Michael Ovitz Quotes
19 quotes from Michael Ovitz — Co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which became the most powerful talent agency in Hollywood..
“If you aim at the target, you lose all your power. You have to hit through the target to really smash it.”
“Mystique is ten times better than publicity; it's much better to be thought of as the great and powerful Oz than to be revealed as merely another schemer behind a curtain.”
“Nobody wants to be treated as just what they are. Everyone wants to feel encouraged to become even more than they are—to become the best version of themselves.”
“Nothing in Hollywood is anything until it's something, and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief.”
“Don't ever think that what is, is—because it isn't. Never count on anybody or anything.”
“It's not about money. The money will flow. It's about power and influence.”
“The Internet is the greatest thing that ever happened to the entertainment industry.”
“When I get on a plane, I don't want a laid-back pilot. I want a pilot who is a control freak, who is paying attention to every single detail of his job.”
“I'm not good at being static. I have to be climbing a mountain.”
“The unknown is always interesting.”
“I learned my first lesson at the Walt Disney Company about not being able to trust my associates.”
“Seeing me hesitate, Ron said, "You have no gamble in you. Sometimes you have to step up and roll the dice." That got me thinking. I was twenty-seven. If we busted in three years, I could land a new job and start over.”
“I viewed what we did as positioning, molding, manipulating: taking fact sets, and making them work for the result we wanted. That mind-set underpinned every single conversation we had with the buyers, and they had with us, all day long. They were never lies to me. They were tools I needed to use to get shit done.”
“I'm not the smartest guy in the world, and I'm not the dumbest guy in the world. And I'm a fantastic loyal friend, and I am a horrible enemy. But I was this guy's friend... It all went downhill, and I don't understand how. And I never will understand how.”
“I was a Terminator. The fear my opponents felt derived from sheer hopelessness. How could they beat someone so tireless, so relentless? So inhuman? That was the image I took great care to project, anyway. It was an image I grew to hate. Who wants to scare the living shit out of people?”
“I felt you could never be too paranoid. I always told our agents, "Make your clients think that they're your friends, but remember that they're not." Yet it would be my clients who would stay loyal and my friends who would betray me.”
“Once a year — and it was sort of towards the holidays — Michael would let his hair down, look out his window from one studio to another, and just go off on those guys running them. It was really, really funny, much funnier than any pissed-off actor could be because he really knew these people, and he had them by the throat.”
“Nothing in Hollywood is anything until it's something, and the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief. If you keep insisting that a shifting set of inchoate possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one.”
“I live to this day with a twenty-five-year hole in my life and seven or eight of the worst years I've ever had in business, or personally, or anything else. Because of this situation where I went into a partnership with a man who was my best friend.”
