Michael Ovitz | All-In Summit 2024

the legend I'm I don't say that L the legend Michael obitz is in the building arguably one of the most successful Talent agents ever he R from working in a mail room to become a super agent representing some of Hollywood's biggest stars one doesn't get to a place of success without having made mistakes people say all kinds of things about him really really all kinds of things about him we went out to win and when you go out to win you make certain sacrifices we were tough and we were aggressive and I had a philosophy of win at all costs when we did uh the cost was huge rise or fall on our own Deeds our own brains our own willpower it's no crime in being vulnerable with people everybody has an

issue I want to leave the planet a little better than when I came on please join us in welcoming Michael loit wow thank you so much Michael all right we have been we have been trying to make this happen for three years you're a hard one to get a hold of um if you don't know Michael you shouldn't be here Michael um co-founded CA and his book is uh fantastic by the way yeah who is Mike Ovitz yeah it's such it's such a read you could just skim through it by like read right through it because it goes by so fast it's incredible um in 1975 where um you know Michael is really known for transforming Hollywood and

transforming the media business um one of the big Innovations of many in Michael's career has been the the the the innovation of packaging which really changed the power dynamics and the trajectory of uh how content was made in Hollywood um Michaels had we were just talking about this kind of three careers both as the founder of CIA and then later um a partnership with Andy Grove in 1993 where you formed the ca Intel media lab and really tried to bring technology to Hollywood and then later joined up with Mark Andre and have helped Mark and Ben since then scale up and recent horowits and really change how Silicon Valley operates and um it's just an incredible reinvention story but

one where it seems you've brought a similar sort of set of Innovations to in in all three phases maybe you can tell us a little bit about those three major Transitions and the you know the the the way that you kind of made the decision to kind of reinvent yourself and uh bring technology and media together well first of all uh thank you for having me I I'm honored to be here uh I must say I've been going up to the valley since 1992 probably hard for most of you in the audience to believe this but I'm much older than all the guys up here um and these are four of the uh not just the smartest but the uh most effective men that I've met up in the valley with

respect to what they do how they do it and then lastly I have tried since they started the all-in podcast I have applied 15 times to be a best and I I have been rejected by one of the four up here which I will not say which [Laughter] one but we all want to have what they have and I was saying to David in the backstage it's so fantastic how they've set something up that is so interesting to listen to to learn from even to push up against you don't have to agree with it which is what I like about it but to hear it from something we all want in our lives which is close friends where you can say whatever you want as a matter of fact some of the stuff they

say to David I find offensive but I think I too he he he handles it really well so back to the question um I I have an insatiable appetite for information and for trying to stay up with things that are current I started in the entertainment miss this when I was 17 years old believe it or not I was the first tour guide at Universal Studios they had hired five uh men and five women and uh I really learned so much about the media business and and how they made entertainment because Universal was in every area in film television music books everything and it's all the same by the way it's just different uh iterations of it it's all made to entertain people and I got the

bug uh I went to UCLA uh took me 3 years to get out of there I couldn't get out of there fast enough but I went to the first class and the last class that's why when I was here I got really scared cuz I kind of missed the classes in between because I worked full-time at 20th Century Fox and just had a blast uh and then I went into the agency business in my early 20s I was at Universal was a tour guide I saw uh these men uh and women dressed really well being received well by everybody on the studio lots and I I said wow that's interesting what do they do I found out they were agents and I realized I could

get a very wide education and I've always been interested in making myself smarter about things because I'm not I don't have the gift that a couple of these guys up here do which is or all of them which is raw intelligence I've I've got uh educated intelligence I have to really work at it and I really enjoyed that time and and getting into it we broke off when I was 26 A bunch of us for a whole series of reasons from the William Morris agenc he started CA with a very simple thesis which was that we were going to do something as a team rather than individually and it just worked really well artists enjoyed having a group of

individuals to talk to which is not dissimilar to what these four guys have accomplished artists liked being surrounded by multiple people with different uh skill sets so that worked really well uh in 1992 uh you could smell in La something going on up North but the thing about Los Angeles and the enter and particularly the entertainment Community is it's an incredibly siloed Community they don't accept people very well from the outside which by the way makes it very inbred and it's not particularly wise it may be smart for the moment but it's not wise so I started going up to San Francisco to see what was going on up there and then in the middle of ' 92

