Michael Ovitz

I always felt that Hollywood was manufactured for people that had no significant others, no children, no home, no family, nothing except maybe a two-bedroom apartment because they could go out 365 nights a year and find companionship with others in the same boat and do something.

You can't find that in most vocations.

Everyone had to be incredibly well-read.

People were not allowed to recommend

roles or material that they didn't believe in.

That was a big downfall of the agency business for all the years I was in it before, which is people would take a flyer to try to get you convinced of something they didn't believe in.

That's a real weak link in the chain.

We didn't have any of that.

You had to have a passion for what you were doing.

I had an open door policy Friday afternoons.

Anyone could come in and give me something to read.

But since I could only read a certain number of scripts on a weekend, they had to be incredibly passionate about it.

I remember a young agent we had named Amy Grossman.

She was a literary agent and she was terrific.

She came in to me one afternoon and said, I've read something you've got to read.

And I said, okay.

And I gave everybody like two minutes to sell it to me because – and by the way, I do the same thing in my tech investing right now.

If you can't tell me what your business is about and –

20 seconds, you should not do your business because how are you going to market it to the world?

You've got, and I'm not talking about that technical algorithms of AI.