Word: ovitz
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Much of the exodus can be directly linked to the departures last year of the agency's shrewd, ruthless chairman, Michael Ovitz, and its charismatic president, Ron Meyer. Both men left for studio jobs--Ovitz to Disney, Meyer to MCA. They took with them the agency's aura of invincibility and its ability to inspire fear in the Hollywood shark pool. Rivals, long resentful of the agency's No. 1 status, are smelling blood in the water...
Dominating the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards in Beverly Hills, CAA's forbidding I.M. Pei-designed headquarters stands as a Zen fortress guarding entry to the city's sparkling business district. For years the building has been show-biz ground zero, a hot zone where Ovitz--routinely referred to as "the most powerful man in Hollywood"--built up the town's most imposing list of talent. His masterful, softly menacing style, along with his courtship of nontraditional clients like Coca-Cola and Credit Lyonnais, transformed the old stereotype of the talent agent as a hustling flesh peddler into...
...will continue to be a very well-run, very powerful talent agency," says Stephen Singular, whose unauthorized biography, Power to Burn: Michael Ovitz & the New Business of Show Business, is set for publication this summer by Birch Lane Press. "But," he adds, "the aura and intrigue the agency once enjoyed were a direct result of Ovitz's personality...
...have been only mildly sociopathic for Grant--or, with a different target, for Howard Stern or Don Imus. But WABC is owned by Capital Cities/ABC, which is owned by Disney, a company sensitive to image befoulers and potential boycotts. After the Brown joke, Jesse Jackson wrote Disney president Michael Ovitz urging Grant's swift dismissal. Ovitz replied that "we have already determined how we will handle the situation." The next day, before air time, Grant was told he was through...
...impact of the two Michaels--Me and Mo, as some Hollywood wags have begun calling them--will be even more apparent when ABC picks its fall schedule later this spring. Those trips to Space Mountain will get old fast, but Mr. Eisner's (and Mr. Ovitz's) Wild Ride is just beginning...