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Michael Ovitz

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134

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2024-01-09

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2024-01-09

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1. “Like we were really lonely, I was particularly. And it was really bad spending eight hours a day at Yale with the child study center. And I'm sitting in the room the second day we're there in the doorks. And the guy says room service. So I didn't order room service go away. He says, room service opened the door. So I opened the door. It's Bill Murray with his son, who's the age of my son, with his son Homer. And Bill said, What are you doing? I said, I told you I had to take a couple days off. He said, OK, great. He shut the door, sat down, the boys played with each other, and he just spent two days there with me. For no reason other than that he's Bill Murray and he's an amazing man. So for him, those kinds of people I have soft spots for, you know.”

   2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “It's funny, I just had dinner with him a few months ago. I can't tell you how touched I was that he would take the time at that night just to say that. He didn't have to do that. I got paid for it. And the third time, one of my all time favorite human beings is on the planet to this day is Bill Murray. He's not only the most talented, dramatic actor and comedy actor, he's one of the great human beings you'll ever meet any smart as hell, and no one really quite gets how well rounded he is. My first son was very young, and he was like God he probably was six, seven years old and he had some medical issues and I found a specialist at Yale that could help with the issue and I took him to Yale. That city Yale's and is really dark and dank and the hotel stinks and the only good food is this famous pizza place.”

   2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “The only time of year I could relax because between the twenty fourth and the thirtieth nothing happened, and the phone rings at nine o'clock at night and wasn't a cell phone was the hard line and I get on the phone and it's Dave Litterman and for him it's eleven o'clock at night. He said, I'm just sitting here, sorry to bother your Christmas Eve. I just want to thank you. He said you really, really came through for me I was really had a problem at NBC and they owned me and they gave the show to somebody else and it was my dream and I have my own show now on CBS and he went on for ten minutes.”

   2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Because he figured that out, and sure enough we did the movie. There was a huge New York Times article that said that I was an idiot and all the clients were going to fire me. It was a stupid idea and it was going to be a disaster. And a movie came out open to six and a half million dollars, which was about a quarter of what a hit opened to at the time. Another article in the paper saying that I was an idiot. I pushed this picture together. It was a package. It was going to fail. For the next fifty weeks it did six million dollars a weekend and won six academy awards and I got thanked by everybody that was in the movie at the Academy Awards in the most sincere giving no ego way imaginable. I just was very touched. The second thing that happened to me was simple. It's a couple sentences I was sitting with my family on Christmas Eve. We were in Aspen, Colorado.”

   2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “reads that meets with Dustin comes to see me the next day and says, you know, I think I've figured out how to do this because no one could figure it out. And I said, what's that? He said, There is no third act. Everyone's looking for a concluding third act. The guy's autistic. It's not going to change. And it's just a light bulb went off in my head. That's why he's Barry Levinson and I'm not.”

   2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Don't necessarily look like their siblings. And then we went through four directors. We started with Marty Brest, great director did Beverly Hills Cop. He couldn't do it. We actually started with Barry Levinson and then he got offered good morning Vietnam. We had to put him in it. So he pulled out Marty Bris came in. He couldn't do it, gave it to Stephen Spielberg. He couldn't do it. He just couldn't find an answer for it. Gave it to Sidney Pollock. This was taking months each one. This is over a three year period. Gave it to Sidney Pollock. He couldn't figure out how to end it. By the time we went through Sydney, Barry had finished good morning Vietnam and we were in Aspen together at a film event and I said, you know, Barry, we ought to revisit Rainman and Dustin happened to be up there and three of us went and had coffee. So”

   2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “As a crossover, frankly, I lived my profession and so did my family, by the way. They were very instrumental in any success I was lucky enough to achieve because they were a support base. And I think three things I'll give them to you not in any order quickly. One, I worked for three years to get a movie made called Rain Man that everyone passed on. And it was something that Dustin Hoffman was my first major client, and I had a huge loyalty to him still do. He's close friend my kids grow up with his kids. He was the motor he wanted to do that character. No one wanted to do it. We put Tom Cruise into it, which we got criticized for because everyone said they don't look like each other, they can't be brothers. But what they didn't realize is that autistic kids.”

