Michael Ovitz | All-In Summit 2024

The legend. I don't sing that lightly. The legend Michael Ovitz is in the building.

Arguably one of the most successful talent agents ever.

He rose from working in a mailroom to become a super agent representing some of Hollywood's biggest stars. One doesn't get to a place of success without having made mistakes. People say all kinds of things about him.

Really, really all kinds of things about him.

We went out to win, and when you go out to win, you make certain sacrifices. We were tough and we were aggressive, and I had a philosophy of win, it costs. When we did, the cost was huge. Rise or fall on our own deeds, our own brains, our own willpower. There's no crime in being vulnerable with people. Everybody has an issue. I want to leave the planet a little better than when I came on.

Please join us in welcoming Michael Obit.

Wow.

Thank you so much, Michael.

All right.

We have been.

We have been trying to make this happen for three years.

You're a hard one to get a hold of.

Yeah.

If you don't know Michael, you shouldn't be here. Wait a minute. Michael co founded caa, and his book is fantastic. By the way, who is Mike Ovitz? Yeah, it's such a read. You could just skim through it, by the way, like, read right through it. It goes by so fast. It's incredible. In 1975, where, you know, Michael is really known for transforming Hollywood and transforming the media business. One of the big innovations of many in Michael's career has been the innovation of packaging, which really changed the power dynamics and the trajectory of how content was made in Hollywood. Michael's had. We were just talking about this kind of three careers, both as the founder of CAA and then later a partnership with Andy Grove in 1993, where you formed the CAA Intel Media Lab and really tried to bring technology to Hollywood, and then later joined up with Marc Andreessen and have helped Mark and Ben since then scale up Andreessen Horowitz and really change how Silicon Valley operates. And it's just an incredible reinvention story, but one where it seems you've brought a similar sort of set of innovations in all three phases. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about those three major transitions and the way that you kind of made the decision to kind of reinvent yourself and bring technology and media together.

Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here. I must say, I've been going up to the Valley since 1992. Probably hard for most of you in the audience to believe this, but I'm much older than all the guys up here, and these are four of the. Not just the smartest, but the most effective men that I've met up in the Valley with respect to what they do, how they do it. And then lastly, I have tried since they started the all in podcast, I have applied 15 times to be a bestie, and I have been rejected by one of the four up here, which I will not say which one, but we all want to have what they have. And I was saying to David in the backstage, it's so fantastic how they've set something up that is so interesting to listen to, to learn from, even to push up against. You don't have to agree with it, which is what I like about it, but to hear it from something we all want in our lives, which is close friends, where you can say whatever you want. As a matter of fact, some of the stuff they say to David I find offensive, but I think I do, too. He handles it really well. So back to the question. I have an insatiable appetite for information and for trying to stay up with things that are current. I started in the entertainment business when I was 17 years old, believe it or not. I was the first tour guide at Universal Studios. They had hired five men and five women. And I really learned so much about the media business and how they made entertainment, because Universal was in every area, in film, television, music, books, everything. And it's all the same, by the way. It's just different iterations of it. It's all made to entertain people. And I got the bug. I went to ucla. Took me three years to get out of there. I couldn't get out of there fast enough, but I went to the first class and the last class. That's why when I was here, I got really scared because I kind of missed the classes in between, because I worked full time at 20th Century Fox and just had a blast. And then I went into the agency business. In my early 20s, I was at Universal as a tour guide. I saw these men and women dressed really well, being received well by everybody on the studio lots. And I said, wow, that's interesting. What do they do? I found out they were agents, and I realized I could get a very wide education. And I've always been interested in making myself smarter about things because I'm not. I don't have the gift that a couple of these guys up here do, which is. Or all of them, which is raw intelligence. I've got educated intelligence. I have to really work at it. And I really enjoyed that time and getting into it. We broke off when I was 26. A bunch of us, for a whole series of reasons from the William Morris Agency started CAA with a very simple thesis, which was that we were going to do something as a team rather than individually. And it just worked really well. Artists enjoyed having a group of individuals to talk to, which is not dissimilar to what these four guys have accomplished. Artists liked being surrounded by multiple people with different skill sets. So that worked really well. In 1992, you could smell in LA something going on up north. But the thing about Los Angeles, and particularly the entertainment community, is it's an incredibly siloed community. They don't accept people very well from the outside, which, by the way, makes it very inbred. And it's not particularly wise. It may be smart for the moment, but it's not wise. So I started going up to San Francisco to see what was going on up there. And then in the middle of 92, I called cold Bill Gates. And it wasn't the Microsoft of today. It was a small company. And I went up and met with Bill and then he introduced. We talked for four hours about where my business and his business could converge. And the only thing I'll tell you is neither of us had any idea, but it was the start of a discussion. Bill introduced me to a man named Nathan Myhrvold, who I'm still friendly with today, who was the first CTO of Microsoft. I was an advisor to three of the four major record labels and I remember being at one of the music labels that had 25% market share and there were stereo speakers in there. And Nathan had said to me, I can't explain this to you, but music's going to come from up there. I had no idea what he was talking about. And I advised all four companies that something was happening and that hard goods weren't going to be able to be sold. And I got fired by one of them. I got thrown out by the other three. They thought that Nathan was crazy. They didn't understand what Microsoft was and they had no interest in computers or anything digital. And then from there I went and met Andy Grove. We started a dialogue and we brought every conceivable piece of hardware and software available to Los Angeles, put it in our Beverly Hills building. The top of the building had like eight dishes on it. It looked like we were going to take off. And we invited everyone from the entertainment business to come in and see and test all this to wrap this up, it was a great thing and a sad thing. We knew something was coming. We had no idea what. But the business did what it always does. It put its head in the sand and no one looked to San Francisco. And today when I meet with people in the business, it's interesting when I explain to them how streaming has basically changed the legacy business forever and it will never change again. And it's all because everyone that we worked with refused to embrace change, which to me is sort of the mantra of my life. I want to change. I've changed my life personally. I've changed careers three different times. It's all about learning and about pushing yourself.

