again. I'd like to hear your thoughts on the future of streaming media, ott. And specifically, are you bullish on Katzenberg's new tv?

Let's go to another question.

I don't know what a lot of those things mean anyway. What do you think about Hollywood today?

It's a different place than when. It's a very different place than, you know, we got. We had, I think, the last great period in the entertainment business with respect to making films and getting people's dreams, dreams to come true. I think that today, with the advent of On Demand and streaming, it's a very different place. It's very hard to build careers the way we did. It would be very tough, for example, to have the run that we had, for example, where Bill was doing one great comedy after the other, filled in with some really amazing dramatic work. But he. He had the ability to do things like Caddyshack and then to go do Razor's Edge and to do where the Buffalo Roam, all while he did other films that were big hits like Ghostbusters, Stripes, Meatballs, and then to come out. And toward the end, I'd say in the early 2000s, when the business just has changed geometrically, we're in the middle of a very large shift in viewing patterns. I mean, all of you get what you want when you want it. And it didn't work that way when we were doing it. We had to plan it all out ahead of time and took years to get those films made.

It did. And people waited a long time to make their movies, and, you know, they would hold onto these movies for a long time, almost like a gift that had never gotten wrapped, you know, and it'd be sort of in the closet, but someone knew it was there, and it was always there. When Mike ran that company, it was a machine. It was really a juggernaut. It really ran. It really, really ran. And when he left, it didn't run the same way. They were still the same. They were still nice people. I met a lot of wonderful people there that you hired. But it didn't run the same after you left because, you know, you were just. You had leadership skills. It was good. It was good for them to be forced to have. How many people have a job or have ever held a job? Well, you know how it is when there's someone that really holds your feet to the fire, that really, really expects you to do your best and is really pleased when you do do your best. Mike had the ability to show pleasure when you did a good job. You know, he's very. He can be very flattering. That's part of what, you know, that's part of what life is. You got to make. You got to fluff people, you know, you got to fluff them up a little bit. Everybody needs an atta boy. Everybody needs an atta girl, you know, and that ability to do that, you know, people that are actors or directors, writers, they get kind of moody. And you see people have. People's success is very visible. You know, when someone else has success, you know, it. You know, it's in the paper, it's on tv, it's in the movies. That movie's there, there's an Oscar, and you didn't get it. Someone else got it. So success has worn, you know, Hollywood style. People wear their success. You know, people, you know, New York's a little cooler when someone's got money in California, la, you know it, you know, you know it. They show it in their car, they show it in their clothes, they show.

It in their house.

And when someone has that success, it's really hard not to be envious of them, to feel that envy. And I think you were very good at feeling that kind of emotional kind of flutter that would happen when someone would have. Someone would have a great success. And you realized, okay, now These other. My other clients are going to want this kind of. Of thing for themselves. And how do you. How do you. It's like your kids, your kids are all different. They all don't need the same thing. Some have much more confidence than others, and you have to treat them all like your kids and you have to mold them and whatever. You have to show them present a set of facts that they can work with to give them confidence. I didn't very. I didn't have that many problems making movies, but they were, you know, because most people in the movie business are very, very hard working. Very, very hard working. Occasionally I'd have a problem with someone and I would just get so frustrated and it would seem like small potatoes. And I would just talk to Mike and say, oh, I can't believe this knucklehead. And he would call this person up and say. And get. Give it to him. I don't know. He would just give it to him. And then it was over. I don't know how you did it, but you managed to make the small problems that I had in business go away, and I appreciated that very much. I don't have those. I don't have any problems anymore. But those kinds of problems could really frustrate you. Then when you're really trying to succeed, when you're really trying to get something, to be known as an artist, to be known as a creator, to. To be respected and listened to and noticed. Not just noticed, but you want to do something that's a little different.

But that's what you did. You started in comedy.

I was one of the lucky ones.

You got way into drama, which is not an easy thing to do.

