Creative Artists Agency, every mention
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every year anyone Ben Gilbert 30Michael Ovitz 23David Rosenthal 12Peter Fenton 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Creative Artists Agency comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 1:19:30 David Rosenthal Founder of Creative Artist Agency.
- ▶ 1:19:36 Ben Gilbert I mean, Michael Ovitz built CAA into such a force in not only Hollywood, but kind of the whole creative community.
- ▶ 1:19:45 Ben Gilbert The only thing that rivaled the power of the studios at the time was CAA.
- ▶ 1:19:50 Ben Gilbert Going to be the number two after being the founder number one at, at CAA said a lot.
- ▶ 1:20:53 Ben Gilbert Day-to-day operations of being the number two at Disney could not have been more different than the skill set he had perfected at CAA.
Coca-Cola: The Complete History & Strategy (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:03:11 Ben Gilbert The relationship with CAA.
- ▶ 3:03:27 David Rosenthal Ovitz and CAA are official advisors on the deal.
- ▶ 3:03:32 Ben Gilbert When Ovitz tried to take it from a talent agency and movie packaging into also doing investment banking.
- ▶ 3:03:39 David Rosenthal And on the back of that success, expanding CAA into investment banking, Ovitz is like, why stop there?
- ▶ 3:05:20 David Rosenthal So he pitches Coke that CAA can make 40 ads a year for them.
- ▶ 3:05:38 David Rosenthal CAA wins the business.
- ▶ 3:05:43 David Rosenthal And among the many ads that they create for Coke is a new Christmas Coca-Cola motif, not featuring Santa Claus, but instead the polar bears.
- ▶ 3:06:04 Ben Gilbert Ovitz found the talent through the CAA network to make the polar bears.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 2:25:11 Ben Gilbert And it is this wonderfully written book about an unbelievable business story, the strategy behind it, the way that with Creative Artists Agency, they just completely upended the entire
- ▶ 2:25:55 Ben Gilbert And what kicked it off was doing the Andreessen episodes and, you know, hearing about how they based it on CAA.
Benchmark Part II: The Dinner · Acquired
- ▶ 1:28:16 Peter Fenton And, and that's our ethic, and maybe there'll be a model where we're not going to be CIA where we take 10% and all that, but, you know, the capital light, you couldn't raise less.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 37:25 Ben Gilbert This is like Michael Ovitz when his application for credit to start CAA had been discovered by the upper level management of his old firm.
SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:06:01 David Rosenthal But then remember from our CAA episode.
CAA (with Michael Ovitz) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:09 Ben Gilbert We are here today with Michael Ovitz to tell the story of Creative Artist Agency, CAA, the legendary talent agency he founded in
- ▶ 1:23 Ben Gilbert As many of you probably know from our earlier episode this season, Michael and CAA inspired none other than Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz to similarly change the power structure of Silicon Valley.
- ▶ 4:57 David Rosenthal Uh, so we're thinking today, of course, this being acquired, we're going to start all the way back way before your time, tell the history of the golden age of Hollywood, new Hollywood, and then leading into you and CIA, of course, but, uh,…
- ▶ 16:23 Michael Ovitz Under the tutelage of CAA with Crichton and Spielberg and Kennedy and Frank Marshall, who helped us with the budget, and it was one of the premier packages we ever put together.
- ▶ 17:05 David Rosenthal And your team, the creative team and CAA kept 50% of that billion plus.
- ▶ 19:30 Michael Ovitz The agents that I dealt with at CA, the agents that I competed against, were vigorously and ferociously loyal to their clients.
- ▶ 20:32 Michael Ovitz And there was, and, and frankly, the agency, to their credit,
- ▶ 24:21 Ben Gilbert You would, you know, take what he did, and, and what CAA really did was, you know, multiply that over and over and over again, such that the talent was really participating in the upside.
- ▶ 27:42 Michael Ovitz And frankly, as CAA gained momentum in the eighties and early nineties, they didn't have a lot of choice because of the 50 top grossing directors in the, for example, in 90, CAA represented like 45 of them.
- ▶ 28:35 Michael Ovitz And I said, well, it is in the context of being a CAA client.
- ▶ 30:57 Michael Ovitz So by breaking up MCA, all that whole company went into a group of tiny agencies, none of which could give him a problem until we came along.
- ▶ 31:11 Michael Ovitz We were his worst nightmare because we created MCA on steroids.
- ▶ 33:28 Ben Gilbert Because I know in the sort of pre-CAA studio world, you know, the talent agencies would represent the talent, and then the studios would do development, where the, the studios, you know, they would buy the script, and they would attach a…
- ▶ 34:39 Michael Ovitz It was kind of the same reason that I encouraged everyone at the agency to read a lot of magazines.
- ▶ 35:26 Michael Ovitz So I urged everyone at the agency to read, we had a list of a hundred titles that they needed to look through every month.