And it wasn't just media because you were very early to helping company like, like Palantir as an example. It's not just, hey, Michael Ovitz is a Hollywood guy or a media guy. You were an advisor to a pure tech company. Can you tell us a little bit about what you did with Palantir and how you got involved and what role you played?

So in 99, a young man named Marc Andreessen, who happened to have been on the COVID of Time magazine barefooted, which I thought was really weird. And he called me cold. I didn't know who he was, frankly. I had heard of him. I had heard of him because we were doing work for Jim Clark, who Mark was in business with. And he had a company that was very close to the media business at the time. I guess you could say it was a pre Adobe type business. And I met with Mark and I. I can't explain to you what happened, but we went to a lunch that was gonna take an hour. I'm not long on lunches. I don't do one hour zooms. And I hate long calls. Cause you can't get anything done. So I thought we were gonna be an hour. We were four and a half hours. And at the end of that, he said, will you come on my board with Ben Horowitz? We're starting a company called loudcloud. And I said, explain it to me. And he did. And I had no clue what he was talking about. I just didn't understand it. He said, all this data is going up in the sky. And all I could think of was Nathan telling me that about music. And I said, wow, now two smart guys, really smart guys, lots smarter than me, are talking about what's going on up there. So I went on Mark's board. I'm still involved with them 25 years later. And Mark basically introduced me to Everyone up in the valley, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, everybody that he dealt with. And one of the guys he introduced me to was Peter Thiel, who I just had dinner with last weekend, is one of the smartest guys I've ever met. And he put a ton of his own money into Palantir. He had no investors. He had a small investment from darpa. I had no clue what they did, but he called me up, he said, can you help me? Because we are in business with the US government and they don't pay very well. And that I could empathize with. They take a lot of money in tax, but they don't pay very well. And I said, what do you want me to do? Because you know, my coding is a bit limited. And he said, I want you to help set up a commercial business. So without going through a long boring story after Peter got a dozen phone calls being criticized for bringing me in to do this, which he actually enjoyed by the way, which is what I love about him. I met with Alex Karp for three months in his office. I was living in San Francisco three days a week and I looked at everything they were doing. They only had at the time about 25, 30 engineers and came up with some ideas, starting with three silos, narrowed it to advertising, health care and finance. Got rid of the two of them quickly because finance was a no brainer. The whole world had gone under with the mortgage crisis. And Palantir actually had an algorithm that you could plug an address of a house into it. And they did this after I asked them to. You could plug an address of a house and it's scraped a million Data points within 1 mile of the house. How many kids were leaving private school, how many hamburgers were sold, how many dry cleaning stores closed. It was like a brief in a nanosecond of the economy. And JP Morgan couldn't off a mortgage for the life of them if they wanted to because they had local branch managers who love their jobs or all the mortgages were underwater. They didn't want to make a decision. We put Palantir online, they got permission to plug the address in and whatever the bid ask came up, they could close. We promised we'd deliver in 90 days. I always under promise and over deliver and we delivered in 55 days and we saved them $150 million to the bottom line in that 55 day period that became a request from them. The only problem they had is they forgot to make a deal with me for the software. So they had this unbelievable result and no deal. And they offered I think 2 million for a one year license for five years. And. And I called Peter and he was just dancing on his desk. He couldn't believe it. And I said, I turned it down. So he said, you've lost your mind and started yelling at me in a nice way. And I said, just give me 15 days. I used to be an agent. And he said, okay. In any case, 15 days later they came back and they made a deal that was many, many multiples of that price. And they became the first of the commercial business at Palantir. And now today their business, they were.

