Michael Ovitz
Michael Ovitz is an American businessman and talent agent who co-founded Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in 1975 and served as its chairman until 1995. He is best known for transforming the talent agency landscape through innovative package deals that bundled actors, directors, and screenwriters together, shifting negotiating leverage from studios to talent and making CAA a force that rivaled the major studios. He later served as president of The Walt Disney Company from 1995 to 1997 under chairman Michael Eisner, a tenure that ended with a severance package valued at approximately $140 million.
“Michael Ovitz built CAA into such a force in not only Hollywood, but kind of the whole creative community. The only thing that rivaled the power of the studios at the time was CAA.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.