   2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “I've had a lot of kind things done for me by people both family and friends, but if you want to talk about crossover professional and personal, there are three situations that come to mind that are crossover professional personal because my whole life was”

   2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “And we showed them polar bears, which they couldn't believe that we could do animation for the price because all we did is outsource, which no one knew what that meant in those days. And we finished, and I'll never forget as long as I live the head of McCann was there. And he was sitting to my left. My team was on my right. His team was on his left. And he wrote a handwritten note to the person sitting next to him. And he stupidly let me read it and said we're screwed. And his person got up to present and I. We felt horrible for her she stopped after one commercial and got the account it was six hundred million dollars year account we ended up doing for them five hundred commercials and we made the cover of Time magazine we made a lot of animies on Madison Avenue we did a lot of firsts”

   2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “taken a flight at seven AM out of Kennedy to get to Atlanta, so they had to get up at five or four to get to the airport. They looked like they were going to die. And there was no energy. And then the bottom line is they flipped a coin and we won and they said, you want to go first or second? They thought we'd go second because that's the way you usually do this. I said, no, we're going first because I knew if we went first, that would have set up a pace. They couldn't follow. And Len Fink went up in Shelley and they started to present Bill Haver and I introduced everything. They went up. We had one thing where a talking dog was the lead character and Len got down on all fours barking.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Untouchables, and we got our money to do the clothes, so we had an inn at Armani and he tailored all these great clothes for us. And we went into Atlanta the day before we had a leisurely dinner. Nice bottle of wine went to sleep. Everybody got up in the morning, went to the gym, showed up at the room at fifteen to eleven for an eleven o'clock meeting with the COCO, CFO, CTO and CMO of the Coca Cola Company, which was big. And there's no McCann Erickson. We're sitting there very patiently. Our suits were pressed by the way. We looked amazing. By the way, we looked great. We were confident. We had all our stuff set up. At five after eleven in walks thirty five people wrinkled and crinkled from New York City, from McCann, who had taken.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “and to put ourselves up against McCann. And I said great, happy to do it. They thought we wouldn't do it because we were promised the account and I didn't care. I was so confident about our product. And we took thirty five commercials. We did storyboards on it. We did what's called a rippomatic on some of them. We had the polar bears we created them all drawn out. There were six of us doing this, and we went down a day early. We went and looked at the room. We did it entertainment style. We looked at the room. We changed the seating around. I bought everybody our money suits, including Shelley Hochran. We all had blues Armani suits because we had an inn with Armani because we'd put Sean Connery and Kevin Cosner. Of course.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “I mean, he didn't skip a beat, he sent us two guys, two young guys. They rewrote it, but they did it in six different rhythms. They did a city rhythm, an urban rhythm, country in Western rhythm, classical rhythm, a European rhythm, they did them all for the sights. Then we went to all our clients who everyone criticized us for and said, You're going to lose all these clients if you put them in commercials? I said, we're going to pay them double their rate. And they get to do this between movies. If they don't want to do it, no one's forcing them to do it. They were lined up around the block to do it because they could go pick up a couple hundred grand for working three days. So we had movie directors doing commercials, and they did it, and they got paid and they loved it. And we delivered thirty-five commercials for the price of seven. We had six people working on the account. And we went, they asked us because they had a 40-year relationship with McCann to do what's called a show.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “So we said, God, let's rain Coca-Cola bottles. So we did a commercial, we called the Magrit commercial where Coca-Cola bottles were raining out of the sky and we came up with this idea of putting a button on the end of every commercial, but making every commercial a small movie. So it had nothing to do with anything else. It was a non sequitur. The only thing it had to do with Coca Coca was the end. The button, and said always Coca-Cola. We called Quincy Jones, who was a close friend and was brilliant, brilliant music, always ahead of his time. I said, Quincy, I need two of the best songwriters you ever seen that no one's ever heard of. He said, For what? I said, we're going to rewrite the Coca-Cola jingle. He said, wow, that is so cool.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “And we looked at them all and we got commercialized. It's like one of the pictures was Magrit with the bowler hats raining. I don't know if you've ever seen it. Yeah, yeah.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “And they said, how can you produce 35? We have trouble with seven. We can't afford it. I said, we'll do 35 for the price you do seven. He said, we have three hundred sixty account executives at McCann Erickson. I said, Good, we have me, Bill Haber, Shelley Hochran, Len Fink, and two people from the mailroom, and they said it's not possible. I said, well, you just saw 35 ideas, thirty ideas. And what I had done is I gave our mailroom assistant, and by the way, we called him a partner. We called everyone in the company a part of there were no titles at all. He was equal to me. And I gave him two thousand dollars in cash. I said, go to Brentano's which was down the street from our office, and I said, Go buy every big art book you can get your hands on. So he did, and he came back with satchels of art books. Those days they cost twenty bucks. And we went through these art books all of us.