Well, I had great teachers. I came out of the second city, and then I worked at Saturday Night Live. If you can work those two jobs, you're going to make it because those are the greatest schools. They're fantastic, fantastic schools. They're not just entertainment. They're not just theaters and television. It's a real education. If you can succeed at those two places, then you're going to be okay. So it says, how did you and Michael meet? How did we meet? You probably remember that.

I'm afraid to say it now because you'll probably say it's wrong, but I remember you first met Ron Meyer, and then Ron suggested that you and I meet, and I flew to New York. And I remember you called me. I was sitting in a hotel room and you called me and I said, where do you want to meet? And you said, grant's Tomb and hung up.

So.

I was dressed like this. I ran downstairs and asked cabbie could he take me to Grant's Tomb. And it took me five cab drivers where one guy finally said, I know where it is. And sure enough, I went there. And this guy was standing tall in front of Grant's Tomb.

I was the only one standing at Grant Tomb.

That's true. And then I. And then we just started walking around, as I recall.

Yeah, it was pretty.

We just started walking around. Bill had. Bill was the guy I always wanted to hang out with in New York because he had this fantastic way of where you'd hang out with him. And you never knew. I was a guy who knew every minute of my life was booked unless I was with Bill. And then the office booked me out. And the reason is I never knew where we were going or what we were doing. And we would walk around. He didn't like to drive that much. We'd walk around and he would walk into three, four different restaurants and sort of get a sense of each place before he would choose one. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah, well, you know, it's got to smell good, right like that. And you know, you just feel it out. You just want to feel it out. This reminds me of. Has anybody here? Certainly someone's been to Patsy's uptown, like 126th street pizza place. So Mike's, you know, from the Valley, you know, I said, okay, I'm gonna take you. I'm show you, like a real coal oven pizza. We're go and to go to Patsy's. I used to stop there on the way home at night, late, really late. But we went in there. Do you remember this?

I remember.

This is a good one. We went in there and had lunch and a pretty nice time. We had like, I think we ate like a couple pizzas and we drank a couple bottles of wine or something. And then, you know, Mike picks up the check, you know, every once in a while. And so he says to the guy, he says to the waiter, who just looks like, you know, you know, he's like a cousin, your uncle or something, says, I don't know, can you. Can you. Can you change one of these? It's got a hundred dollar bill. We're in patsies, right?

Okay.

The waiter says, oh, gee, I don't know, let me check, and reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wad as big as this baseball hat. I mean, this is the waiter. He's got about 6,500 in his pocket. It was so awesome. I was like, oh, this is so great. This is so great. Mike wouldn't come back for months after that. That was. God, that. Really. Still one of my favorites. I tell people that one all the time. I tell that one all the time. Okay, so how many kids have you got?

4.

And what are their names?

Gee, I don't remember.

Okay.

Chris, who's married to Era. Kim, my daughter, you know, Eric, who's married to Kendall. And Minty, who's Tamara's daughter, who is my significant other.

And so what, have the kids all read this thing? They read this.

I haven't asked them.

Okay, well, it's like, I don't ask people to give me Christmas presents, but I get them. But. So you haven't asked them to?

No, I think two of the four have read the book.

Okay. I just. Interested. I can't even. I don't think any of my kids read my book. All right, so you had. When you started this CAA business, you started with the William Morris Agency, and then you guys decided that you were doing it better than they did. And they were a little square. They were old fashioned.

They were.

They were old fashioned. And you guys were bringing them lots of money, and they weren't necessarily respecting you. And so you fellas decided to set off on your own. And when they found out you were thinking of setting off on your own, you're setting off on your own. You all got fired.

We got fired.

Which is like that day. They all got fired.

Same day.

And tell them how that happened. This is a funny one. Go ahead.

So we were talking about we needed to set up offices. We needed to get some money. I went to a local bank in Beverly Hills, the City national bank, they're still in existence, to set up a credit line. And I had no idea that the bank would call the CFO of William Morris in New York, who they had a relationship with. Say this guy was just in here asking for a credit line. And we asked him why. He said, to set up a business. They then called the president of the company, who was in Los Angeles, and I happened to be the president's assistant. That didn't go over very well. That was that.

