The Keys to the Kingdom (29 page)

The Imagineering researchers had a broad and rather formless mandate, from shooting (literally) for the moon to setting up computers and high-end stereo equipment in the homes of top executives. Eventually, they were also asked to come up with inexpensive attractions. Someone produced a huge magnifying glass, several feet across, that he hoisted on a forklift and used to burn holes in various objects. A favored trick was to heat a Coke can until it exploded. Visiting executives from Kodak were treated to this stunt and the employee proposed that guests at the theme parks could blow up their own Coke can, make a video of the explosion, and go home with a computer screensaver of the spectacle. Like many ideas tossed around within the division, this one never made it to the parks.

But there was also a mandate to create attractions with the broadest possible appeal. One insider says he left Disney after a colleague told him that his ideas for a particular exhibit were too sophisticated. “He said, ‘Our guests are dumb as posts. They have to have the plots of [the Disney television show]
Blossom
explained to them.' I realized the best I could aspire to was creating things for an audience that was supposed to be ‘dumb as posts.'…They really had zero respect for the guests. Guests are stupid. Guests are destructive. The only thing they liked about guests is they have pockets of money.”

 

TYPICALLY, WELLS KEPT
up a hectic pace. Some years into his tenure at Disney, for example, his old climbing partner, Dick Bass, was getting married (for the third time). Rick Ridgeway, the climber who helped train Wells and cowrote the seven-summits book, decided he couldn't make the trip to Dallas for the nuptials. Late on the night before the wedding, his phone rang.

“We've got to go to Bass's wedding,” Wells said.

Ridgeway protested but Wells persisted. “Meet me at the airport in six hours,” he instructed. “I've got a jet lined up. We'll be back by the evening.”

Wells, as usual, brought along a pile of paperwork and started plowing through it. But he also knew the plane would arrive in Dallas several hours before the reception. He had planned to drop by the Disney store (which perhaps would help explain the use of the company jet). He could do that
in forty-five minutes, which left him with three or four hours to spare. He pondered what to do. Then he told Ridgeway, “We'll go see Ross.”

“Ross” was Ross Perot, the irascible Texan then making a run for the presidency. He was invited to the Bass wedding, too, but Wells had never met him. As Ridgeway looked on in amazement, Wells picked up the phone and called Perot. The billionaire invited them right over and gave them a tour of his office—including a glance at his Remington originals.

“Frank was so charming and disarming,” Ridgeway remembers. “He towered above Perot.” Ridgeway couldn't believe Perot was devoting three hours to entertaining these drop-in visitors. He was even more surprised when Wells suddenly grabbed Perot's protruding ears and declared, “You gotta do something about your hair. With these ears sticking out like that—you're unelectable.”

They moved on to the wedding. Just as the party was in full swing, Wells glanced at his watch. “Gotta go!” he told Ridgeway. By now, it was about ten
P.M
. “I've got to go to Disneyland and meet Michael,” Wells told Ridgeway. “I need some company or I'm going to fall asleep.”

The two flew back to Burbank, made the long drive to Anaheim, and pulled in at Disneyland around midnight. The park was open for another hour. Wells decided to check out various rides until Michael and Jane arrived at one
A.M
. The theme park was putting the finishing touches on a laser show and the work in progress had to be viewed at night. Ridgeway sat with Wells and the Eisners as they watched the demonstration. “Frank and Michael Eisner started taking the thing apart, piece by piece,” Ridge-way says. “I couldn't believe the level of micromanagement.” Finally they were done. Wells drove Ridgeway home; he dragged himself through his front door about twenty-four hours after he left. Wells went straight to the office. Ridgeway had been climbing with Wells before, but now, he reflected, a day in his corporate life could be pretty exhausting, too.