I called cold Bill Gates and he it wasn't the Microsoft of today it was a small company company and I went up and met with Bill and then he introduced we talked for 4 hours about where my business and his business could converge and the only thing I will tell you is neither of us had any idea but it was the start of a discussion Bill introduced me to a man named Nathan mirval who I'm still friendly with today who was the first CTO of Microsoft and I was an advisor to three of the four major record labels and I remember being uh at one of the music uh labels that had 25% market share and there were stereo speakers in there and Nathan had said to me I can't explain this to you

but music's going to come from up there I had no idea what he was talking about and I advised all four companies that something was happening and that hard Goods weren't going to be able to be sold and I got fired by one of them I got thrown out by the other three they thought that Nathan was crazy they didn't understand what Microsoft was and they had no interest in computers or anything digital and then from there I went and met Andy Grove we started a dialogue and we brought uh every conceivable piece of hardware and software available to Los Angeles put it in our Beverly Hills Building uh the top of the building had

like eight dishes on it it looked like we were going to take off and we invited everyone from the entertainment business to come in and see and test all this to to wrap this up it was a great thing and a sad thing we knew something was coming we had no idea what but the business did what it always does it put its head in the sand and no one looked to San Francisco go and today when I meet with people in the business it's interesting when I explain to them how streaming has basically changed the Legacy business forever and it will never change again and it's all because everyone that we worked with refused to embrace change which to me is sort of the Mantra of my life I want to

change I've changed my life personally I've changed careers three different times it's all about learning and about pushing yourself and it wasn't just media because you were very early to helping company like like paler as an example it's not just hey Michael Ovitz is a Hollywood guy or a media guy you were an adviser to a pure tech company yeah can you tell us a little bit about what you did with paler and how you got involved and what role you played so in 99 um uh a young man named Mark Andre who happened to have been on the cover of Time Magazine barefooted which I thought was really weird uh and he called me cold I didn't know who he was frankly um I had heard of him I had heard of him

because we were doing work for Jim Clark um who Mark was in business with and uh he had a company that was very close to the media business at the time I guess you could say it was a pre- Adobe type business and I met with Mark and I can't explain to you what happened but we went to a lunch that was going to take an hour I'm not long on lunches I don't do 1our zooms and I hate long calls because you can't get anything done so I thought we were going to be an hour we were four and a half hours and at the end of that he said will you come on the My Board with Ben Horwitz we starting a company called

loudcloud and I said explain it to me and he did and I had no clue what he was talking about I I just didn't understand it he said all this data is going up in the sky and all I could think of was Nathan telling me that about music and I said wow now two smart guys really smart guys a lot smarter than me are talking about what's going on up there so I went on Mark's board uh I'm still involved with them 25 years later and uh Mark basically introduced me to everyone up in the valley Reed Hoffman Peter teal Mark Zuckerberg everybody that he dealt with and one of the guys he introduced me to was Peter teal who I just had dinner with last week and is one of the smartest guys I've ever met and he put a

ton of his own money into paler he had no investors he had a small investment from DARPA I had no clue what they did but he called me up he said can you help me because we are in business with the US government and they don't pay very well and that I could empathize with um they they take a lot of money in tax but they don't pay very well and I said what do you want me to do because you know my coding uh is a bit limited and uh he said I want you to help get com uh set up a commercial business so without going through a long boring story uh after Peter got a dozen phone calls being criticized for bringing me in to

do this which he actually enjoyed by the way which is what I love about him uh I met with Alex karp for three months in his office I was living in San Francisco uh three days a week and I looked at everything they were doing they only had at the time about 25 30 engineers and came up with some ideas starting with three silos narrowed it to advertising health care and finance got rid of the two of them quickly because Finance was a no- breiner the whole world had gone under with the mortgage crisis and paler actually had an algorithm that you could plug an address of a house into it and they they did this after I asked them to you could

plug an address of a house and it scraped a million data points within one mile of the house how many kids were leaving private school how many hamburgers were sold how many dry CL cleaning stores closed it was like a a brief in a nanc of the economy and JP Morgan couldn't off a mortgage for the life of them if they wanted to because they had local branch managers who love their jobs all the mortgages were underwater they didn't want to make a decision we put palent online they got permission to plug the address in and whatever the bid ass came up they could close we promised we deliver in 90 days I always over uh I always under promise and overd deliver and we delivered in 55