That too. Bruce. That's great. That's good. I like that one. The bank turns you in. Isn't that fantastic? There's a little known fact. I was just in Iceland. How many of you have been to Iceland? Okay, it's pretty good. It's pretty over there. And they always talk about how beautiful the women are in Iceland, you know, it turns out the Iceland girls are just. They're just like Mike and I. They look like us. But what they did was those guys back in the day went to Ireland and Scotland and stole all their women. So all the pretty Irish and Scottish girls are the ones getting all the attention up there in Iceland. I find that interesting. I'm still impressed that the Appalachians are still full of Irish and Scots, too. These are things that I have to find out for myself. But the interesting thing. And then I'll bore you just for another 30 minutes. Iceland has one penitentiary, 150 people in it. 150 people in the penitentiary. 50 of them are bankers. I gotta like that. I like that one a lot. Okay. So you also brokered some big deals. I lost track of Mike when he became too big for his britches. He used to be my agent. And then all of a sudden, I couldn't reach the guy. Couldn't find the guy anymore. But as I read the book, I realized it was all part of a master plan in here. It's all. It's all right here in. Who is Michael Lovitz? You can find it all in there. But basically, I'd end up talking to all these other guys, what they call the young turks, who were fun. Those guys were fun. And Jay Maloney was one of the great ones. He was one of the funniest guys. He took his own life and he was beautiful and he was really something. But he was the guy. I was OK with not talking to Mike. Because you. Jay Maloney was so charming and wonderful. And I know that really hurt you a lot. Killed you, killed all of us. Because he was a guy that was better than you, Mike. Much better.

Thank you.

And better than me. He was just a really good guy. And I remember going to his funeral service, and it was one of the saddest things. Because in Hollywood, it's very rare that everyone likes someone, that people can agree on someone. And they all agreed on that fellow. It was a good time in Hollywood back then because Mike was good at. Nowadays they have these feuds. They always have sort of like feuds. But Mike was able to say back then he would solve the feud. He was that powerful a guy that he knew that solving the feud was better than having the feud. As much as everyone likes the juiciness of the intrigue and slamming these people. And there's some of that in the book and so so forth. But I was always impressed that he could. That you could make people bury the hatchet. And God damn, they got Some hatchets out there, they have lots of hatchets. They've got all kinds of reasons. There's always this envy in competition. But there was a hatchet that came, somebody pulled every day, and you've managed to make those things happen. And that's one thing that I miss about the Hollywood of today. People get grudges that they just will not give up. They just will not give up. And I'm very pleased to read your book, that some of the people that you had fallen out with, like Ron Meyer, that you made your peace with them. So talk about making peace with someone. Like that was someone that was your close friend for many years. You got into a. Whatever the heck the word is, and you went apart. So we don't want to talk about the details of what. What sent you apart. But how do you make peace with people?

Well, first of all, there's gotta be a willingness on the other side to start with. And basically, after 20 years, I just picked up the phone and called him, and he was incredibly receptive. And we started a dialogue and picked it up as if, and kind of worked it out, and it was good for both of us.

You even had a mediator or a counselor in the middle of this.

Right. I talked to him about that and asked him how he felt about. He liked the idea because that way we could both get out and purge all of our feelings. And we had someone who was a professional who could talk it through with us and make sure that we didn't get off track. It was really important to me in the first couple meetings that we had that everything got vented and out on the table and that someone could weigh it and discuss it and push back.

Well, you had a lot of. There was a lot of material. You guys had a lot of. There was a lot of stuff that you had to talk about. But I'm always curious about how people solve problems with people. And you say a willingness. What about when there's not a willingness?

Well, you and I went through that and you probably forgot about it, but let's not forget.

I haven't forgotten.

I'm not talking about you and I. I'm talking about a guy who ran Columbia Pictures who, when you say, how do you solve a problem?

Oh, that guy, you know, that was an odd.

But that was a guy that we couldn't solve the problem with, if you recall.