Just added to the S&P 500. Sorry, they were just added to the.

S P 5 yesterday. And they. 60, 40, I'd say commercial versus government.

Government.

Michael, could we talk a little bit about the movie business, the entertainment business? We were just watching all this Generative AI and I got the sense you were looking at it with either anger, contempt or sadness. You've made such amazing, orchestrated such amazing seminal works during peak Cinema, something Friedberg, Sachs and I grew up in, defined a lot of the way we look at art. And now it feels like it's lost in many ways. I'm curious, when you see people making things with Generative AI, what happens to your heart and to your mind?

It's a great question, Jason, and I'll tell you why. First of all, streaming has basically destroyed the legacy business. You've probably all seen in the press what's going on with Paramount, where the Ellisons have purchased the company at a price that's probably 20% of what it used to be. It was one of the great seven horsemen of the entertainment business. But as I was talking to David about and Jason earlier, there's the entertainment business went from a. You get paid up front and then you get a piece of the profits. So since streaming's come, you get paid up front, there are no profits. Your product's in the ether, your book's in the ether, your song's in the ether. Music is a little better because thanks to Daniel Ek, everybody gets a royalty. But it's very different than it used to be. So streaming has destroyed the business that I grew up in. It's why I wanted to get out of the entertainment business. You could see it coming. Secondly, I think that if you look past that and you look to AI right now, it's bittersweet. The things that can be done are mind boggling. We just saw a slight example. I'm involved with a company out of Germany with three young PhDs from the University of Heidelberg, they have just released their first product of text to video. I've never seen anything like this in my life. Visually, you can say what you want and it shows up, and, I mean, it's perfect. The technology is staggering. And I've seen every one of them. For obvious reasons, the people that work in this community and 250,000 people in Los Angeles make their living in the media business. They are all afraid of one thing, and that is, are they going to have a job or be able to work? So if you talk to a production designer, the man or woman who comes up and draws and designs every shot so they can light it and figure out continuity and who's wearing what and what they're going to shoot so they can get their two minutes of film in 12 hours. Because that's what you get. You work 12 hours a day, you get two minutes of usable footage. I am working on a project right now with Netflix, and a production designer I interviewed asked me at the end of the meeting. He said, michael, I need three weeks to do this project, but I'm using these two AI programs, which I approved. And he said, I can do it for you in three days. He said, does that mean I'm going to be out of a job when that three days is an hour and anybody can do it? I honestly, I didn't have a clear answer to put his mind at ease, because the answer is probably a little yes and a little no, but it's incredibly disruptive. Now, on the other side of the coin, is it going to have emotion and heart? If you look back all the way to the history of video games, to Pac man, which was a nothing game, but it was viral in the world. It had no heart. It was nothing. It was just some thing eating other things. But look where we are today with full motion video, video games. And once you get the face and the eyes right in video games and in animation and animation has done the best of that, it sucks people in emotionally. So the question, Jason, can AI do that? Or do they need a human being to do that? And nobody has the answer.

Can we just talk about the community aspect? Because the implication of generative AI is I sit in front of my screen and I say, show me something. Romantic comedy, horror film, sci fi, here's the premise, and you get something or you have some directions, and everyone ends up with personalized content, which is effectively what, you know, distributed social media did. Everyone's kind of consuming different tiktoks and different Instagrams, but everyone seems to coalesce around one. And then we still all watch the same Netflix show, and we talk about it, we have a conversation about it. Does Generative AI change the nature of media, which is a shared experience, a community experience that we all talk about, or do we end up in a world where everyone's got their own media or their own content? And how does the jury kind of ultimately decide that?