 

AS EISNER AND
Wells flourished at Disney, Michael Ovitz was creating his own legend in the industry. By the mid-eighties, Ovitz was no longer a guy who had to wangle a meeting with Eisner by courting his secretary with a bottle of cologne. In 1975, he and his colleague Ron Meyer, both junior television agents, had decided to leave the William Morris Agency. The two had scouted out cheap office space but they had little to go on: Meyer, a high-school dropout who had joined the marines at age
seventeen, didn't have a great client list. Their biggest star was Sally Struthers, and Meyer figured he might have to pay the rent by hustling at pool—for which he was well equipped. Before they had to try their luck on their own, however, they were drawn into a group of more senior agents who had also decided to defect from William Morris. A longtime William Morris executive says Ovitz had a last-minute failure of nerve and asked to stay at the agency, but it was too late. His bosses had learned of his plans and there was no going back. Creative Artists Agency was born.

All of the founding partners had worked in television at William Morris, where they had grown increasingly restive under the controls imposed by their New York colleagues. The East Coast held on to power that lingered from the days when a single sponsor supported an entire program and the agency put the shows together. “The problem with William Morris is nobody ever died or retired,” says CAA cofounder Michael Rosenfeld. “We knew these guys would live forever.” (The eldest of the founding CAA partners, Rosenfeld was twelve years older than the twenty-six-year-old Ovitz when the new agency opened its doors.)

With all five of the defectors coming from television, the group naturally made one of its first stops at ABC. Eisner welcomed them with an extraordinary luncheon in the boardroom of the network's Century City offices. Later, he arranged for ABC executives to meet with Ovitz's team and ordered them not to leave until they had generated projects to do with CAA.

These gestures gave the new agency a recognition that it desperately needed. But it wasn't just generosity on Eisner's part. He was savvy enough to know that fragmented power among the agencies would increase leverage for buyers at the network. “He wanted to encourage us and show the town and probably show places like William Morris that we were being taken seriously,” Rosenfeld says. “Part of his motive was to get other people antsy.” Eisner also undoubtedly figured that if he was one of the first to extend a hand to a promising group, he'd get first crack at choice projects that might eventually come CAA's way.

Ovitz quickly formed other important alliances. Literary agent Mort Janklow in New York started funneling him best-selling books to package as miniseries. Gary Hendler, an attorney who had offices in CAA's building, guided several major clients—including director Sydney Pollack—toward Ovitz and CAA. “Getting into the movie business was a slow, arduous task,” Rosenfeld remembers. “Ovitz decided the best way to get a client was to romance them, and their attorneys and business representatives. Ovitz was
brilliant. When you met Mike Ovitz and shook hands with Mike Ovitz and talked to Mike Ovitz, you felt like you were in a fast car on the highway.”

A sense of momentum developed as CAA slowly ate into the client lists of older, slower competitors—including William Morris. Ron Meyer, Ovitz's number-two man, liked to boast that CAA's team would parachute out of an airplane into a backyard to snag a client. Another one of Meyer's favorite lines was that CAA could sell anything to anybody. If he could get Barry Diller into a haberdashery, he contended, he could sell him a green suit.

Ovitz in particular was fearless. “There was nobody he wouldn't pick up the phone and call and court,” says Rosenfeld. And though the stars were an important part of CAA's equation, Ovitz also had to work with the buyers who ran the studios. Here he found one of his greatest strengths. “Ovitz early on realized that courting that powerful group was something he was good at doing,” Rosenfeld remembers.

Eisner remained friendly with Ovitz after he made the move to Paramount. He hired Ovitz's affable brother, Mark, as a television executive (though he subsequently put TV chief Rich Frank up to firing him). The two Michaels also socialized together, dining out or taking ski trips. Just as Eisner had refused to accept Ovitz's terms for director Ivan Reitman after his surprise hit
Meatballs,
he would resist Ovitz's deals over and over again. Eisner almost always opted for thrift, while Ovitz felt that Eisner would not reward those who had brought great profits to the studio.

But CAA, the small operation that started with card tables and wives answering the phone, grew into a juggernaut. The agency's primacy was established in 1980, when CAA snagged Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Dustin Hoffman—a stunning hat trick. CAA became known for its lockstep discipline, its seamlessness. “We felt we had the best company in the entertainment business,” says former agent Jack Rapke. “Was it a perfect place? No. Did we rock-'n'-roll? Damn right we did.”