Yeah. May he rest in peace. Yeah, well, that was. I don't, you know, those kinds of people. I don't know. But. So I don't know. You didn't answer my question. And so I'm going to just keep saying it until you solve my problem, which is me asking the question again. So when you have a. Do you have any insights about this? I mean, what do people want to hear from this knucklehead anyways? Let's ask. Anyone got. Raise your hand. Anyone got a real question? What do you got? You said you kept notes early on in his career, right? Notes. He says you kept notes early on in your career. I'm just saying it so you can all hear it.

Right.

So my question is, why would you think at an early age like that when you're starting off with Bill or any of your artists?

Well, it wasn't about Bill, by the way. I wasn't articulate about that. I kept daily. A calendar. Right.

Why? Did you do it?

No, not at all. I kept a calendar just to keep my life organized. I was in a business that was incredibly fluid and I used to keep. There was a thing. It doesn't exist anymore. I don't know if. Do you know what paper is? So there used to be. Thank you. There used to be something called daytimers. And they were. By the month, they were great. And they broke down every day and they had your appointments and then on the left hand side notes that you would keep. That was my bible. And I kept those. And I never. I started using them when I started in the agency business when I was 21 years old. But they weren't for the reason you think. They were for my calendar. The calendar would remind me of certain events and then on the left hand side of the daytimer were a series of notes. I didn't keep notes on anybody specific. I kept notes on what I did, deals I was doing. And then I would transpose them every Sunday to Monday to start the week over again so I didn't forget anything. It's called follow up. And.

You had that coming. No, it's. No, it's true. But he had those little bitty daytimer things in his pocket all the time. It was very strange. You got one too. Right. So, Mike, can you maybe share a story or two where during one of your deals where you came out on top, you had a. A little extra cutthroat and maybe at the expense of the other party. Okay, I'm going to do Garrett Mars here. Mike, could you tell us a story about what you had to be a little cutthroat and then at the expense of the other. At the expense of. Well, kind of the definition of cutthroat I mean, it's not this, it's that.

It's a tough question to answer because we had such an extraordinarily gifted client list that we had leverage. And the goal was to have leverage so that guys like him would were in the driver's seat rather than the other way around. When we started the business in late 74, the leverage was on the buy side. It was with the studios, the networks, the publishing houses, record companies. And we wanted to have leverage to be able to make the best deals. And we got to a point where we had someone in house that did models the same way that the buyers did. So we knew what was there to be taken and we took everything that we could. The idea that the deals, we felt that the other side were grown ups, they could handle themselves. So we would get the best that we could get for our creative people. As far as the deals, it was almost every time, look, if we had a package like Ghostbusters with Billy and Danny and Harold may rest in peace and Ivan Reitman the director, everybody wanted that movie. And it gave us the ability to take a very large piece of the gross for the clients, which we did.

It did change. It did change. When you watch Turner Classics and you use your remote control, you can see that, you know, you go back in someone's movie and you can see that there are actors that made 30 movies in a year. How the hell do you do that? You know? But in the 39, 40, and there they were grinding them out, you know, two, three a month, you know, where they would just work and they worked them like dogs. They didn't get paid particularly well. They always had the pictures of them with Pierce Arrows and snappy cars, Duesenbergs. But they didn't get paid like they get paid now. They get paid now. Same as sports and so forth. And you guys have. CAA was the first. You guys started representing sports agents or basketball players, athletes. That didn't used to happen. My son is a basketball coach. He's represented by caa. I said, are you kidding? Really? Really? What do they do? Do they get you like an extra whistle? What do they. I didn't tell him to go there. He just saw the building, I guess. I don't know. So did you ever like talk a little bit about the glamorous side of your life of like what Hollywood's like? Because I didn't really ever live there much, but I heard about it.

A lot.

I heard about it. What's the most silly fun you ever had? Like on a movie set or when a movie. Sort of. That was always the fun thing. We did the Ghostbusters in this town. We had that car, and it sort of looked like it was legit. And you could drive through stoplights and just drive anywhere and no one would stop you. The cops didn't. They thought you were a fire department. The fire department thought you were a cop. So you just. You just keep driving that damn thing around. Had lights and everything, horns, all kinds of crap, you know, and. And we had those machines. We'd walk into stores with the. With the proton accelerator on our back and just look at all the jewelry, you know, just took. You know, just taking things apart, spilling coffee on things, saying, all right, someone will come, and somebody's going to come back and get that cleaned up for you. And we'd walk out.