days and we saved them $150 million to the bottom line in that 55 day period and that became a request from them the only problem they had is they forgot to make a deal with me for the software so they had this unbelievable old and no deal and uh they offered I think 2 million for a one year license for five years and I called Peter and he was just dancing on his desk he couldn't believe it and I said I turned it down so he said you've lost your mind and started yelling at me as only in a nice way and I said just give me 15 days I used to be an agent and he said uh okay in any case 15 days later they came back and they made a deal that was um many many multiples of that price and

they became the first of the commercial business at palente tier and then and now today their business I they were just added to the S&P sorry they were just added to the yesterday and they 6040 I'd say commercial versus government government Michael can we talk a little bit about the move mov business the entertainment business we were just watching all this generative Ai and I got the sense you were looking at it um with either anger contempt or sadness um you've made such amazing or you know orchestrated such amazing seminal Works um during Peak Cinema something fredberg sax and I grew up in defined you know a lot of um the way we look at Art and now it feels like it's

lost in many ways I'm curious when you see people making things with generative AI what happens to your heart and to your mind it's a great question Jason and I'll tell you why first of all streaming has basically destroyed the Legacy business you've probably all seen in the Press what's going on with Paramount where the elant have purchased the company at a at a price that's probably 20% of what it used to be um it was one of the great seven horsemen of the entertainment business business I was was talking to David about and Jason earlier there's the entertainment business went from a you get paid upfront and then you get a piece of the profits so since streamings come you get

paid up front there are no profits your products in The Ether your books in The Ether your songs in The Ether music is a little better because thanks to danielc everybody gets a royalty but it's very different than it used to be so streaming has destroyed the business that I grew up in it's why I wanted to get out of the entertainment business you could see it coming uh secondly I think that the if you look past that and you look to AI right now it's bittersweet the things that can be done are mind-boggling we just saw a slight example I'm involved uh with a company out of Germany with three young phds from the the University of heidleberg

they have just released their first product uh of text to video I've never seen anything like this in my life visually um you can say what you want and it shows up and I mean it's perfect um the technology is staggering and I've seen every one of them for obvious reasons the people that work in this community and 250,00 thousand people in Los Angeles make their living in the media business they are all afraid of one thing and that is are they going to have a job or be able to work so if you talk to a production designer the man or woman who comes up and draws and Designs every shot so they can light it and

figure out continuity and who's wearing what and what they're going to shoot so they can get their to minutes of film in 12 hours because that's what you get you work two 12 hours a day you get 2 minutes of usable footage I am working on a project right now with Netflix and a production designer I interviewed asked me at the end of the meeting he said Michael I need three weeks to do this project but I'm using these two AI programs which I approved and he said I can do it for you in 3 days he said does that mean I'm going to be out of a job when that 3 days is an hour and anybody can do it and I honestly I didn't have a clear answer to put his mind at e because the

answer is probably a little yes and a little no but it's incredibly disruptive now on the other side of the coin is it going to have emotion and heart if you look back all the way to the history of video games to Pac-Man which was a a nothing game but a it was viral in the world it had no heart it was nothing it was just some thing eating other things but look where we are today with full motion video video games and once you get the face and the eyes right in video games and in animation and animation has done the best of that it sucks people in emotionally so the question Jason can AI do that or do they need a human being to do that and nobody

has the answer can we just talk about the the community aspect because the implication of generative AI is I sit in front of my screen and I say show me something romantic comedy horror film sci-fi here's the premise and you get something or you have some directions and everyone ends up with personalized content which is effectively what you know distributed social media did everyone's kind of consuming different Tik toks and different Instagrams but everyone seems to coales around one and then we still all watch the same Netflix show and we talk about it we have a conversation about it does generative AI change the nature of media which is a shared

experience a community experience that we all talk about or do we end up in a world where everyone's got their own Media or their own content and what's how does the jury kind of ultimately decide that I think I think it's an individual decision from all of you sitting in the audience it's binary you either want passive entertainment because you're exhausted you want your brain taken to another place I used to love to watch big set movies that were took me outside the United States to relax when I was in the agency business I mean we watched 105 minutes of film every night just to get a sense of what directors do but when we were stressed believe it or not even being in the

