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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Because, you know, someone said to me, why did I start this business with Ollie, who's 40 years younger than me? And I've got all these under 30 people working around our office and everything. I said, well, one, it's stimulating. Two, I'm learning a lot from them. Three, they know things I don't because of their age. Four, they're all really smart. So for me, that's like a feeding zone.
I'm a big Dracula devotee. And five, the build is the most fun. The best time of my life was the first 10 years of CAA. The worst time was when we came out. Number one on the power list. Because then everyone wants to kill you. And they don't just want to kill you. They want to hack your limbs off and just drag them around the courtyard. Because either you can't do what they want you to do.
You can't make their dream come true. You can't help them. Or you don't help them enough. It's a never-ending litany of problems. Human beings are basically unsatisfied at every level of their life, except for moments. And the goal is to have as many of those moments as you can.
No, look, some of my greatest moments are with my grandkids. I love having grandkids because... I get all the fun and none of the responsibility to raise them. But I get to see my kids in them and a little bit of me, and it's really fun. Doing things that are creative are fun. For me, business is creative because I'm not a painter or a director or a sculptor or an actor. I have no talent.
So I can't do any of the things that I just so admire. That's why I could sit and watch Roy paint. I love the concept. I used to tell Michael Crichton, we were on a vacation together on a boat in the Mediterranean and He was sitting at his computer. I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm making notes about this town we just went to in Italy. I said, what about?
He said, well, things I saw that were weird. To what end? I'm going to put it in the file and I'll use it. And what I realized is he, like a quilt, he'd patch all this stuff together into a yarn and And it was either true, false, fiction, nonfiction, but it was a yarn. And it came out of nothing. It came out of his head from life experience.
Danny Meyer cracks me up. I sat next to him at a MoMA trustee lunch. He's not on the board, but he's very close to the museum. And he was catering it. He fits my description to you of the kind of people I like to be around. He sat there and he didn't sit still. He's looking at everything. He's jumping into the kitchen. He's talking to the captain. He's talking to the waiters. He wanted perfection.
And to me, that's what it's all about. It's about excellence. If you can't live your life and achieve some excellence in some silo, then you should move to another planet. Because that's what it's like. And it doesn't matter what the silo is. You can be an auto mechanic and be the great. I had a guy in L.A. who was the greatest auto mechanic I ever met in my life.
I used to take my cars to him when I was younger because I love cars and I had all these old cars. I don't know how he did it. He could make them run. I thought the guy was a genius. He was a guy who lived in Little Japan in L.A., And he was brilliant at his field.
I guess as an agent, and I've mentored so many young people, and I so enjoy it. But the best part of it is seeing them succeed. I said to Ali, look, I said, you're 40 years younger than me. I wanna leave this so you, and now my son who's joining us, I said, I want you guys to have some foundation that you can quadruple. It's my job to give you that foundation. It's not for me.
I already have my career.
Well, I'll take the third one first because I told this story to someone yesterday. Years ago when I was – Bob De Niro was a close friend and a great client and he and Marty are best friends and we did like five movies together. Yeah.
Occasionally, competitive agents, even though we really didn't have any competition, would somehow kind of eke their way into our clients' good graces of a meal or a meeting. It was highly unusual. So some agent, who I don't want to mention his name because he's still functioning, gets Bob De Niro in a room here. And two things happened in the same week.
One with Bobby De Niro and one with Bill Murray. So with Bob De Niro, he says to him, you know, Bob, Ovitz is too busy, too many clients, too tough, too much in control. You're losing all your creative judgment. And he's impossible to deal with. And then he called me all kinds of names that I took as a compliment, you know, that I was too tough and that I was a bulldog.
And he said even to wit, he has bulldogs on his desk in his office, which is true. And Bob looked at him for a second and was having coffee. And Bob told me this story. And he said to me, he said to him, yeah, you're right about everything you said. But he said, you know what? And the guy said, well, he said, he's my bulldog. And he left.
And Bill Murray that week, this is hysterical, a guy, a different agent, got Bill Murray to have a meeting with him. And they were supposed to meet at the Mark Hotel, but Bill was late and he said, come up to my apartment. Bill didn't know what the meeting was about. He didn't even know the guy was an agent. Bill, to this day, is one of my close friends.
He's one of the smartest, most gifted human beings on the planet. He is a gift to all of us because he's all about making people feel good, unless he thinks you're a joke. He is meeting with this guy in his own apartment, and the guy starts pitching him why he should leave me. And Bill's shaking his head and said, could you excuse me for a minute? And I've got to go to the bathroom.
And the guy said, yeah, sure. So Bill leaves the room and this guy's sitting there and five minutes go by and 10 minutes go by and 15 minutes go by and 30 minutes go by. And he goes looking for Bill. Bill walked out the fire escape and left him in his apartment.
Yeah, true.
Look, I'm a zealot and a passionate human being about everything I do. When I started collecting art, I started collecting prints. Now I have a very deep and strong art collection, not an accident. I've worked really hard at it because I enjoy it. So it's fun. It's rewarding. I envy what these
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