The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ovitz: AI music platforms Suno and Udio construct songs using copyrighted IP
“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.”
Ovitz: Stanley Kubrick never had any talent agent besides Michael Ovitz
“He never had an agent except me, and I could talk to him because Marty basically educated me”
Ovitz: CAA represented 46 of top 50 grossing filmmakers
“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.”
Ovitz: CAA made 35 Coke ads on 6-ad budget
“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.”
Ovitz: CAA never lost a single agent during his tenure
“We didn't lose an agent in the whole time I was at CA, not one.”
Ovitz spent a year cultivating Japanese relationships while impatient American peers failed
“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…”
Ovitz: Magic Johnson was the first contemporary athlete to build a business
“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.”
Ovitz mailed weekly CAA movie star signing announcements to rival agency partners
“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…”
Ovitz: CAA once represented 46 of the top 50 box office filmmakers
“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.”
Ovitz: Marc Andreessen oversees everything while Ben Horowitz operates a16z
“Mark knows everything that's going on in the company, but Ben operates it, and Mark's very comfortable with that.”
Ovitz: David Rockefeller funded MoMA expansion without explicitly asking trustees for money
“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 …”
Ovitz introduced Nobu Matsuhisa to Robert De Niro to start Nobu
“Several years later, I introduced Nobu to Bob De Niro, and he and Nobu started the present business with a sushi restaurant called Nobu”
Ovitz: Got ABC's president to sign Wolfgang Puck to TV deal on a napkin
“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 Collison spent 2.5 hours interrogating Ovitz's career mistakes
“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…”
Ovitz: Mike Nichols's fee increased $2 million after joining CAA
“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…”
Ovitz: Matsushita Electric held an unheard-of $20 billion in 1980s liquidity
“Matsushita Electric, one of the largest
companies in Japan that at the time had 15 to twenty billion dollars of liquidity on their balance sheet, unheard of in the late eighties.”
Ovitz personally subscribed to 210 magazines while running CAA
“I subscribe personally to 210 magazines. I didn't read every one. Don't, I don't think I did for a second, but I flipped the pages.”
Ovitz: Ran three newspaper delivery routes at age nine using aliases
“When I had a paper route at nine, I realized I had enough time to do three paper routes. And I went under another name, got the other two, because the guy delivering the bulk of papers thought he was delivering to three different people, and he thought no one …”
Ovitz: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz put him on their board before meeting
“Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen in 99 put me on their board, and I never met either of them, and they had the confidence in me to go into a business that I told them I knew nothing about.”
Ovitz: Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in five months working 20-hour days
“Michael hated writing. He rather do thinking. And he waited for deadlines. And he wrote Jurassic Park in five months. Because he wrote 20 hours a day, six days, seven days a week, because it was due, and he just waited.”