- ▶ 49:32 Ben Gilbert You didn't have movie caliber directors doing commercials, but one of your aces in the hole was not only are we going to come up with these great concepts, but we're going to go get our A-list CAA talent to do this.
- ▶ 50:05 Michael Ovitz CA is gonna use their clients to make commercials.
- ▶ 54:08 Ben Gilbert Can we hear the entrepreneurial story from you of how CAA came to be in the first place?
- ▶ 55:05 Michael Ovitz And crazy as it sounds, CAA was born out of a bad staff meeting at William Morris.
- ▶ 58:53 David Rosenthal To my mind, looking from the outside at, at you all in the beginning of CA, and then everything it would become, no doubt, a absolutely essential, and, and probably the primary ingredient was just your, uh, all of your collectively, and…
- ▶ 1:01:34 Michael Ovitz And the rest of the guys would stay in television, but that Mike Rosenfeld, who was in the movie division at William Morris, with me would start a movie division at CAA.
- ▶ 1:02:05 Ben Gilbert Can I ask, what, what was it like to get your first big star, and what's the story of, of CAA sort of actually building a, a, a sort of reputable, enviable talent roster?
- ▶ 1:07:00 Michael Ovitz And it said, CAA is pleased to announce the worldwide representation of
- ▶ 1:07:31 Ben Gilbert Well, this feels like a huge principle of yours and CAA, which was really strength leads to strength.
- ▶ 1:10:09 Michael Ovitz At CA, your meal ticket was how well the whole company did.
- ▶ 1:10:20 David Rosenthal Was there an element, I, I know this was the case at WMA, but maybe at all the agencies of a holdover from old Hollywood where, where New York owned these, like who owned these, uh, your competitors, uh, like, um, like, like you said, you…
- ▶ 1:13:03 Ben Gilbert And why were you able to just make so much at CAA and, and frankly, just overpay to keep people there?
- ▶ 1:13:10 Ben Gilbert Like, what was it structurally about CAA where you were able to just run this incredible cash flowing business?
- ▶ 1:16:29 Ben Gilbert When people say it started in the mailroom at CAA, I mean, you were an essential part of the fabric of the, the system.
- ▶ 1:20:23 Ben Gilbert Michael, can you take us toward the last few years of your time at CAA?
- ▶ 1:20:49 Ben Gilbert You kind of getting into investment banking, and maybe I should pull kind of there, you definitely turned CAA into an investment bank, and I think you were the top grossing investment banker in the world the year that you did your first…
- ▶ 1:22:25 Ben Gilbert CAA couldn't put up a hundred million dollar budget for a movie.
- ▶ 1:22:59 Michael Ovitz Plus, the Writers Guild and Directors Guild were run by CAA clients.
- ▶ 1:35:25 Ben Gilbert Well, Michael, as we come up toward the end of your tenure here at CAA, can you talk us through the generational transfer and, and the sale of the business to the next generation, the Young Turks, and then your time at Disney after that?
- ▶ 1:38:16 Michael Ovitz And he said, we want you to come over and create the culture here that you had at CAA.
- ▶ 1:39:02 Michael Ovitz I didn't want to die at CAA.
- ▶ 1:43:17 Michael Ovitz In the height of transitioning from CA to Disney, I actually thought I made the right decision.
- ▶ 1:46:27 Ben Gilbert Can we ask you what playbook from CAA you learned that you brought to technology?
- ▶ 1:47:52 Ben Gilbert What could have made CAA an enduring franchise that became a gigantic force rather than sort of apexing as you exited?
- ▶ 1:48:04 Michael Ovitz You know, it's funny, I had dinner with Ari a couple weeks ago, and we were, you know, he was a trainee at the agency, and one of the best we ever had, and I think he's done a fantastic job at building his business and diversifying it.
- ▶ 1:48:18 Michael Ovitz I spent a lot of time, which very few people know, looking into how I could diversify CAA.
- ▶ 1:49:37 Michael Ovitz To so many people at the agency, because how do you tell a group that's all for one, one for all, and we're splitting all the proceeds and then go through what all these companies go through is how do you give options out to everybody?
- ▶ 1:49:51 Ben Gilbert Because it was you and your founding partners primarily that owned, you know, 90 plus percent of CIA.
- ▶ 1:50:05 Michael Ovitz And all I could see, frankly, was the agency disintegrating.
- ▶ 1:50:10 Michael Ovitz And I like to think I made the right decision, because unlike the decision Lou made where MCA disintegrated, CA is still going strong today.
- ▶ 1:51:49 Ben Gilbert Yeah, and just so listeners have the context, because I, I think, Michael, you created a lot of value and captured a lot of value in other scenarios and at other points of CAA's life.
- ▶ 1:52:00 Ben Gilbert You created a lot of value at the end and made a pretty sweetheart deal for the next generation that you sold the firm to, and at least my research, uh, found that, um, you sold all of CAA to the next generation for two hundred million,…
- ▶ 1:56:22 David Rosenthal We're like the creative artist agencies of tech podcasts.