business we would go back to pictures like David leans Lawrence of Arabia or Stanley Kubrick's 2001 or um any of these pictures that transported you James Bond the early I represented connory the the early Bond movies were made for a nickel and took you all over Europe and there were places I just wanted want to experience the other side of that coin on the binary side is active entertainment do you want to create your own ending do you want to change characters do you want to try to put a movie together do you want to go to a site that has the rights to an old movie star like Clark gel or Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper or the greats of the 40s and 50s and

make your own movie it's all individual I think everybody will make up their mind Netflix an experiment with a show with a bunch of different endings and it's fascinating you never heard anything about it I want to ask you about attention spit can I ask a question yeah sure of course um let's talk about um free speech and censorship when you were building your business you had these free speech absolutists like Larry Flint who are not anywhere related to your business but over there fighting for a certain set of basic rights um and then underneath that as a result I think there was like this envelope that it created for

creative people to just go and push the boundaries tell stories explore things um how is that the same as what's happening now and different so you know you talked about working with Netflix one of the jokes about Netflix is it sometimes starts with sort of like an agenda per se say around content and you know even if it doesn't necessarily map to good content it reflects certain um ideas how do you think about that just well it's a it's a great question because it's like at the Forefront of every conversation um this company I'm working with in Germany it's called Black Forest they you know they put certain guide rails on what can be done and then they found someone uh you know

someone on X used the content to I mean use the algorithms to create something that was questionable right but they can't stop it they're just the provider so it's a debate going on all the time when I started in the business in the 60s the every the there was only three television networks seven Motion Picture companies there was five publishing companies that publish books and there were five record companies and they were The Gatekeepers to everything we read heard or saw and as agents and the reason I became an agent is we became the gatekeeper to the gatekeeper which no one had ever thought of so we basically took 75% of the talent to the company within eight years of

starting and we went to The Gatekeepers and we told them what they could have versus them telling us what they could have so we would uh Michael kryon who was a longtime client gave me a book um and it was a book about three people uh on a island off the coast of Costa Rica and it was an amusement park with Prehistoric monsters and the Monsters got out and I read the book and I called them up I said my son likes dinosaurs I like dinosaurs and my dad likes dinosaurs we're doing this movie I called Steph Spielberg and I said I need you to read this tonight which I've never done in all the time I represented him and he said you have to get permission from My

Wife and because he wasn't allowed to read at night so I called Kate who was also a client and she said it was okay he called me at 6:00 the next morning and said I'm in it was the first time in my history that a filmmaker had said to me I'm going to do a movie with no script I'm going to do it off the book it was that good and Jurassic Park has probably done four or five billion dollars of box office minimum plus ancillary rights and I think that when I think about it it suffered the same thing that happened when I started in the business there were actually was a department at the three networks that read everything looked at everything and

told you what you could not do and some of it was so ridiculous that the creative people went crazy some of the biggest fights as agents we ever had was protecting our creatives against the authority of what what was the censorship department and we're right back there now we are right back there now this whole concept of AI how do you protect I had a conversation yesterday something I never thought of I was looking at Cyber companies and I was on the phone with someone that works at a big cyber company and he gave me a thesis asked me what I thought how they could protect the following someone does

a piece of AI that is you Troth and it's got an invoice with you on it approving that that invoice should be paid right the invoice looks very legitimate it's got your wiring instructions and it goes to the company and it's not you and it's not your invoice and you your office automatically pays the bill they see you they see the invoice they pay the bill how do you protect against that that's just the tip of the iceberg and it's all everyone's talking about right now how do you handle this there was this incredible moment I guess from Robert Evans to yourself um Bob Delhi of the studio head the person who could make a gut decision to Greenlight something as

you were sort of just describing with Jurassic Park and then something crazy happens the accountants the financiers take over and they OU the URS and the and the people who have taste um and then we're all suffering through the 78th Marvel movie or television series that is just done without any care or thoughtfulness and we lose these adult movies that you made that your contemporaries made uh um that Define Cinema that Define art that defined storytelling whether it's the Godfather the conversation shape culture you know and I'm I'm curious when you look at those Studio heads in that moment in time is there any chance that could ever

