Michael Ovitz, Me And The Truce That Never Was

As a new book puts the focus back on CAA’s origins, Kim Masters recalls how the agent’s fit at The Palm and her follow-up kicked off one of Hollywood’s prickliest pas de deux.

- Kim Masters

TWO YEARS BEFORE I EVER MET Michael Ovitz, I heard from him.In 1988, Premiere — then a fairly new, gorgeous and glossy movie magazine (that eventually would collapse) — hired me to write a monthly column called “California Suite” about the film business. Premiere was partly owned by Rupert Murdoch, who a few years earlier had taken control of 20th Century Fox. The possibility that he would at some point want to alter or kill a story that embarrassed or inconvenienced his studio was so obvious that before I took the job, I asked the editor, Susan Lyne, not to hire me if she wasn’t prepared to back me when things got sticky. She said she would. Right out of the gate, I found myself writing an item about Ovitz. In short order, Susan found herself on the line with Murdoch.

Ovitz was so powerful in that era — swathed in carefully manufactured mystery and highly inaccessible to the press. He had reinvented the agency business and built something sleek, disciplined and aggressive. Everyone in town called CAA agents “Moonies” because of the way they seemed to march in lockstep in Armani uniforms. Powerful executives and producers liked to accuse the media of creating a myth around Ovitz, but we only were reacting to their fear of him. And that fear wasn’t unreasonable given CAA’s formidable array of stars — Robert Redford, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Barbra Streisand, Julia Roberts — who in those simpler times could open just about any movie. Crossing CAA could mean less access to crucial talent and material.