I think it's an individual decision from all of you sitting in the audience. It's binary. You either want passive entertainment because you're exhausted. You want your brain taken to another place. I used to love to watch big set movies that took me outside the United States to relax when I was in the agency business. I mean, we watched 10, 15 minutes of film every night just to get a sense of what directors do. But when we were stressed, believe it or not, even being in the business, we would go back to pictures like David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia or Stanley Kubrick's 2001, or any of these pictures that transported you. James Bond, the early. I represented Connery. The early Bond movies were made for a nickel and took you all over Europe. And there were places I just wanted to experience. The other side of that coin, on the binary side is active entertainment. Do you want to create your own ending? Do you want to change characters? Do you want to try to put a movie together? Do you want to go to a site that has the rights to an old movie star like Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper or the greats of the 40s and 50s, and make your own movie? It's all individual. I think everybody will make up their mind. Netflix did an experiment with a show with a bunch of different endings, and it's fascinating. You never heard anything about it.

I want to ask you about attention Spin.

Can I ask a question?

Yeah, sure, of course.

Let's talk about free speech and censorship. When you were building your business, you had these free speech absolutists like Larry Flint, who are not anywhere related to your business, but over there fighting for a certain set of basic rights. And then underneath that, as a result, I think there was, like, this envelope that it created for creative people to just go and push the boundaries, tell stories, explore things. How is that the same as what's happening now and different? So, you know, you talked about working with Netflix. One of the jokes about Netflix is it sometimes starts with sort of like an agenda, per se, around content. And, you know, even if it doesn't necessarily map to good content. It reflects certain ideas. How do you think about that? Just.

Well, it's a. It's a great question because it's like at the forefront of every conversation. This company I'm working with in Germany, it's called Black Forest, they. They put certain guide rails on what can be done and then they found someone on X, used the content, I mean, used the algorithms to create something that was questionable. But they can't stop it. They're just the provider. So it's a debate going on all the time. When I started in the business in the 60s, the every, there was only three television networks, seven motion picture companies, there was five publishing companies that published books, and there were five record companies. And they were the gatekeepers to everything we read, heard or saw and as agents. And the reason I became an agent is we became the gatekeeper to the gatekeeper, which no one had ever thought of. So we basically took 75% of the talent to the company within eight years of starting. And we went to the gatekeepers and we told them what they could have versus them telling us what they could have. So we would. Michael Crichton, who was a longtime client, gave me a book. And it was a book about three people on an island off the coast of Costa Rica. And it was an amusement park with prehistoric monsters. And the monsters got out and I read the book and I called him up. I said, my son likes dinosaurs, I like dinosaurs and my dad likes dinosaurs. We're doing this movie. I called Steven Spielberg and I said, I need you to read this tonight, which I've never done in all the time I represented him. And he said, you have to get permission from my wife because he wasn't allowed to read at night. So I called Kate, who was also a client, and she said it was okay. He called me at six o' clock the next morning and said, I'm in. It was the first time in my history that a filmmaker had said to me, I'm going to do a movie with no script. I'm going to do it off the book. It was that good. Jurassic park has probably done four or five billion dollars of box office minimum, plus ancillary rights. I think that when I think about suffered the same thing that happened when I started in the business. There were actually was a department.

At.

The three networks that read everything, looked at everything, and told you what you could not do. And some of it was so ridiculous that the creative people went crazy. Some of the biggest fights as agents we ever had was protecting our creatives against the authority of what was the censorship department. And we're right back there now. We are right back there now. This whole concept of AI, how do you protect. I had a conversation yesterday, something I never thought of. I was looking at cyber companies, and I was on the phone with someone that works at a big cyber company, and he gave me a thesis, asked me what I thought, how they could protect the following. Someone does a piece of AI that is huge. Ramaph. And it's got an invoice with you on it approving that that invoice should be paid.

Right.

The invoice looks very legitimate. It's got your wiring instructions, and it goes to the company. And it's not you, and it's not your invoice. And you. Your office automatically pays the bill. They see you, they see the invoice, they pay the bill. How do you protect against that? That's just the tip of the iceberg. And it's all everyone's talking about right now. How do you handle this?

There was this incredible moment, I guess, from Robert Evans to yourself, Bob Dailey, of the studio head, the person who could make a gut decision to greenlight something, as you were sort of just describing with Jurassic park, and then something crazy happens. The accountants, the financiers take over and they oust the auteurs and the people who have taste. And then we're all suffering through the 78th Marvel movie or television series that is just done without any care or thoughtfulness, and we lose these adult movies that you made, that your contemporaries made, that define cinema, that define art, that define storytelling, whether it's the Godfather, the shape sensation, shape culture, you know? And I'm curious, when you look at those studio heads in that moment in time, is there any chance that could ever come back? Because I think part of the reason why people don't have an attention span for cinema and for this incredible art form that's being lost is because these bean counters, these bureaucrats, are not letting the artists make important work anymore like you did.

