Word: ovitz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Actress Minnie Driver trapped in elevator, rescued by former uber-agent Mike Ovitz...
Beverly Hills doesn't look like a combat zone. Rodeo Drive screams money, not mayhem. But sweetie, kiss-kiss, get out your designer flak jacket, because there's a war going on in Hollywood, and Wilshire Boulevard is ground zero. Taking up a position at one end is Michael Ovitz, the former uber-agent who repped Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks before quitting for a short-lived tenure as president of Disney. Four miserable years later, he's back from exile, offering his services as a manager and raiding clients from Creative Artists Agency, the firm just a mile away...
...Hollywood, agents and managers live in a symbiotic world, working together to cater to star egos and pocketbooks. So the seven clients with ties to both CAA and Ovitz's new AMG were appalled at their predicament. The rest of the town was enthralled. THE GREAT CAA-OVITZ WAR: WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?, blared the Hollywood Reporter. Would Madonna make the leap? (Maybe, maybe not.) Would Spielberg? (Absolutely not, he said, since CAA packaged his hit Saving Private Ryan.) But of the seven who got the ultimatum, director Martin Scorsese and actors Marisa Tomei and Mimi Rogers have joined...
This all might seem like a schoolyard squabble (He's mine! No, he's mine!), but there are bigger stakes involved. Ovitz, once Hollywood's most powerful agent, is trying to cobble together a one-stop "virtual studio" for stars--effectively usurping the roles of agent, manager and studio chief. Round 1 is building the talent bank: Ovitz first captured two of young Hollywood's brightest stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, by bringing over their managers, Rick Yorn and his sister-in-law Julie Silverman Yorn. Ovitz then started going after CAA's list of bankable celebs...
...money with their energy. Forstmann, who is chairman of Gulfstream Aerospace and a senior partner at a New York LBO firm he co-founded, spent a year canvassing the country, examining local school districts--the program will serve 40,000 students in 38 cities--and cajoling everyone from Michael Ovitz to Barbara Bush to join the fund's board of advisers. He got the idea for the venture after years of studying a similar financial-aid program in New York City. Nine out of 10 school kids who used money from the fund to attend private schools, he says, went...