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “And they're all different demographics, so how can you do that? And they said, well, we don't know. We've never been told not to do that. And we sat down and we created a hundred plus ideas for commercials. And we went in and we took 30 of them and we pitched the following idea was very simple. We think you should do your commercials like a relay race. So we should do Thanksgiving commercial that's family. We should do Christmas commercial that's about the holiday that was a polar bear we created and we should do Valentine's Day as love. We should do Easter as family. We should do the summer as refreshment and heat in the beach Thanksgiving as family and we should do thirty to thirty five commercials a year. And they should hand off to each other over the course of”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “And I chose eight agents from the business, including one of my partners, Bill Haber, who's a brilliant guy, and I chose agents from music, from movies, from television that all represented the breadth and depth of what we had, briefed everybody, we looked at every commercial they had done for the last thirty years, we looked at all their print work, all their merchandising we really educated ourselves. And to make a long story short, we went in and spent eight hours with their department as if they had flown in from all over the world. So it's not like they weren't serious. We listened to what their needs were and we said, we got it. We'll be back to you in fourteen days. And they said, okay. And we came back in fourteen days and said, you do seven commercials a year for the world all and you put those commercials on every single program, whether it's late night, prime time, daytime, sports, they're all the same.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Jackson commercial that Pepsi's doing is just permeating everything culturally. And he said, yeah, we're not doing anything that's current or contemporary was how he phrased it. And I said, look, we can do something for you, but it's going to take enormous corporate guts to do it. Because if we do it, it's going to be pushing the edge. So he said, come to Atlanta and meet with our twelve worldwide department heads and pitch your idea and we'll give you a very fast answer. I said, okay, so I took, they sent a plane for us. It was so cool. They sent a big plane. You could stand up in and at the end. You didn't have a fee in a bottle?”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “But I learned what you only had to tell me once, and I figured out how to never make that mistake again. I didn't have formal education. Advertising was easier when we got asked to bid for the Coca Cola account. I had a really interesting idea, frankly, that came to me after looking at all of their work, and it was very clear to me that we could deliver on it because we had a repository of creative talent. By the way, thus the name creative artist, that's why we use that name. That wasn't an accident. And when I would sit Sun Valley at the Allen& Company conference, this is so long ago, and I'm sitting with Roberto Goisetta and Don Quixote. May they rest in peace who are running the company in its dynamic duo. And Roberto sitting at coffee with me with herb and saying they're concerned about case sales. And I was saying, well, do you kind of should be because this Michael's.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “sharpens your brain like sharpening a knife on a stone? Because if you don't have a sharp brain you can't do anything. And the only thing that gives you a sharp brain is pushing through difficult situations and education. And how do you get educated? You get in the middle of a lot of complex situations. And you learn my son once asked me, Dad, how did you learn how to be an investment banker because we did investment banking, we did advertising, we did a lot of stuff that no one had ever done before. And I said, I didn't learn it. I said I learned it on the job. Many times Herb Allen would say to me when we were selling an entertainment company to another company and we did six of them, he would say to me This is not the way to do this. This is how you have to think about this because I came at it with a naive point of view. I didn't go to business.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “I don't know a lot of the businesses that I was consulting for the uniform complaint is the generational hire of what the expectations are of work ethic. And I can't speak to what this generation thinks. I can only speak to my generation. It's not for me to decide what it's like today because I wouldn't want to build a business in today's environment. I don't want someone working with me that isn't on the program because at the end of the day we spent more hours during the day with each other than we did with our significant others. So it's got to be pleasant and it's got to be fun and it's got to be challenging and it's got to be energizing. You got to every minute learn something different that makes you a better human being.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Could make it, but back from the org I couldn't. I did a lot of urinating in bottles. But it was important like we could do two sets in a day and not have to sleep in a hotel, which so if someone was working in Colorado, it's tough to get a scheduled flight to. So we could go LA to Colorado, then Colorado to Iowa to cover a movie, and then back to Los Angeles all in twenty four hours. I didn't sleep a lot, but I also didn't do that on weekends so I could be with the kids. It was much easier when all three kids were in school. That I will tell you.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Was doing it. Well, I did it for $75,000 down in six hundred thousand dollars mortgage and didn't tell anybody because at that time Warner Brothers was passing out airplanes to people as benefits. When I started in the business the big gift was when the studio gave a client a car. Everybody got that. Everybody got a car. It's like if you did a good job on something, you got a car. That moved when Steve Ross was at Warner Brothers. You got a plane ride. And then as agents, we were under the gun cause every client said, Get us a free plane ride. And it became a big negotiating point. If anyone knew we were running a plane, including internally, it would have bankrupt us. Funny thing is I had a small plane. You couldn't stand up and it had no bathroom. And it couldn't make it all the way to New York. You'd had to stop on the way back to New York.