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
wide open for me it was about getting to a point where no one could talk to the owners of anything without going through us so if you wanted to talk to the owner of cbs records or columbia pictures they spoke fluent japanese and if you didn't have a long relationship with them You had less than zero chance of having a definitive conversation. So it all funneled through us.
So we had the owners of MGM, which were creditly in a bank, which I was a consultant to the chairman. We had the owners of Universal Studios, which was Matsushita Electric. And we had the owners of CBS Records and Columbia, which was Sony. And we had the owners of Bertelsmann. I was a consultant to BMJ. And that was pretty much three-fifths of the business.
We didn't have Disney, but they were always on their own. And at the end of the day, you needed a favor. And that's all that business is, is one favor after another. You had to call us. You couldn't call anybody else. Who are you going to call? Ghostbusters? Who are you going to call? There's no one to call. Try getting Jean Perlevard, the chairman of the Credit Lyonnais Bank on the phone.
Good luck. Just doesn't happen. It's not simple. And remember, in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, up until the Mid-70s, you could get any owner of any studio on the phone. You could see them in a restaurant. That changed fast, and we saw it coming.
Well, that's 40 years ago. Yeah.
Well, it's what we've talked about. You asked me how I learned how to be an investment banker, and to answer your question, which I've avoided skillfully, my son, my oldest son, Chris, asked me the same question when I was doing it. He said, Dad... how the hell did you figure this out? He said, this is complicated stuff. I said, Chris, I learn on the job every day. I watched Steve Schwartzler.
I watched Pete Peterson. I used to go to lunch with Roger Altman and pick his brain. I am an insatiable sponge. If I can get 30 minutes with Marc Andreessen or a meal with Peter Thiel just to listen, to me, that's a quadruple net positive because I learned so much. And I have to tell you that I didn't know what I was doing, but I didn't need to.
I learned it as I did it because it's pretty much common sense. I could read a balance sheet. I knew what the SEC checklist was to make, you know, that had to be met. I knew enough. I had Herb Allen II as my mentor telling me, what to do, what not to do. Like I was, if I was gonna do something incredibly stupid, he had the nicest way of telling me how stupid I was.
And we were on the phone, Herb and I were on the phone 10 times a day.
Herb is the most extraordinary man on the planet. And by the way, so is his son. He raised him. I could tell a lot about a guy by their kids. That's the most I learned about a human being is by meeting their kids.
He doesn't talk much, doesn't do press. You Google them, there's nothing. The family's amazing. Herb II was my mentor in banking. I went to him with these ideas, and instead of saying no or trying to steal them, I said, let's do it. He didn't push me away. He didn't think I was nuts. He thought it was a great idea that he and I do it together. Every other bank tried to push me out.
When I signed Matsushita as a client, they took me into a room, like a cubby room, and there were stacks of engagement letters from every investment bank in the world, in the world. laying out all their fees and everything else. And Herb said to me, don't ask anybody for anything.
So I went in and when I closed the deal with Matsushita, a man named Hirata, who was the senior vice president, number two guy in the company, that's how they work it, said to me, what would you like? And I said, nothing. He said, what do you mean nothing? I said, if we're successful, I said, if we're successful,
I want you to get a Brinks armored truck and load it up with gold bars and send it to Beverly Hills to my office. If we're not successful, cover our expenses, we get nothing. He bowed so deep his head hit the table because it was trust. We never had a written document. In 25 years at CA, I didn't have written documents with employees or clients. We never lost a client the whole time I was there.
You never had a written document with a client? No. Sometimes we had what's called guild authorization papers, but they didn't mean anything. Because under the Screen Actors Guild, if a client didn't work for 91 days, they had the right to fire you. Why have a contract? Because it just gives them something to look forward to. I had people stay with us 25, 30 years, never signed a document.
But, you know, Herb said, do it. I did it. He was right. I did it with everybody. I never asked Sony for anything. I never asked MGM for anything. I never asked Credit Lyonnais for anything. I never asked anybody for anything. I just got paid. And I got paid obscene sums of money. But we gave them really good advice. And we gave them advice they couldn't get from anybody else.
So when we were diligencing the Columbia Pictures Library, I had six of our guys in the library looking at the names of the films and had seen them. They weren't just bankers. They were hyphenates. They had seen the movies. So they could say, yeah, this has value. No, this doesn't have value. They couldn't get that anywhere else.
And we were spot on with what we said the libraries were worth because we didn't inflate it. The other thing we did, which is quite out of the ordinary, is we told the truth. And that drove people crazy in the entertainment business to tell people the truth was like unheard of because they, they, This is what drove the business.
Oh, I hated it.
No one understands how much I hated it. It was, I don't even remember the name of the magazine, but it was a very nice woman who was the editor. And when I saw that, I panicked. Because that was the beginning of shots to be taken that there's just too big a chance that one of them's going to hit you. Like, why does it matter?
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