Who Is Michael Ovitz?
“I was blown away. I'm actually listening to it a second time.”
Why it is worth your time
Who Is Michael Ovitz? is the 2018 memoir of the agent who co-founded Creative Artists Agency in 1975 with 4 colleagues from William Morris and ran it until 1995. Ovitz covers the packaging of films and television around CAA clients, the Sony and Matsushita studio deals he advised on, and his 14 months as president of Disney under Michael Eisner, which ended in a public firing. Jason said on his January 2019 blog post that he was blown away and was listening a second time, and he repeated the recommendation on TWiST in 2020. Ovitz is an operator from the 80s and 90s of the type Jason likes to study, and an outsider who got inside, which was the argument of the post. It suits readers interested in negotiation and power. The caveat is that it is Ovitz's side of each story; Kitty Kelley in the Washington Independent Review of Books found it settles scores.
