The Ledger, every show

“We've seen it, what's going on with Suno and Udio, where they're taking IP that other people own, even 10 seconds of it, and Constructing custom-made songs.”

“When I got to Disney, it was very clear there was a head-to-head conflict, and Michael undercut me every chance he could, and after a couple years, I just didn't want to deal with it anymore”

“In the years I was at CA, we never lost a client, and the reason was if they tired of one person, they'd go to the next, but everyone was up to speed.”

“One of the things we pioneered at CA was We literally service the clients on everything. They wanted to buy a house. We helped them. They wanted to buy a car. We knew all the dealers. They wanted to get their kids into private schools. We had contributed to th…”

“Easy to look at it now. They have a four hundred fifty billion dollar credit fund. I was having dinner with the heads of one of the banks in New York, and we were talking about Blackstone and I, and Steve in particular, and I said, would you have ever thought …”

“In 25 years at CA, I didn't have written documents with employees or clients. We never lost a client the whole time I was there.”

“Or any of the 350 films that we packaged, Tootsie, Rain Man, go down a forever list, you had a choice. You'd, you'd buy the package, or we'd sell it to somebody else, because we viewed the studios as distribution entities.”

“They gave me a hundred and twenty million dollars to pass out to all of the consultants. And I passed out money to everybody generously, because we had Washington lobbyists, we had PR people.”

“The idea of building a movie star now is not possible.”

“He never had an agent except me, and I could talk to him because Marty basically educated me”

“Having A 75% market share of the talent for me wasn't enough, which people thought I was crazy, because no one had ever gotten over 25. We had 46 of the top 50 grossing filmmakers in the world.”

“Coke was doing six commercials a year for the same budget. We did 35 for the same budget, and we got Quincy Jones to redo their theme song, and we changed their saying.”

“We didn't lose an agent in the whole time I was at CA, not one.”

“We weren't going to wait for offers. We were going to aggressively try to put things together and package which hadn't been done, and we'd never let anything go out that wasn't surrounded with like-minded creative people.”

“I'll put Our tech scene up against anyone's in the world, hands down, we'll kill them. We'll kill them. We're just motivated, free thinkers.”

“We had a 76% market share of talent. We had 46 of the top 50 grossing directors in the world.”

“So we had the owners of MGM, which were credibly in a bank, which I was a consultant to the chairman. We had the owners of Universal Studios, which was Matsusta Electric. And we had the owners of CBS Records and Columbia, which was Sony. And we had the owners …”

“The entertainment business went from a, you get paid up front, and then you get a piece of the profits. So since streaming's come, you get paid up front, there are no profits.”

“So we basically took 75% of the talent to the company within eight years of starting.”

“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. So it was impossible. You couldn't say no.”

“We got awarded the account And of the 35 commercials we presented, they approved every single one.”

“So we had McCann Erickson had 300 human beings working on the Coke account. We had six.”

“As a matter of fact, in a 25 year period, I think we lost under six, five or six clients.”

“So, you know, I, we signed Hoffman, Pacino, and De Niro, which had never been done in history.”

“Mr. Morita came to see me and wanted to buy, get into owning content because he was upset that Betamax, which was a superior technology to VHS, was losing to VHS. So he wanted to own a studio”

“We had quietly accumulated 14% of the stock through Allen and Company for the Bronfman family. And I met with Steve Ross three weeks before he passed away. He was one of the greatest guys in history of the business. And he gave me three hours of his time where…”

“In the early eighties, I was going to Japan once a month for business, and friends of mine were going, and they'd come back, and they'd call me, and they said, my God, I just had the greatest meeting in Japan. I'm going to close. And I'd start laughing, and th…”

“He came to me and said, look, I want to be in business. No other athletes at that time said that, and they did their service, and 35, they were done. Irvin said, when I'm done, I want to be able to be a businessman, and we went and set that course.”

“Every time we signed a movie star, which was once a week, we took out a full red page ad in Variety. This is when there was no computers. People actually read and took out every Friday. Every time we signed a movie star, I took that ad, tore it, put it in an e…”

“At one time, CAA representative of the top 50 grossing variety box office filmmakers, we had 46. 46. And I was upset, because I didn't have all of them. There were four I couldn't get, and it really upset me, and it gnawed at me my whole career there.”

“You know, at CA we kept a list of every single executive That helped us in the first three or five years that then had trouble, and we got everyone a job, and if we couldn't get them a job, we made sure they had money. Because they helped us when we had nothin…”

“Matter of fact, we recruited, I'd say, 80% of our executives like that. We either groom inside or recruited them from the competition because they had our standards and they were at the wrong place in our mind.”

“Mark knows everything that's going on in the company, but Ben operates it, and Mark's very comfortable with that.”

“David raised all the money by himself to build the new museum. And he took me out to dinner after I was a trustee, and we spent three hours talking about politics, art, People, things that had happened in his life, travel, his 10,000 index card file... And he …”

“Several years later, I introduced Nobu to Bob De Niro, and he and Nobu started the present business with a sushi restaurant called Nobu”

“I got the president of ABC to sign on a napkin, a contract for a week's work on Good Morning America as an audition to replace Julia Childs, and the guy signed it, and he dated it, and I took the napkin.”

“Patrick sits down. He said, are you ready? I said, yeah, I'm starving. He goes, no, no, no, no. See your book? I said, yeah. He says, I have a lot of questions. I said, oh, sure, anything. He said, no. I want to know. I've marked every place you made a mistake…”

“Mike Nichols' price, because he was put in with our clients, you know, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, Ron Howard, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Marty Scorsese, everybody, his price went up two million dollars, because he fit into A higher strata price with…”

“We also kept a list of executives that got fired, and the executives that helped us At the first five years of the company, we're given priority for jobs, and we got every one of them a job. Every one who got fired who helped us when we had nothing.”

“I think at the company, there's three people over 32, and I'm one of them.”

“We were lucky enough to stumble on a man named Glenn Lowry who had absolutely no contemporary art background. He had a PhD in Islamic art, knew nothing about contemporary art, but was smart articulate, well-spoken, handled people brilliantly. And had this extr…”

“Secondly, he populated the board with the most diverse, amazing group of men and women, but they had one common denominator. They were all art collectors of something. They collected something. So they had a passion for the arts.”

“One of his partners, Stefan Kohn, brilliant young engineer would take one meeting every 10 minutes with an engineer. And they were, I had an office next to him, so I'd watch this parade of young men and women sitting lined up for 10 minutes with Stefan. And he…”

“I can't tell you the number of pivots my young companies have made. I mean, Kevin Systrom, fourth pivot was Instagram.”

“You've run a business that's humongous. You've grown it 20 X. All the owners have made a fortune. There's nobody losing money.”

“And we delivered in 55 days and we saved them one hundred and fifty million dollars to the bottom line in that 55 day period.”

“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.”

“Prior to that, artists were paid what's called flats, which is a flat fee, and they didn't get a basic participation. And I think that what he did is he changed the entire fabric of the business.”