Word: ovitz
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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...
...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...
Hollywood is abuzz with rumors that former superagent and Disney president Michael Ovitz plans to start a talent-management business. He would presumably bring along former clients, including Sydney Pollack, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman and Kevin Costner. The fact that most on that list are over 50 has apparently not been lost on Ovitz, who is said to be courting Brad Grey (who declined) and hot young Hollywood manager Rick Yorn, of Industry Entertainment. Yorn represents Leonardo DiCaprio, for one. Other clients include Cameron Diaz and Claire Danes...
...former Ovitz associate expressed surprise that Ovitz would get into talent hand-holding again given that he was so sick of it when he left Creative Artists Agency in 1995. But managers, unlike agents, can act as producers, so the new Ovitz enterprise could have a broader scope than CAA. Those who doubt Ovitz has the patience to deal with finicky stars should note that he recently stepped in to help Barry Levinson cut a deal with Warner. And Ovitz?s old friends at CAA are painfully aware that he has taken ample office space on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly...