New York Review of Books Review

JAMES ANDREW MILLER'S "Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency" has a terrific subject for a sprawling narrative, since CAA has been at the vortex of Hollywood and commerce for more than four decades. The story has great characters, plenty of boldface names and surprising twists. "Almost any of Shakespeare's political tragedies, or comedies, could serve as road maps to the backstage drama surrounding CAA through the decades," Miller writes. "CAA long ago ceased to be a traditional talent agency, and what started out as a television representation business had since spiraled into movies, music, investment banking, advertising, marketing and most recently, sports." As in his previous books (with a co-author, Tom Shales), "Live From New York" (about "Saturday Night Live") and "Those Guys Have All the Fun" (ESPN), Miller is mostly an invisible hand. "Powerhouse" is largely a series of direct quotations strung together in more or less chronological and topical order. While I wouldn't go so far as to call the story "untold" (many of the key events were widely reported and written about), Miller has done an extraordinary number of interviews (more than 500, he says), and simply organizing and piecing together this wealth of material is a feat. Even more impressive is Miller's ability to get nearly everyone involved not only to talk but also to go on the record, which is remarkable given the notorious culture of secrecy in Hollywood. Still, there are drawbacks to this approach. Few sources are naturally good storytellers, even in the entertainment business. It's hard for Miller to build up much narrative steam, and just when he gets it going, someone rambles off on a tangent. Some sections are filled with tedious details only an insider could appreciate. There are too many sources doubling as characters and too many walk-on appearances. (You get a sense of what you're in for when the cast of characters at the front of the book runs to 11 single-spaced, double-columned pages.) Transitions are nonexistent, jarring or confusing. At times Miller has to abandon the quotations and supply some much-needed connective tissue. This is also an inefficient way to tell a story - I'd estimate a more conventional narrative could have done the job in half the book's 700-plus pages. But for readers with the patience to sift through all this semi-raw material, "Powerhouse" delivers a chronicle of vaunting ambition, immense wealth and power, and personal betrayal all the more astonishing in a business ostensibly built on loyalty and trust. Michael Ovitz and Ron Meyer, the most important of the five co-founders of CAA, loom large as both quoted sources and the most fully developed and fascinating characters. They had a remarkably close and symbiotic relationship, Meyer warm and affable, Ovitz cerebral and tough. "I didn't trust anyone in my life more than Ron Meyer - no one, except for maybe my wife," Ovitz says. They had help from others, but it was their fierce determination, hard work and single-minded devotion to clients and CAA that turned a fledgling talent agency into an entertainment colossus. It's no wonder being an agent is a young person's job: The actress Ali MacGraw packed her suitcase and walked out of a passionate romance with Meyer when he wouldn't get off the phone with a client early one Saturday morning. (He says he doesn't blame her.) Ovitz was once widely acknowledged as the most powerful man in Hollywood, perhaps the most powerful business person in Hollywood ever (at his peak even President Clinton was eating out of his hand). When Earvin (Magic) Johnson suggested Ovitz might someday run a studio, he replied : "Earvin, I don't have to run a studio. I run them all now anyway." Then Ovitz over reached and fell ignobly to earth. He blew opportunities to run two major studios - Universal and Sony - by making outrageous demands for autonomy and compensation. But why wouldn't he have? He'd built a career on outrageous demands - for both himself and his clients - and they were invariably met. After CAA orchestrated the wildly successful 1993 polar bear ad campaign for Coca-Cola, a senior Coke executive put a $10 million check, payable to Ovitz, in the hands of a toy polar bear and had it delivered to the company. Ovitz returned the check, unendorsed, with a sticky note: "Let's discuss this." Ovitz eventually got $31 million. In 1995 Meyer was sent by Ovitz to New York to meet Edgar Bronfman Jr. (the Seagram's heir and chief executive, who had just gained control of Universal) and to salvage Ovitz's shot at running the studio. Meyer emerged with the job himself. "That's when Ron lost me as a friend," Judy Ovitz says. "He turned around and took the job that should have gone to Michael." Ovitz, who never missed an hour let alone a day of work, was so stunned and depressed, people said, that he didn't come into the office for a week. With Meyer out and a new generation at CAA - the so-called Young Turks - chafing to take over, Ovitz's days at the agency he founded were numbered. In his own telling, he was "burned out." For an exit commensurate with his stature, Ovitz accepted an offer from Michael Eisner to be president of Disney. After Meyer, Ovitz probably considered Eisner his best friend, and their two families had been close for years. Ovitz thought - erroneously - they'd be running the company as equals. Eisner fired Ovitz after little more than a year. A measure of Ovitz's power was the vindictiveness with which former friends and colleagues greeted his downfall - none more so than his successors at CAA. As Miller puts it, "Just about anybody in Hollywood with a triple-digit I.Q. heard, firsthand or remotely, about how much the Young Turks resented and even hated him." This seems especially ungrateful since Ovitz had paid them lavishly, handed them clients, built the agency and then sold it to them for the bargain price of $175 million. (By 2010, it was valued at $700 million.) True, the Turks - Kevin Huvane, Bryan Lourd, Richard Lovett, Jay Moloney and David O'Connor - thought they'd been lied to or misled about matters large and small: who earned what; whether CAA owned a private jet; who had an equity stake in CAA's headquarters building. But none of that seems adequate to explain the intensity of their resentment (which the more genial Meyer seems to have escaped). Miller speculates: "The Young Turks were prodigal sons, with the agency functioning like the trust fund a rich kid gets when turning 25." But the Turks seem to have risen to the challenge. They had to cope not only with the inevitable upheavals that accompany succession but also with tectonic changes in the entertainment business, starting with the collapse of the DVD market and the withering of revenues from feature films, which once contributed the major portion of CAA's profits. These new leaders had to rethink the nature of the agency business, pushing boldly beyond marketing and investment banking, the expanded boundaries Ovitz and Meyer had laid down. It's hard to manage change of that magnitude. For CAA, the biggest financial change came in 2010, when it sold a 35 percent stake to one of the big- gest and most successful private equity firms, TPG Capital, for $166 million. TPG got a majority share four years later in a financing deal that raised another $435 million, which lifted the value of CAA to more than $1 billion. The infusion of capital enabled the company to become a principal - not just an intermediary - by investing its own capital in projects. It's too soon to know how that's going to turn out. We may find out if and when CAA is sold again or goes public, which, for a private equity firm like TPG, would typically be seven to nine years after making the investment. Miller suggests CAA's best days are behind it. Today, only three of the Young Turks remain at the firm. Moloney, the one closest to Ovitz, who had been viewed as his chosen successor, died in 1999 after struggling with cocaine addiction, apparently by suicide. After 32 years at CAA, O'Connor left in 2015 to become chief executive of Madison Square Garden. CAA IS NOW big and impersonal and focused on the bottom line, which seems to have taken a lot of the fun out of being an agent there (not to mention reading about them). Even so, if money and power are the measure of success in Hollywood, then access to the hundreds of millions in capital TPG delivered gives CAA the potential to be far more powerful than anjahing Ovitz and Meyer ever envisioned. But money and power may not be the only or even best measure of success in Hollywood. Perhaps I'm naïve, but I came away from the book with the sense that CAA's most enduring legacy will be the impact its agents had on the lives and careers of their many clients, amply documented in "Powerhouse." The best of the entertainment they created will be remembered long after CAA is gone. "I think it's a ghastly way to make a living," Ali MacGraw says of the agent business. "But if you're really good at it like Ron was, you must gain some tremendous happiness by changing people's lives so dramatically." Ovitz may still be reviled by some, but not his clients. "I've never known anybody like Mike Ovitz," David Letterman says. "There is nobody like him. He was such an overwhelming positive force, and in show business there are not many positive forces. He put me back on my feet. It's comparable to my heart surgery, for God's sake." A measure of Mike Ovitz's power was the vindictiveness with which former friends greeted his downfall. JAMES B. STEWART writes "Common Sense," a weekly business column, for The Times and is the author of nine books, including "DisneyWar" and "Den of Thieves."