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at the agency, be involved in all the meetings that we had, and then Wednesday at five I could run to the airport, get to New York by one, go to sleep, get up to a breakfast, meetings, lunch, dinner, and then leave for LA at nine, get home at eleven thirty, and then be in the office Thursday morning, and it's like no one No one knew, but no one could figure out.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “On the phone watching them, at least I was there was I as engaged as I would have liked to have been? Probably not. Did they realize that I don't know probably the hours I spent trying to be a good father, I thought I did the best I could do. Was I a father that was around twenty four seven? No. I always work really hard to not travel on weekends. I used to have to go to Japan almost once a month for a period of years. I made very clever trips that left Sunday late afternoon so I had a weekend at home. I worked really hard to do six day weeks in a five day week. I bought a very inexpensive small airplane, didn't tell anybody about it, and gave me the ability to work.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Work at home on Sunday. I worked both days of the weekend. I mean, for 20 years, I worked seven days, seven nights, but when I had the kids, we took off Saturday and Sunday night. But we also made a clear where we went to people's houses that if we couldn't bring the kid we weren't coming when we sort of pioneered this thing of bringing a basket with a kid in it, putting it on the table because we didn't want to leave the kid at home. And then as we had more kids, it became easier because we could adjust schedules. I tried like crazy to be a good father. It's really hard when you're in a service business. Sometimes I used to when the kids had athletic games at three thirty in the afternoon. My office was ten minutes from their school max and I would go with two cell phones and an assistant and stand on the sidelines.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “I did it with mixed success family was very important to me, but I didn't start a family till we'd been in business for close to ten years or eight years, so I got the hard part behind me. The minute we had our first kid, and I have four now the minute we had the first child. I changed my hours of operation around their schedules, so when they slept I worked when they ate I ate, and I did a lot of coming home at six thirty and leaving at seven thirty. I never didn't have a dinner. I would try to get home at least two nights a week. Weekends I always worked from home. I used to work in the office on Saturday.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Why,'cause he knew they didn't look great, but he was so upset that someone told him,'cause no one had ever told him. Our point of view was it's just easier to tell people the truth.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Drive back twenty minutes, I walk in, he doesn't say anything to me except I can't sleep. I said, Well, it's a pretty simple thing to fix. I said hang out and I called an internus that you see a lady. It's strong enough to put him to sleep and light enough where he's not going to be hungover. And the guy said, this is what I'd recommend put him on the phone with me. I did. We got him a prescription. He said, what are you going to do? I said, you're going to go out to your house at the beach and do nothing for five days. This was a Wednesday. Tuesday. I said, we're going to shut the movie down Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. He thought I was like, God, that I could do that. I had already pre-cleared part of being a great agent is presenting that you can do the impossible. So I had already cleared that we could shut down and get insurance, and I got him a prescription of the sleeping pills had it picked up for him, had a car and driver take em to the beach, and he came back Monday and the movie turned out to be fantastic and he stayed with me for twenty years. So when you say, is it better to tell the truth or to lie to somebody if I would have walked in and said, boy, your dailies look great. He would have thought I was out of my mind.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “To get Said, I don't need an agent like you. I didn't know what to do, so I just walked out and got in my car and spent twenty minutes driving back to the office trying to think how I was going to tell the agents that I had just lost a flagship client. It would have been a disaster for us because we were on a momentum roll. We used to announce a movie star signing a week with red ads, and it just put the competition away because they never knew what the Thursday nights were bad nights for our competition because Fridays that we rolled out these ads every Friday, 50 weeks a year. So I get back to my office and the phone's ringing, it's the client. Please come back.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “On the set, called her, I said, I'm going to take care of it. Can I do what I need to do? Can I say certain things that I don't have the authority to say? She said like what? I said, Can I tell him we'll shut down for three days? She said, Yeah, I'll take insurance. She said, say what you need to say. So I went to see him and I walked into the guy's trailer and he was sitting there. He said, what's up? Because for me to make a trip to the set unannounced was highly unusual. He was at the lot at Paramount and I said, Look, I just looked at Daylay's and I said, I feel like something's going on I don't know about. I want to help. What can I do? He said, what's going on? And I said, You don't look good. He said, what do you mean I don't look good? I said, you look tired and your eyes are half closed and I don't think we should let those takes be used. He said, get out of here.