come back because we're I think part of the reason why people don't have an attention span for Cinema and for this incredible art form that's being lost is because these Bean counters these bureaucrats are not letting the artists make important work anymore like you did it's a different world I got I'm so lucky I can't articulate it enough I've seen both so I got to work at the with where there were people running Studios like Lou waserman ran Universal uh dick xanic ran Fox and all the um the executives were they didn't work for big companies some of the companies had stock that traded just you know on its own and those that didn't were private Universal was Private up

until I sold it to matsoua Electric it was a private company and I was telling this story to someone at dinner the other night no one that studies film when I teach at a film class I will ask how many of you see black and white movies almost no hands go up how many of you have seen movies prior to 1980 no hands go up how many of you know who Frank kapr is or David lean or Stanley cubrick I just go right down the list of the greats that set the foundation for the American cultural ethos in entertainment and and at one time entertainment was the second largest export of the United States which no one realizes between movies television books and Records

second largest export after aircraft those numbers don't exist anymore and it's it's a different world and I tell this story about how a man named Irving thalberg at MGM in the late 20s and 30s at 28 years old pumped out 350 films a year and if you look at the titles they're some of the greatest movies ever made it was all from his stomach he didn't have any data he didn't look at Tik Tock which none of us should look at anyways but that's a different issue um he didn't see reals he wasn't on Instagram he wasn't looking at short form content the you know the one negative thing that the valley has done for creativity is they have trained viewers

which I thought was imposs possible 20 years ago to consume content differently I want it short I want it fast I want to ease drop on other people they don't need to be celebrities I'm going to make somebody that's celebrity that isn't a celebrity and has no talent but they seem to know how to put makeup on so I'm going to follow them and there's data coming out of your eyeballs you have the streaming service is giving filmmakers data on who's looking at what how old the character should be how good-looking this one should be how badl looking this one should be what should the heavy look like who the director

should be based on the past 20 films because we've put it in the computer it doesn't work like that and social rules social is and this is a I mean you know I don't know if you want to comment on that before we wrap we are uh running a bit late but that's it David we could keep going I mean um but there is a there's a there is a big um he's a bestie yeah there's there's a you're best now I'm trying out here so you guys I need you guys to convince the one of the four guys up here that I should be with them on this podcast wow that would be be honor you know Michael it used to be that Hollywood kind of set culture Hollywood um Hollywood kind of created whatever

social phenomenon became The Fad dour but now um there's culture there there's there's social rules and restrictions that are being imposed on Hollywood I I no one wants to talk about it out loud but how much do you feel like the business is constrained and challenged Now by you know these social movements well I mean let's start with the woke movement okay I wasn't going to say it yeah okay here we go I mean I I don't have any problem raising it if it doesn't bother you guys I think I'm okay with [Applause] it it uh it's hard to believe that it's had a huge impact on what you see what you read not what you hear musicians have been really clever about getting

around that because if you watch some of their music videos they just do what they want to do but it's short form it's 3 minutes around under can I just make a quick observation as we wrap up here so I didn't really understand what Michael had done to disrupt the agency business until a couple of decades ago I had the opportunity to visit the original William Morris office and the original CA office that you designed with imp and the original William Morris office it was like this honeycomb where the each agent would have this little office and then uh there was an outer office where they had their assistant and there'd be a hallway to get to that it was and you

know there'd be like a longer hallway way no one could ever see each other everyone was kind of on their own and then if you visited the original CIA office it was this open space it was like this modern office like get see in a startup where everyone could see each other and it immediately helped underscore and helped me understand that how significant this team approach that you had to team packaging was and why you could do such a fundamental disruption in the industry so that's observation number one the second observation is that when I read your book the one of the concepts that really stood out to me was that when you talked

about packaging and putting together a package you always had this concept of what you called the motor which is it was the element in the package that would make it go so in the example you gave with Jurassic Park you had the element of Steven Spielberg and really in that case the element was the IP that you got from Michael kryon right and you put that together there was two elements two elements in that case but that always stuck with me and you know even when I'm dealing with startups I'm thinking about what's the motor here it's frequently the founder in their vision should be um but it seems to me that uh that you were the motor not just for CA but really for an entire era in

the entertainment industry and I want to give you credit for that well thank you thank you Micha amazing we'll have you back again yeah