Michael Ovitz

Everything was about the entertainment business.

There was no life outside the entertainment business.

There were very few people with other interests other than content.

There were very few people that collected art in the entertainment business.

There were very few people that talked at dinner about anything except entertainment and a little tiny bit about politics.

But it was mostly about gossip and about...

about clients and about who made what, how much trouble someone was in, all things that I found absolutely uninteresting.

And I made it a point to take myself away from the business, go to New York every single week,

build a presence in the art community, in the theater community, in part of the intellectual community, because I didn't want to be one of those kind of one-horse people.

I always admired people that had great depth and breadth and could talk about many things.

And I practiced what I preached.

We had at the agency in 74 a 200 single line list bibliography of monthly magazines and books to look at.

And they weren't in a singular space.

And I had, at one time, I was a magazine junkie.

I don't know if you know this, but you probably aren't aware of this, but there wasn't always an internet.

Did you know that?

No.

And I used to get over 200 magazines a month at my office or house or both.

And every single day, I'd thumb through 10 or 15 of them, and I'd tear out things I needed to read in depth.

Those were the days of long form, not short form like today where no one has any attention span.