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “would be really difficult because to me it was a lifestyle and a religious experience that you enter out because you couldn't work that way for other human beings without it. I did believe that you say the truth to your client. We had a big movie star, I don't want to say who. It's not important giant movie star. I got a call from Sherry Lansing who was a brilliant producer and studio executive, one of the top women in our business and she said Michael you got to look at this movie that you helped me put together and you got to look at the dailies your client something's wrong. It was early on in the relationship with the client. It was early on in our business. I don't think we were but five or six years old and we had signed this giant movie. And I looked at the dailies and I, oh my God, they're not watchable. He looked like he was dead.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Well, I was incredibly controversial when I was in the agency business because I had this one for all for one attitude and it was win at all costs, and I made a lot of mistakes when I think people would say that I was over zealous, that I knocked a lot of people around, I knocked people out of things, and they're probably right. I wanted to win. I wanted our clients to win, and I really felt it was important if we could do it without lying and without doing anything immoral or illegal. Our clients had to win and we had to win. We had to be the best. And I'm a great believer in excellence and whatever anyone does, whether they're a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief or an agent, they have to be the best. I really strove to be the best, and I felt that anyone who worked in the company had to be the best and drove people really hard.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Good God And one thing came to my mind when I'm watching it is Alfred Bierstadt whose Alfred Bierstad is one of the great American landscape painters of his generation, and I kept looking at this production design I said My God, it's like a giant Alfred Birstad painting I called him from the car on the way home. I said I have two words to say to you and he said three words and he said what's that? I said one Alfred two Bierstad three brilliant And we hooked up after that, but if I didn't know art, he did, whether he used Bierstadt or not, it was surely some influence in the production design. So I found art to be very compelling with creative”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “about the stuff that isn't so good, and I also view myself as a normal fan. I'm a guy who goes in, buys the popcorn, sits in the seat. I went to theaters every Friday night for twenty years into Westwood and stopped on the way home for an hour to see how the audience was reacting to clients of mine movies. I remember I went to see Last of the Mohicans and I went to see part of it. I left the agency early. I really wanted to represent Michael Mann. I think he's really brilliant. He's one of the few guys that can not only tell a story but make the pictures just stunning and realistic, and he gets great acting performances. So I went to see last night. I just sat there and I didn't leave. So it's two hours an hour late for dinner. I just sat there.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “In order to be really good, they have to be a little insecure, a little narcissistic, a little bit of ego to balance the insecurity. We all have it, but it's hard to tell people what that makeup the truth. And no one did. Everyone would puff them up, tell them how great they were. And I found that to be when I was a young agent of William Morris reprehensible. How do you call a client at home that his show or his movie was fantastic when it was absolutely terrible? Why don't you give him some notes and just say look, I'm not an expert, but here as a viewer. So I've always viewed myself from the day I started in the business as the ultimate fan. So I view myself as the fan of somebody's work and fandom means you like the good and the bad, but you can give comment.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “I think you have to tell the truth to people, and it's not pleasant, frankly, and people aren't used to when we started CA, one of the things we decided to do was A function as a group. The five musketeers, and B, just tell the truth, which no one did. Everyone lied to everybody, and when you're dealing with people that are performing talent,”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Thank you. And then I have a lot of friends that are artists. I'm mesmerized by creative people. I can't paint, I can't draw, can't sculpt, can't write. I can't shoot a picture properly with my iPhone. I am just a doofless about anything creative. I can read it because”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “disconnect that I must be missing something so I went and spent months thinking about if I was making a mistake because to me past this prologue saw historically no one is using art as a foundation for parts of their business than maybe I'm making a giant mistake and it's taking up a lot of my time and I just push through it and I said I think I'm right and I just kept going and I just love every second of it it's the challenge of learning how to judge what pictures are”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “I said, how is that even possible? There's no technology for it. And he said, somebody's going to figure it out. And we did it. We put it in his contract. You couldn't recreate characters and now we've seen with AI, it's like all anyone's doing. But he says to me one day, I was sitting with him in London at his house having a lunch and we were talking about putting together one of his movies. It was eyes wide shut and I was pitching Tom Cruise and Nicole to play the leads they were clients. And it was sitting in his breakfast table. And he brings a book over and he says, you know, I love Henri Lartig, who is a great French photographer. He's taught me so much, and then it just was very clear to me that art was so important in talking to directors, said to myself, how is it possible there's only like under ten art collectors in Hollywood? How's that? Possible that that could be some day.