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
Tamara and I will sit around sometimes at night after dinner and look at the art on our walls and say, how did they do it? Why did they do it? Why did they use that color? What drove them? It's so interesting. I don't know how anyone could not think that. It's just so interesting. Take yourself to that moment.
You know, what was Picasso thinking when he decided to deconstruct a figure and make it a cubist look where it's like a puzzle pre-computer 100 years ago?
The African mass. That's what influenced me to go to MoMA. One of our directors, Bill Rubin, did a show I saw probably 25 times. He came up with the thesis that Picasso... And all of those artists were influenced, Gauguin, Roch, all of them by Modigliani, by African statuary from the mid-1800s.
Because in the 1850 to 1900, the Nigerians threw the Catholic missionaries out, so they went back to Paris and Brussels, where the greatest primitive art museums are. And they brought all these relinquary figures with them. And in the early 1900s, they ran out of money and they put those masks in those left bank. Oh, wow. Shopping, you know, on the weekends. Yeah, yeah.
And Picasso bought 50 of them. Probably spent two, three francs for each one. There's a picture of his studio in Moujon in black and white that has 50 masks on the wall. And you look at these masks and you look at the faces and you go, good God, it's right here. And Rubin proved that with these two volumes that are amazing. I saw that show so many times.
I started collecting African art the same day. And then I started looking at Picasso very seriously before anyone. This is before Picasso took off. As a matter of fact, there was a period in New York in the early 70s where the New York Times had written a vile review of the late Picasso show at the Guggenheim, and all the dealers had stocked up on it because he had painted 10,000 pictures.
It wasn't hard to get. And it all just sat there. No one would buy it. And not for me to disagree with the New York Times, but I went in and bought three paintings for nothing. They were thrilled to sell them to me. Crazy. Because I thought he's a genius. And they re-reviewed the show three months later and said they made a mistake. But those are all things that are important. And for me,
It's about, when you talk about excellence and it's about being the best friend, I want to be the best friend I can be to my friends. I want there to be no question of my loyalty to them. It was the same with my clients. I did not work for the movie studios. I didn't care what they thought of me. I didn't work for the networks. I worked for the clientele of CAA.
That was my job, and I worked for my associates. I wanted them protected. I wanted us to function in unison, client and agent. We had a young agent. who we all had assignments, everybody, including me. Her assignment was Warner Brothers. And the guy running the studio wouldn't return our calls, which was weird because we had everybody he needed, but he wouldn't talk to her.
He would only talk to more senior people. And we forbade that. We insisted that if you, Patrick, wanted to package someone in the O'Shaughnessy production, You dealt with the agent that represented CAA and all our clients. That was our conceit. You didn't go to the agent that handled the client. And the guy shut her down.
And in a staff meeting, much to everyone's chagrin, I told everyone not to return this guy's call. Period. No emails, no calls, no communication until further notice. This went on. And about three days in, he called me. I didn't return his call. Five days in, his wife called me. I did return her call. And she said, why are you doing this to Bob? And I said, why is Bob being disrespectful to Lori?
And she said, what are you talking about? I said, ask him. So she calls me back. She said, he's taking her to lunch. Then we started calling him again. Because that kind of movement, he hated me for that. And I don't blame him. But- Team probably loved you. Team loved it because they felt supported. Clients loved it because we taught them a lesson and we became even more powerful.
And at the end of the day, power was synonymous with success in getting things done as an agent. I'm only talking about as an agent because we were there to protect the clients and to protect the constituency. So am I, was I a good friend of that guy? I was until that moment. And then I decided I wasn't going to be because he shouldn't have done that.
He embarrassed her to death in a staff meeting. She was turned red as a beet. She couldn't give a report. So World's Worst Enemy, one of my close friends in Los Angeles called me up, said he needed to see me, said he had been sued by a woman. who worked for him 30 years ago because he thwarted her career. This was not sexual harassment. Never touched her. Thwarted her career.
I said, give me every fact. He did. And I went on a campaign on his behalf because it wasn't right. 30 years ago, she did just fine, but the judge wouldn't throw it out. I'm his friend, and I did some things that probably other people would question. Nothing illegal, but I called the lawyer for the plaintiff, who I know, and gave him my point of view, which was not particularly friendly.
I thought that it was shaming his firm and told him. And told him I was going to tell everybody else that too, because I thought what he was doing, what his associate was doing to this man was not only inappropriate, there was no legal ground for it. And it was 30 years ago. So yeah, am I world's worst enemy, best friend? Yeah, I think so. And I'm proud of it.
Been friends with him, just had dinner with him. We were laughing about how long we've known each other. Met him in the early 90s. I don't know what happened. He's one of those guys. He was number four at the NFL when Paul Tagliabue was there. He had something very special. He fits in that list. He had something very special. He was really smart.
He had the best bedside manner of anyone I ever met in sports. Anyone I met anywhere. He was fun to be around, knew the game cold, knew his stuff. It's kind of like, you know, Andreessen or Horwitz knows their stuff. I remember sitting with Mark and Ben at a Y Combinator day and every presentation, Mark would go, yep, 19 so-and-so, saw that, been there, done that.
And Ben would say, yep, that didn't work. And the frame of reference is, and the memory is frightening. And Roger just knew the game, knew everything. Couldn't have been more accommodating to the things we were trying to, I was trying to buy a team for LA at the time. And just, we got to be good friends and it never stopped. It's now,
I don't know, 40 years later, and I think I got into a mega, mega argument with his wife at dinner last week, which he's going to kill me for saying this, but I can't help myself. I said, you know, you actually should be president of the United States. I said, you've run a business that's humongous. You've grown it 20x. All the owners have made a fortune. There's nobody losing money.
Showing 1321–1340 of 1,371 · page 67 of 69
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