But what did you. What's.

Tell us some kind of a fun.

Thing that you guys did that the reality is it's not an accident that I begged you to do this. The fun times were on the sets. Groundhog Day. What about Bob Stripes? We had a good time, and you always made sure we had a good time. And it was fun. Glamorous. I wouldn't call it glamorous. I would call it just plain old laughs and fun. And it was always great running around New York City with you. You were like the mayor of New York. Well, we.

You know, my job. I always felt the more fun you had, and I'm sure everyone feels the same way. The more fun you have at your job, the better you do it, right? I mean, the more fun you have at work, the better you do your job. We always felt pity for Mike and his crowd because they had to dress like that for one thing, and show up at work. And they'd have to come. They'd have to act like they were serious about looking at the movie set and stuff. One of my favorite stories, when Coca Cola bought Columbia Pictures and they were just like businessmen from Atlanta, and they were all dressed up for work, and they came to visit us on the set of Ghostbusters. And when you're in the movie business, you can smell. You can actually feel when someone enters the set. That's not one of you. You can feel it. It's real. I'm not exaggerating it. You really do. You really feel it. And I remember we were on this, the biggest set on the lot, and they had to pick the building up because we built that giant set of the house over here on Central park west, right? We had to build that set. And in order to make the building big enough, they had to. They got every person on the lot that worked on the lot to lift it one inch at a time. You talk about the pyramids, it was crazy. And There was like 1500 people and they went, 1, 2, 3, lift it, you know, one inch at a time to make it 10ft taller. So we're in this crazy set there. And Laszlo Kovac's great cameraman, the set cinematographers there, he's just having the most fun because this is a real screw head movie. And we'd seen. We saw the first Ghostbuster scene at Ivan Reitman's house. He had us over. The director, he had us over to his house for Thanksgiving dinner and he showed us, like a rough cut of the movie or just that one scene of the first time we take apart this hotel room ballroom with the machine with the guns and stuff. And we came into work the next Monday and was like, boys, relax. This is going to be really good. Really good. And we acted that way. And from that moment it was just like, we were always fun. But then we really knew we had something great. And the Koch guys came in anyway, long story. Oh, we're way over. The Koch guys come in and they're just standing there like, well, we own all this kind of thing, right? There's like seven or eight of them in suits, not that you'd ever notice, eight guys in a suit walking into a movie set. And so we just started clowning around with them, you know, just talking to them. And, you know, they were kind of amused for a little while. And then they're looking at their watches. That's why I looked at my watch. They start going, thinking, when are they gonna get to work? And we didn't. We did not get to work. It was just. I intentionally knew what I was doing. It was like, I'm gonna make sure these guys never come back here again. And we just kept playing with them and playing with them, and then they're looking at each other and they know it costs like $70,000 an hour. And we've done absolutely nothing but talk to them. And they left and they never came back.

That's true. I got that call.

That was good. All right, so what do you do now with yourself, with your free time?

I work up in Silicon Valley between San Francisco and San Jose, investing in.

We know where it is, Mike. You don't have to talk down to us. You don't have to talk. I don't know, because are we gonna take that?

I don't know.

No. You work in Silicon Valley, which is code for the buildings in transition. No. What are you doing in Silicon Valley?

You know, it's interesting. It's the same thing that I did as an agent. I work in marketing, monetization and strategy with young people. And it's just fantastically fun and I really enjoy it.

Not one of us could get away with saying that. Not one of us in this room. I work in marketing and monetizing. I'm working with young people. It really sounds like predatory stuff, doesn't it? It sounds bad.

What would you like me to say?

I don't know. I mean, tell us something. It's so magical, Silicon Valley. It's just this dream world, but we don't understand.

But by the way, not much different than the world you and I occupied for some time and that you're still in.