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “So let's go to 2001 Space Odyssey and look at that film which I've done twenty times and say how did he think of that? How did he call me up thirty years ago and say to me I want you to put something Michael in my contract so no one can recreate any of the characters I've created digitally? I said what are you talking about?”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “I had a job that was too good to be true. You know, I was running the tour department at 20th Century Fox. I had seventy-five people from my college working for me and 45 of them were attractive young women. The rest of them were my fraternity brothers. If I told you we were working, I mean, we were having a blast. But I did go to art class because it was at eight o'clock in the morning and I did get hooked into it. And then when I graduated college and went to work full-time at William Morris, I started buying prints of artists and studying them in my spare time. And when we started CA, it turned out by a fluke that it was something all creative people were interested in, oddly, all directors were influenced by some artists. I mean, I'll never forget talking to one of my clients, Stanley Kubrick, who's really”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “eighteen years old and I walked around and then I walked around again and then I walked around again and I stayed there for eight hours and I was in absolute state of shock the things that I saw and the perception of it for me it flooded my brain it like pixelated my brain I just couldn't believe what I was saying of all periods of art and I said I need to understand this and I started reading about art in my spare time when I was in college I never went to class because I worked sixty hours a week and I went to the first class And the final. And I had someone taking notes from me at UCL.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Of candlelighting and early gas lighting, which were single source flames, and Marty's such a stickler for perfection in what the period looks like he's so good at it and his research is like a college professor that he looked at this and it was like a light bulb went off and that's how he lit gangs of New York when they were interior scenes and they're gorgeous but to me I got lucky frankly Patrick I got interested in art very early I never left the San Fernando Valley before I was eighteen and when I was eighteen I worked every day of my life and I worked every summer but I took two weeks off in the middle of summer from my job and I drove across the country to kind of get a sense this is between high school and college I only took two weeks and I drove and I ended up in New York.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Well, art for me is so much a part of my life because it's what I did for a living too because making movies and music and the clients that I represented, they're artists too, just visual artists. I once said to Morty, who I'm crazy about and have such respect for, and I said the same thing to Stephen. Let's take some single frames out of some of your setups and frame them and do an art show. We actually did one with Tim Burton because some of the frames are as good as anything I've ever seen hanging on a gallery wall the way they're composed. Matter of fact, when Marty did gangs of New York I gave him the definitive book on Rembrandt because it was pictures painted that showed how Rembrandt lit his paintings with candlelight and the period Marty was doing there was a ton of”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “But I think that being offensive in business is a key strategy in investing, no different than it's a key strategy point of being a founder. You can't be a defensive founder. You have to play offensive and you have to do that also to kind of scare away the competition a little bit that is so competitive in the technology space. The moats are never high enough. Your competitors better think that you got a real lead on them and they're not quite sure what you have, but you better make a presentation that it's maybe a little more than you do to just keep your lead. It's important.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “I didn't really understand what they were doing, frankly, but I could sell the company to a commercial client and keep them in business, and I did. Got them their first commercial gig in banking with JP Morgan. I spent ten years with them. I keep an eye on all the palater engineers that leave to start up businesses because when Stefan Cohn was interviewing them, he'd take one for every fifty interviewed, and if they work there, they've got an edge. They've got some intellectual edge. But I don't believe you wait for people to send you stuff. You got to go out and look for it. So I do both. I can't cover everything. It's one of the reasons that I'm working with Ollie is that we've got to, for the first time in years I have really talented people to work with me because I can't do it as a solo practitioner and it wasn't as much fun anyways. It was getting boring. You like to have someone to do a high five with if you happen to be lucky enough to make a right decision.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “I think there's room for both. I don't wait for things to cross my desk. I try to keep a scorecard on one of the best experiences of my life is when Peter Teal asked me to help Alex Carp out with Paladir and get them into a commercial business. It's not like he asked me for my coding expertise.”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Either a positive or negative connotation. So you see how works at so many levels underneath the surface? Probably the only rule that I could see working today which would just be me as I would not allow anyone in the theatral agency business to be in social media on anything except their family. I mean, they could have a private account, but don't go posting on Instagram anything, your opinion. Who cares what your opinion is? I mean, you may care. I marvel at people that put their opinions out there about things that have no credibility or no position or no intellectual capability and they put out these emotional gut wrenching opinions and I say to myself, why?”

    2024-01-09 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source