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
I said, you should run for some public. You should do some good for somebody aside from the 32 owners. I said, run for senator, do something. I thought Jane Skinner, his wife, was going to leap the table and throttle me. But you never met a guy with so much integrity, so much creativity, so much ability to communicate, so much the blind lady of justice between players and owners.
Absolutely fearless taking an order to task. Fearless. Been this way since I met him. He didn't grow into that. If he doesn't agree with him, he just says it. They respect it. And on top of it, his dad was a senator. was a Senator who took a position against his party. And Roger has something to prove and has proven it a hundred times over. And you want to talk about a loyal friend, he's up there.
He makes me look like an amateur.
You know, it's a great question. I got asked this a couple of weeks ago at a dinner I was speaking at. And Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz said to me in the early 2000s, you know, you're wasting your time. doing all the stuff you're doing, because what you do is exactly what we do. There's no difference.
You find an idea or a young person, so that could be a director or an actor or an idea from Michael Crichton, and then you develop it, and then you finance it. You get it money. Then you help them shape the business or the package. Then you cast it, and then you get a distribution, and you market it. So that's the definition of a startup.
And there's not one thing in my day today that I'm doing different than I did in 1974. There's not one thing different. It's just the numbers are a little different. But it's the same blocking and tackling, same fundamentals. At the end of the day, for me, I have a very cultural bias on how I invest. I invest very different than everyone else.
It's the same fundamentals, but I invest in human beings. I may not like their idea, but if I like them, I want to be around them. And I've put my money into companies that have gone through the roof, and I've put my money into companies that have failed. But the founders have never failed me. They've always come back.
40, 50.
Great. So today, you got full motion video with emotional looks on the game characters. That was unheard of in those days, right? You're going to get the same thing with AI. There's no emotion now. Will they get there? Maybe. It's still a handmade craft. I don't think content's the issue. I think the issue's ideas where we've kind of run the gambit on it.
Everything's a sequel. When I started as an agent, I bought a 20-volume set of the synopses of the greatest literature in the world. And I would go through it to see if I could find ideas for movies. And some of my favorite authors of all time, like Alexander Dumas, how many times can you make The Three Musketeers or Count of Monte Cristo, right? The French just made it for the fifth time.
we've kind of bled the well dry on source material. And then the fiction that's coming out, not at the rate it used to, because we don't encourage young people. We've got a humongous problem in the arts, not in the fine arts, oddly, but in the media arts of teaching people and giving them an opportunity to
When I signed Tom Cruise when he was 19, I gave him a list of 10 directors that he needed to work with to build his career. And all 10 were clients, and he worked with all 10 over 10 years. That's a career builder. Couldn't do that today. Someone said, could you start CA today? I said, no. There's no marketplace for it.
If someone said to me that Netflix or a company out of San Francisco that mailed DVDs was going to change worldwide viewing patterns, worldwide viewing patterns, and that everything would be put up, accessible in multiple places on the internet, in perfect quality when you want it. Who would have thought you were smoking crack? They changed the viewing patterns.
No one watches TV the same way anymore. In the, I remember in the 80s and 90s, you watched Thursday night on NBC because you wanted to see Seinfeld and you wanted to see Kelsey Grammer, you wanted to see all these shows. And on Tuesday nights in the 70s, you watched Mod Squad and then Marcus Welby MD and the Tuesday night movie. It was just, that's the way it is.
And you'd talk about it the next day at the office. Well, first of all, no one's going to the office. And second of all, there's nothing that's ever at the same moment. So no one's talking about anything. It's very hard to build word of mouth. And it cracks me up when these releases are made that such and such streaming show had 3.4 million viewers. And I crack up because in my day,
Late night, which was the lowest viewing center on television, but very profitable, Letterman drew 5 million viewers every night. The day it's over, and the theaters are tough to go to, and until someone puts capital into the theaters, people don't want to go. You can now get a 100-inch flat screen for around $2,500 max.
You can get a surround sound kit from any of the big Japanese manufacturers for $499 at Costco or any place. You get your own little theater and you put it in your bedroom, your living room, put it in your bathroom. It doesn't make any difference. I just bought a projector that's 4K. It's about six inches wide. It projects a picture on the wall in my bedroom. It's unbelievable.
And technology has just swamped the content possibilities. And we're not growing creative people. Who's the next Steven Spielberg? Who's the next Morty? Why is that? How do we do that? You need... a fertile marketplace. And as I always said when I was at the agency, we're in a business, folks.
It's fun to make movies that no one wants to see except the person that makes it because it's some personal statement. And that's fine. But we had a rule, one in three. You didn't make two commercial movies, you were not making an art movie. Today, go look at the things nominated for Academy Awards and show me the breakout movie.
You know, we used to have movies that had an aesthetic value and a commercial value. And when you push them together right at that line, they were the Tootsies and the, you know, they were the, all the President's Men and the Jurassic Parks and the Rain Man. Rain Man was a humongous hit. That movie was turned down by everybody. What do you think the key is to raising money? confidence.
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