It's a different world. I'm so lucky. I can't articulate it enough. I've seen both. So I got to work where there were people running studios, like Lou Wasserman ran Universal, Dick Zanuck ran Fox, and all the executives were. They didn't work for big companies. Some of the companies had stock that traded just on its own, and those that didn't were private. Universal was private up until I sold it to Matsushita Electricity. It was A private company. And I was telling this story to someone at dinner the other night. No one that studies film. When I teach at a film class, I will ask, how many of you see black and white movies? Almost no hands go up. How many of you have seen movies prior to 1980? No hands go up. How many of you know who Frank Capra is, or David Lean or. Or Stanley Kubrick? I just go right down the list of the greats that set the foundation for the American cultural ethos in entertainment. And at one time, entertainment was the second largest export of the United States, which no one realizes, between movies, television, books and records, second largest export after aircraft. Those numbers don't exist anymore. And it's a different world. And I tell this story about how a man named Irving Thalberg at MGM in the late 20s and 30s, at 28 years old, pumped out 350 films a year. And if you look at the titles, they're some of the greatest movies ever made. It was all from his stomach. He didn't read data. He didn't look at TikTok, which none of us should look at anyways. But that's a different issue. He didn't see reels. He wasn't on Instagram. He wasn't looking at short form content. The one negative thing that the Valley has done for creativity is they have trained viewers, which I thought was impossible 20 years ago, to consume content differently. I want it short, I want it fast. I want to eavesdrop on other people. They don't need to be celebrities. I'm going to make somebody that's a celebrity that isn't a celebrity and has no talent, but they seem to know how to put makeup on. So I'm going to follow them. And there's data coming out of your eyeballs. You have the streaming services giving filmmakers data on who's looking at what, how old the character should be, how good looking this one should be, how bad looking this one should be, what should the heavy look like, who the director should be, based on the past 20 films? Because we've put it in the computer. It doesn't work like that.

And social rules.

Social is.

And this is a. I mean, you know, I don't know if you want to comment on that before we wrap. We are running a bit late, but that's it. David, we could keep going. I mean, but there is a. There's a. There's a big. He's a bestie. Yeah, there's. There's a. You're a bestie now.

I'm trying out here.

So I think.

I think you said, I need you guys to convince the one of the four guys up here that I should be with them on this podcast.

Wow.

That would be an honor.

You know, Michael, it used to be that Hollywood kind of set culture. Hollywood kind of created whatever social phenomenon became the fat du jour. But now there's culture, there's social rules and restrictions that are being imposed on Hollywood. No one wants to talk about it out loud, but how much do you feel like the business is constrained and challenged now by, you know, these social movements?

Well, I mean, let's start with the woke movement.

Okay. I wasn't going to say it.

Yeah. Okay, here we go. I mean, I don't have any problem raising it if it doesn't bother you guys.

I think I'm okay with it.

It's hard to believe that it's had a huge impact on what you see, what you read, not what you hear. Musicians have been really clever about getting around that because if you watch some of their music videos, they just do what they want to do. But it's short form. It's three minutes or under.

Can I just make a quick observation as we wrap up here? So I didn't really understand what Michael had done to disrupt the agency business until a couple of decades ago. I had the opportunity to visit the original William Morris office and the original CA office that you designed with IM Pei, and the original William Morris office, it was like this honeycomb where each agent would have this little office, and then there was an outer office where they had their assistant. And there'd be a hallway to get to that. There'd be like a longer hallway. No one could ever see each other. Everyone was kind of on their own. And then if you visited the original CAA office, it was this open space. It was like this modern office, like you'd see in a startup, where everyone could see each other. And it immediately helped underscore and helped me understand how significant this team approach that you had to team packaging was and why you could do such a fundamental disruption in the industry. So that's observation number one. The second observation is that when I read your book, one of the concepts that really stood out to me was that when you talked about packaging and putting together a package, you always had this concept of what you called the motor, which is it was the element in the package that would make it go. So in the example you gave with Jurassic park, you had the element of Steven Spielberg. And really, in that case, the element was the IP that you got from Michael Crichton. Right. And you put that together.

There was two elements.

Two elements in that case. But that always stuck with me. And even when I'm dealing with startups, I'm thinking about what's the motor here. It's frequently the founder and their vision should be. But it seems to me that you were the motor, not just for caa, but really for an entire era in the entertainment industry. And I want to give you credit for that.

Well, thank you. Thank you, Michael Novit.

Amazing.

We'll have you back again.

Yeah.