Michael Ovitz
speaker
1,371 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3 Feb
Michael Ovitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
All about momentum. In other words, they remind me of this toy I bought my grandson that's a remote control truck that when it hits a wall, it bounces off and turns in the other direction. That's kind of these people. There's no stopping them. And there's no idea that isn't worth considering. You know, at CA, we had every 90 days a gong show.
And we lined everyone up in a circle, 250 people that were working executives. And they were all seated within an inch of each other, tight in an oval. They had 90 seconds to present a new idea. I didn't care what the idea was. We got some amazing stuff out of it. Just when you think there's no new ideas. That's what I love about technology. What are the top enemies of momentum? Oh, that's easy.
Loss of confidence, fear of failure. Fear of failure is the greatest problem outside the United States. So I was in London a couple months ago in a business meeting with five or six business people. And one of them looked at me and said, how do we do this? And these are prominent people. And I said, what do you do what? He said, you've been up, down, and sideways, but you never stop.
And you don't take no for an answer. And you just keep building. But you know how to build off success and off failure. He said, if we fail in Europe, it's over. We run away. We're embarrassed. We're never allowed to come back. I said, if we fail in America, we take it as a badge of honor. I can't tell you the number of pivots my young companies have made.
I mean, Kevin Systrom, fourth pivot was Instagram. Fourth. I have a young kid I love. I've mentioned him last time, James Proud. That deal failed the first one. Second one, huge hit. You can't stop. I think if some of these great entrepreneurs, I mean, when Mark and Ben wanted to start, everyone told them they were crazy. There were 190 VCs on Sandale Road. They were going to be another one.
We had conquered all areas of entertainment. We had a 76% market share of talent. We had 46 of the top 50 grossing directors in the world. We controlled almost everyone except Disney's motion picture offerings. That was 10 different studios. We packaged everything. We made the biggest hit movies of anyone, of all of them added together.
The biggest hits came out of CA, from Jurassic Park, Dawn of Africa, to Ghostbusters, to Stripes, Meatballs, Casino, Goodfellas. I can go right down the list. It just was endless. And we had great commercial taste, great commercial taste. We all loved movies.
So we basically picked movies we wanted to see, which always amazes me today when I look at the offerings and I say to myself- Who's picking this stuff? Who's picking this stuff? Who'd they pick it for? Because I'm not like really interested in this and I'm just view myself as a normal moviegoer. But we had hit top in every area.
And I was sitting back one day and I'm saying to myself, there's a transition going on in the business. The businesses are between the seats, the distributors, the studios. They're too big to be independent and too little to grow because they had no capital. They relied on what their content did. So if they had... a 30 movie slate, which was about average 35.
They were thrilled if two were hits, two were zeros and the rest floated in between. But that's not a money-making business, believe it or not. People didn't get rich in the studio business. So I realized that what was going to happen is that these companies were going to need sponsors. They were going to need money. It was pretty clear. It was not like some genius observation.
They were dying for cash flow. I could tell because we were having trouble collecting. They'd put us off. We'd get paid for our clients because they had guild rules. But man, they waited until the last possible second to send the check. We used to have to send messengers to Paramount to get paid to pick up the check. Do you remember checks?
They were on paper. And I said, wouldn't it be great if CA not only had all the clients... But we had all the owners. We were the ones that they had to talk to. And Japan was on fire, on fire. They were producing everything we weren't, that we stopped producing. It's fascinating to me to this day, because I am such a zealot American right now.
At the end of the day, and I agree with Alex Karp, we better be strong. We better just be, and Andreessen says the same thing. Peter says the same thing. Anyone I know who's smart says the same thing. We better be strong. You don't keep the world peace by being weak. You just don't. No one understands weakness. They just don't. And I surely don't. I don't understand it in people.
Because there's no reason for it. It's better to come out ahead of yourself and be confident in what you're... We all have individual skill sets. Be confident in those skill sets. So I started to cultivate companies in Japan. And the first company I cultivated, oddly, was Nomura.
And they, oddly, in those days, in the 80s, controlled about 3% to 4% of the stock in the top 20 Koretsu companies, which no one knew. They hadn't invested in them. So they opened a lot of doors for me. I was their media consultant. And when I met Mr. Morita, it became very clear that their money would be very good for American assets. I was highly criticized.
The cover of Newsweek bashed me, had a picture of the Statue of Liberty wrapped in the Japanese flag, and wrote a nasty article that I was selling all of our assets to Japan. And I'll never forget this. My friend, Bill Bradley, who ran for president at the time and was Senator of New Jersey, gave a quote to them that shut it all down. He said, did you ever think that he's using this for financing?
Because they can't take the studios over to Tokyo. They can't. And they don't understand how to make the product. So it was like a no-brainer. They were just good money with technology. It was a great fit. The fact that they didn't all use it right is a different story. That's because they had no interest in growth. They think in a very organized fashion.
I booked Michael Jackson at Tokyo, one of the Tokyo stadiums. They had 60,000 people there. And we had him at Soldier's Field in Chicago, 100,000 people. When he finished at Soldier's Field, there was pandemonium from the Chicagoans. They went wild and ran for the exits in the field and they went crazy. When I was in Tokyo and Michael Jackson finished, everyone applauded.
And then some guy in a yellow blazer comes out to the diamond with a microphone and starts dismissing Rose one at a time. And I said to myself, I learned so much in that moment. It was unbelievable. We are not brought up in an organized fashion. We rebel against authority. We don't like people telling us what to do. We like original thinking. Failure is an option. Let's just get on with it.
That's America. And the great thing about America is we create movies, we create television shows, we create books. We're the masters of fine art now. Used to be, until the 50s, it was all Europe. Then came abstract expressionism, then pop art, then op art. It just kept going. We have the number one artists in the world here, in New York City, all over the United States. So when it comes to tech...
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