I went to Google once and I think you should know that there's no one in Google that's half my age. No one. And you walk around and you're going like, okay, is there an adult here anywhere? And there's not, there's no one that's an adult. There's no one that's paying their own phone bill, that I can tell. And they've got like every, like every like 50ft. There's a little table with Oreos and Doritos and all kinds of different coffees and chocolate. And then there's another table right over here with Oreos and Doritos and chocolate. I'm not, I don't know why everyone's not £700 and they do it and they don't leave because they got all the snacks they want. They just can't. It's a concentration camp of some kind. It's like. It's mind control is what it is, is what's going on there. I don't know who does it, but they just, like, they're just going through the salt sugar access portholes and that's it. That's how they're getting things done. But you're pretty fit considering you're hanging out with.

I limit my Oreos and Doritos.

So what's the most fun for you about coming to your, to the 92nd Street? Why? What's the most fun part?

Are you kidding?

Aside from present company excluded? You're not going to do that again.

I'm just. No, I'm not going to exclude it. Sitting here. I could just be out there or here listening to your stories. They really are amazing.

Well, I'm.

Actually, now that I think about it, you really should write that book. You're the guy that should write a book.

Yes. All right, Mike, what story did not make it into your book?

Oh, God. Hundreds. And none of which can be made.

What's the one? If you had one more. Well, obviously, the more horrifying ones are just around the campfire, but what's one that you really like to tell that's not too horrible on yourself and not too horrible on anyone else?

I wouldn't even know where to go with that.

Really?

Yeah, I wouldn't know where to go with that. I mean, the stories that weren't in the book were things that were personal.

Yeah.

And I didn't put anything in that on any of our artists were something that was done that might be questionable or embarrassing. I refused to do that. I didn't want anything sensationalist in the book. The book is stories as I see them. You may not agree with the facts, I understand, but it's pretty much. The stories are stories that I am very comfortable saying publicly, and I didn't want to put anything in.

It's pretty good. There's not very many mean bones thrown over the side. I noticed that when I wrote. The only reason I wrote one of the reasons I wrote a book I read. Anyone ever read any of David Niven's books? Does anyone know who David Niven was or is? Anyway, his is a really kind of a crazy story. His personal life story is interesting. He just sort of like. Then I met a chap who I was in school with, and he invited me over. He had sort of no money, but he just kept going like this. And he would meet a friend who would say, oh, we're going over here, and then we're going over here, and then we're going over here. Oh, we were in the military together, you know, but he would write. He wrote books, and he was best friends with everyone. Just the nicest guy, it seems. And he wrote books and told stories about famous people, and. And he never was mean. It really impressed me. I never saw anyone write a story about Hollywood or modern people without ever, like, sticking it to someone. And I thought, that's really a challenge to write a book where you don't have to pull out the mean bone on someone. Anyway, you did a pretty good job of that.

Thank you.

Okay. All right. Okay. How are you different today than. Who is Michael Ovitz today versus Michael Ovitz 20 years ago? Okay.

You know, by the process of Writing this book, it was a cathartic experience for me and a growing experience. And, you know, as you get older, as you know and you look back and you think about things that you've done that you shouldn't have done, things that you've done that you're proud of, things that you probably would like to do differently. And as you get older, you start to really think that through. I feel very good about the place that I'm in. Even though you don't like my definition of what I do up in the Valley, which I understand, I feel inspired to be up there. There's a lot of brain power up there. It was what kept me going through CA was creative people, really. It wasn't the other side of the fences. You know, you were right. I did bitch to you a lot about a lot of the people that neither of us cared for. But the reality is that when you're working with really bright young men and women, it's very stimulating. And as far as I'm concerned, I kind of found what Ponce de Leon was looking for. When you go up there, you have to learn about something different almost every day. Bioscience, search mechanisms, enterprise software. It's a whole new planet for me, and I've been doing it now for about 15 years, and I really enjoy it. But I leave you speechless.

