Lew Wasserman, every mention
37 scenes · ← back to Lew Wasserman
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Michael Ovitz 18David Rosenthal 14Ben Gilbert 5
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Lew Wasserman comes up
SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:01:28 Ben Gilbert Would have been Lou Wasserman running it?
- ▶ 1:01:31 David Rosenthal Well, yes, it was Lou Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg.
- ▶ 1:01:52 David Rosenthal They start talking to Sid Sheinberg about this, and Sid's like, you know, Lou and Sid, as we talked about with Michael Ovitz, they are smart cookies, uh, and they were behind aggregating all the power in Hollywood before Ovitz came along,…
- ▶ 1:05:08 David Rosenthal So other electronic manufacturers, even other electronic manufacturers in Japan have been working on their own formats and Lou and Sid at MCA are so pissed at
- ▶ 1:06:39 David Rosenthal Well, Lou and MCA had such clout in Hollywood at that point in time.
- ▶ 1:35:19 David Rosenthal If they owned a studio, they could at least be at the table against the Lew Wassermans and the like when they were negotiating formats and licensing fees and all the strategic stuff.
CAA (with Michael Ovitz) · Acquired
- ▶ 15:34 David Rosenthal And Sid, of course, is the number two to Lee Wasserman, who we're going to talk about in a minute.
- ▶ 22:59 Michael Ovitz Well, the first is the famous story of the movie Winchester, 73, where Lou went into the studio and suggested a lesser front money payment for a piece of the back end.
- ▶ 23:44 David Rosenthal And, and Lou was his agent, right?
- ▶ 23:50 Michael Ovitz Cause then Lou went to the other side.
- ▶ 24:01 Michael Ovitz I had a similar issue with Lou and Sid over back to the future.
- ▶ 24:07 Ben Gilbert Where they were running the studio, and by this point in history, you know, Lou's original trick of, hey, let's get Jimmy Stewart, you know, uh, cut in on the back end.
- ▶ 24:36 Ben Gilbert To Lou, when he's a studio head at Universal, that's gotta be kind of a wild, full turn of events to, to, you know, um, really get the better of that deal.
- ▶ 24:51 Michael Ovitz One of the things I said to Lou, when, um, our director, Bob Zemeckis, who's a brilliant director,
- ▶ 25:07 Michael Ovitz My opening line to Lou was, you caused this problem.
- ▶ 25:17 David Rosenthal So tell us more about, who was Lou?
- ▶ 25:21 David Rosenthal From the outsider's perspective, like here, here's how I sort of see things is like, Lou was an agent.
- ▶ 26:15 Michael Ovitz Then he bought universal for a period, by the way, David, Lou was still an agent while he owned review television.
- ▶ 26:52 David Rosenthal So is my characterization maybe not fully accurate then that I'm, I'm thinking of blue and MCA as sort of opening up a seam for artists, but then closing it again, but maybe that's not totally accurate.
- ▶ 27:13 David Rosenthal How, how would you characterize Lou then and what he did with universal?
- ▶ 29:28 Ben Gilbert Before you got into the business here, you mentioned Lou bought this pre-
- ▶ 30:18 Michael Ovitz Lou was the chief fundraiser for the Democratic Party.
- ▶ 30:26 Michael Ovitz There are stories galore that Lou called one of the Kennedy brothers and suggested that MCA be broken up as a monopoly.
- ▶ 30:49 Michael Ovitz Because what Lou didn't want was
- ▶ 1:23:15 David Rosenthal So back to the studios being in financial trouble, like literally you have the reverse problem of the Wasserman back in the day of you need, but you now have the buy the power on the sell side.
- ▶ 1:30:47 Michael Ovitz Which, by the way, I tried to buy for Sony, but Lou turned me down.
- ▶ 1:31:27 Michael Ovitz So when I brought the CEO of Matsushita to the universal lot after the deal was consummated, I had had lunch with Lou the day before, and I said to him, I said, Lou, you are the greatest executive in our business, but once you sell this…
- ▶ 1:32:14 Michael Ovitz And Lou looked at me, shook their hands and turned his back on me and didn't invite me in.
- ▶ 1:32:56 David Rosenthal Well, clearly, I mean, having read about him and, um, you know, even going back to the, the Sony courtship, like clearly Lou and Sid didn't want to be owned.
- ▶ 1:33:54 Michael Ovitz Ruffle Lou's feathers, because one thing the Japanese companies are always ultra sensitive to is politics, and Lou was still very connected politically.
- ▶ 1:34:24 Michael Ovitz They, and the reason was they didn't want to try to negotiate with Lou.
- ▶ 1:35:55 David Rosenthal First for Lou, right?
- ▶ 1:42:24 Ben Gilbert You and Lou Wasserman both.
- ▶ 1:42:26 Michael Ovitz Yeah, I mean, I shared that with Lou.
- ▶ 1:42:29 Michael Ovitz My critique of Lou goes for me.
- ▶ 1:42:37 Michael Ovitz I like to swing for the fence, and I like to have autonomy, and I don't like to answer to anybody, and I was too thick-headed to see that clearly and only saw it in retrospect, but I did the same thing Lou did, and
- ▶ 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.