By the mid-eighties, as Eisner was performing astounding feats at Disney, Ovitz was well on his way toward establishing his image as the most powerful man in Hollywood. He created his myth by maintaining an aura of mystery and by promoting himself as virtually omniscient and omnipotent in industry affairs. The media was tantalized by his secretiveness. And the denizens of Hollywood played along; they seemed to need someone to scare them and to check the chaotic forces of the entertainment industry. Studio executives soon learned that fighting with Ovitz was costly and exhausting
and many tried to accommodate him when they could. If, for instance, Ovitz wanted client Bill Murray to get a particular role in Universal's
Mad Dog and Glory,
Murray got the part. The fact that Universal preferred someone who would work for less money was beside the point.

Michael Eisner was not a man to be frightened by a Michael Ovitz. Eisner was conscious of pedigree and Ovitz's bourgeois San Fernando Valley upbringing didn't impress him. And with Eisner, business always came first. Eisner and Katzenberg modeled themselves on Paramount as it had been in the Bluhdorn days. The standard approach was to do things cheaply and to keep control. That meant resisting the growing influence of CAA and Ovitz.

Rather than cowering as many other studios did, Disney cheerfully went on the attack. Early on, remembers one former executive at the studio, Katzenberg called his staff together and declared that Disney was “at war” with CAA. No one was to return phone calls from CAA agents, make deals with CAA, or do anything to accommodate the enemy. A couple of days later, Katzenberg declared a truce. Presumably, he had made his point for the time being. But these battles would be repeated. “I did not buy into Mike's game,” Katzenberg says. “I did not service his enterprise, his ego, and his ambitions at all. I made clear I was a buyer in a buyer's business and he could sell or not.”

When Katzenberg fought, however, he was acting at Eisner's behest. “Michael was always candid about CAA being a business adversary,” says Marty Kaplan, then a vice-president at Disney. “He thought what CAA was trying to do on behalf of its clients was a disaster. They were driving up prices. They didn't care about the health of the industry. Whatever friendship he had with Mike Ovitz didn't affect that view.”

But if Eisner was candid within the company, he was not so direct with Ovitz. When there were conflicts, Ovitz called on Eisner for help. “Michael [Eisner] loved it,” Katzenberg says. “He'd call me up and say, ‘More. Be tougher on him.'” But somehow, Katzenberg says, he never perceived Eisner as pitting him against Ovitz to preserve his own relationship with the agent. “I always thought we had the same agenda, which shows what a naive schnook I was,” he says. Ovitz also says Eisner had him convinced that Katzenberg was the one behind the problems.

The fights were frequent and the theme was often the same: Disney paid a below-market wage to a director. Then the studio would get a big hit out
of the deal and the director's fee for the next project would rise accordingly. But Disney would still demand a discount. “We'd say, ‘Everybody in town is offering $3 million,'” says a CAA insider. “They'd say, ‘Yeah, but we were the ones who gave him his break.'” To CAA, the problem was what one agent called Disney's “feeling of entitlement.” Disney saw CAA as a rapacious force bent on ruining the industry.

But Eisner made sure the relationship with CAA didn't degenerate too severely. “Michael was pretty clear that you could not just ignore Mike Ovitz,” says Marty Katz, then a Disney executive. “Michael would often help in the CAA area. But don't think Michael was ever really, truly the good cop.” If anybody was a good cop, it was Frank Wells. His natural counterpart at CAA was Ron Meyer, who often smoothed feathers ruffled by his intransigent partner. “Disney and CAA were sort of natural business enemies,” Meyer says. “We wanted to get the very most for our clients and Disney wanted to pay the very least. Frank and I were sort of arbiters of these relationships.”

So there was some friendly intercourse between Disney and CAA. Early on, Katzenberg offered a backhanded tribute to CAA during one of the agency's retreats. Katzenberg had his staff sift through the cartoon archives to stitch together a reel of clips depicting Mickey Mouse and other characters in various settings. The joke was that the reel supposedly showed that several hit films that had been big CAA packages—
Tootsie, Ghostbusters, The Natural
—were ripped off from old cartoons. Katzenberg appeared on the video, explaining the dark discovery, and his top attorney, Helene Hahn, declared that Disney was going to sue.