I believe you. You know, it's hard. Well, he plays a little close to the vest. You know, that was kind of the. That's the way it was. It is in business. You don't sort of tell everyone what you're thinking all the time. You don't.

I told you all the time.

I got a fair amount of information.

Yes, you do.

But then you knew that I was inept enough to be able to do very little with it.

No, that's actually not accurate. I knew that you were like a vault, which was great, and that you weren't part of the social part of the business. You were your own guy, and you ran your life very differently than all the other people that I dealt with.

Sidney Pollack, who was a good guy. Also a good guy. And you could tease that guy. God.

And you did.

I did, too. He was relentless. He was like a sweet Jewish guy from South Bend, Indiana. I didn't even know there were any Jews in South Bend. I thought it was just Notre Dame, and that was it. But he wore cowboy boots and tight denim, and I used to tease the hell out of him. I was like, come on, man, you're South Bend.

Come on. Well, when you Tore up the set. He was beside himself. And that was the set they ended up using. Is the one you did.

But a really good person and really wanted to hear. Just like I was. Really wanted to hear Steve Martin's book read aloud to him as he was dying. Steve Martin's book really made him laugh. But he said that Michael Ovitz was a Mike Ovitz. Michael Ovitz is a weapon to be aimed. Which. I love that one. I thought that's really good. And I think about that. And I think about that. There are other people like that. We all know someone like that. We all know someone like that. But so now. What are you aimed at now? Not to silicon, but what do you. There's gotta be, you know. What's that line? Sometimes I shoot for the stars. You know, Rocket man. What are you aiming at? That's not.

I don't. I'm trying to enjoy my life, which was hard to do in the agency business. As you know. In the agency business. When you're in the entertainment business, it's a 24. 7. 7 days a week, 365 days a year. You're one of the few people that was in the entertainment business that had a personal life. It's very hard to do. It's all consumptive to be in that business. Today I'm not in the business, which is a good thing for me. And I'm very tempered about my time. And I find time to be my enemy, frankly. And it's something that's incredibly valuable to me. So I'm very careful about how I spend my time and frankly, who I spend my time with.

Time is my enemy. I've never heard anyone say it. I mean, people that have conditions say that time is my enemy. But, you know, a team that's got no timeouts left and they're 12 points behind. Time is their enemy. But I never heard anyone say that. How is time your enemy? Time is. It's a sort of a. It's an objective thing, sort of. It's a unique subjective time, isn't it? That it's sort of works on different.

Levels as you get older. Bill. I know it's hard to believe it.

You say when I get to be your age.

Yeah. I mean. And by the way, it was just Bill's birthday, so we should wish him a happy birthday.

So don't you worry about me. See this? I was in Nashville yesterday and I'm celebrating because I'm friendly with a writer, singer named John Prine from Chicago. And he's one of the great ones. And I did something with him for a Grammy kind of business down there in Nashville. And then he said, we're going to go see this band, the Steel Drivers, which is this fantastic bluegrass band. They're really like just a killer bluegrass band. So I got there a little late, but, and I came backstage, the Steel Drivers were already on, and I saw John Prine and he had a guitar, and I said, are you going to play? He said, yeah, yeah, I'm going to go out and sing.

I'm going to go out and sing.

Paradise, which is this great song he wrote about the coal mining industry. He said, come on out and sing with me. I'll go out and I'll tell Mike you're coming and he'll introduce you. So I got to walk out on stage at the Grand Old Opry last night and sing with the Steel Driver. And it was, and it was just like, it was just like old Brother, Where Art Thou? They got the big old fashioned microphone and John singing a solo mic over there and then the whole like the string bass, the banjo, the girl on the fiddle, and we all go. Oh, daddy, won't you take me back to Newburgh County? I'm not going to sing it for you tonight, but Mike, maybe you got something you want to sing to the folks. I think you stayed here long enough.

I, I, I think we've covered it all.

I don't know if we've covered it all, but I, I appreciate you're all coming out tonight to see Michael Olitz.

Thank you. Thank you.

And now, now I hope you know who is Michael Ovitz. He's the guy on the right. That's Michael Ovitz right there. Thank.