CAA

"Our focus on first impressions won us many new clients before we’d uttered a word. When Dave and Peter Lassally pulled into CAA’s underground garage that August, one of our five parking “concierges” welcomed them by name. Dave and Peter then walked to the elevator through a gallery of vibrant prints—Johns, Stella, Close, Rauschenberg. I’d chosen those pieces to compel attention and announce our values. When I gave visitors a tour, I’d stop by the prints and talk with actors about composition and mood, with directors about the power of the images, and with execs about being well rounded and having a life outside the business. The art works were secretly my favorite feature of the building because they always made me pause, made me feel something, made me remember the person I kept hoping to become—a man very different from the personage Dave and Peter had come to see."

"Almost everyone at William Morris started in the company’s mailroom. After a year or two, trainees were sent to secretarial school for shorthand, or “speed writing.” They came back as an agent’s secretary. If they did well at that, they became an assistant, then a junior agent, and finally a senior agent. It could take three years to become a junior agent and four more to start signing your own clients as a senior agent—and more than 80 percent of the trainees washed out along the way. The way you got ahead at WMA was nepotism: everybody was somebody’s nephew. It was an old, soft, corrupt place. I didn’t know anybody, so I needed another way to stand out. I told the head of personnel, “I have a proposition for you. I think I can learn all I need to know to become an agent in 120 days. If I can’t, I’ll give back everything you paid me.” I was agenting him, and he knew it. He broke out laughing. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” he said. “But I’m going to hire you. You start Monday.” My salary would be $55 a week. I said, “I’d like to start tomorrow.” I showed up at 7:00, two hours early, to learn my way around the building. At 9:30, we received our assignments for the day. A few senior trainees snagged the plum jobs as substitute secretaries, which gave them the chance to impress an agent. The rest of us piled into company Volkswagens to make the morning mail runs to studios, networks, lawyers, and clients. There were three routes: the Valley, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills. Before the days of fax or email, all business not handled by phone was conducted via hand-delivered memos and contracts. Our bags were full and heavy. There were twenty mailroom trainees, which meant I had nineteen rivals for advancement. I set out to finish my route in half the allotted time. Mapping out routes with my spiral-bound Thomas Guide to the city’s roads, I played a game I called Keep On Moving. The trick was to avoid red lights. I got back to the office before noon, way ahead of the rest, for any errands my bosses needed in-house. They dispatched me to accounting or legal, where I learned the ins and outs of the byzantine company. People came to rely on me. Soon they stopped sending me outside Beverly Hills, and raised my salary to $75 a week. I was embarrassed by the low pay, embarrassed that I could take Judy out only to Mexican restaurants, which were the cheapest. You could get a five-course meal at Casa Escobar, on Pico, for $3.95: two dinners, two beers, and a tip and we were out for $16—slightly more than I was making in a twelve-hour day at William Morris. But Judy gave me the line I’d use later when I recruited people to an entry-level job at CAA: You’re investing in your life."

"At CAA we kept a “dashboard” of every project under way in film, TV, music, and books. A copy was placed in each agent’s black binder, together with the latest box-office data, TV ratings, bestseller lists, and other pertinent data that might give us an edge at our 8:30 a.m. staff meetings (which were themselves scheduled to give us an edge—we started sixty to ninety minutes ahead of our competitors). Our rule at staff meetings was “No idea is too stupid.” I consulted the dashboard several times a day, looking for opportunities for clients, potential film packages, or new business, the crazier-sounding the better."

"In the early eighties, I’d begun collecting relationships. For instance, I reached out to Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard Frères banker who had almost single-handedly rescued New York City from bankruptcy in the seventies, and who was on the board of MCA and had Lew Wasserman’s ear. I called and asked to see him, saying, “I need no more than ten minutes of your time.” On my next trip to New York, I went to his office, shook hands, and placed my watch on his desk. Then I said, “I’d love to talk to you about how you saved New York, and also how you advise Lew—to learn from the Dean. And I’d love to be helpful to you in L.A. in any way I can.” All to get him talking and to show that I knew what he’d done and that I admired it and wanted to learn from it. After ten minutes, I said, “Thanks so much,” and stood to pick up my watch. Felix—and everyone else I used this stratagem on—asked me to sit back down. In this way I got to know Herb Allen, the head of Allen & Co., and Bob Greenhill at Morgan Stanley, and I’d always drop in on them when I was in New York—as well as on Mort Janklow and fifteen other book agents, a number of figures in the art world, and our clients Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Al Pacino, Sidney Lumet, Bob De Niro, and Marty Scorsese. The relationships outside entertainment would prove useful to CAA in the plans I was beginning to develop. They’d be our bridges to a wider world."

"CAA came to subscribe to nemawashi, the Japanese style of bottom-up consensus. We didn’t hire anyone from outside until they’d met with and been approved by the whole department. The process made onboarding smooth, easing new talent into the company. (It helped that we promoted two people for each one we imported.) No one questioned our calls because they’d already signed off on them."

"While other venture firms seek out executive talent for their clients, Andreessen Horowitz goes further. It develops ties with the Valley’s best software engineers, designers, and product managers, helping them with introductions and career counseling. At times it connects these engineers and managers to one of its portfolio companies, but often there’s no direct payoff. It does the same for top Valley executives, much as CAA negotiated employment contracts for studio executives. Andreessen Horowitz aims to forge long-term relationships that might eventually prove helpful at a future start-up, or as part of future deal flow. And Marc and Ben’s thesis has worked brilliantly. They have rapidly established themselves as one of the nation’s top five venture firms, with prescient investments in Facebook, Skype, Stripe, Airbnb, GitHub, Instacart, Lyft, and Pinterest, among many others. As Marc told the New York Times, “We’ll wire up talent first with the goal of knowing and building relationships with all the best people. It’s more like a Hollywood talent agency.”"

"In the afternoon we met with finance, sales, marketing, and research. At 5:30, closing time, Hirata took me aside and said, “I want to show you something.” Leaving his translator behind, he led me up to the executive floor. We passed down a long corridor to a locked door, which opened into a room the size of a walk-in closet. Hirata pointed to the stacked, plastic-bound volumes on the floor. I picked up one from Morgan Stanley, a signed letter from the head of its investment-banking division clipped to its cover. There were dozens more like it, multiple copies of proposal books from the top investment banks in New York, London, Paris, and Frankfurt. The letters asked for the privilege of guiding Matsushita through the wilds of the movie business. They listed their services, each one with a fee. They charged for everything but continental breakfast. Hirata’s smile grew wider as I leafed through them, and I understood: CAA was the only one to forgo a fee letter. In all our dealings in Japan we never had a written contract. Our attitude was, We know you will do the honorable thing. For an old-fashioned businessman like Hirata, that gesture was definitive. Despite his limited English and my nonexistent Japanese, we were going to trust each other."

"CAA had four commandments: (1) Never lie to your clients or colleagues. (2) Return every call by end of day (or at least have your assistant buy you a day’s grace). (3) Follow up and don’t leave people guessing. Every desk phone at CAA bore the message COMMUNICATE. After our Fred Specktor heard me use that word in every speech I gave, he stuck the plaques on Ron’s phone and mine—and when we admired them, he stuck them on everyone’s phone. It was our version of IBM’s famous imperative to THINK."

"CAA had no formal business hours. If the partners’ cars were in the garage at 8:00 in the morning, so were everybody else’s. When I made my evening rounds at 7:00, 80 percent of our people were at their desks. The work was the thing. We even had a no-fly-by-day rule: if you flew to New York, you took the red-eye so you didn’t waste a workday in the air. Ron and I would park our cars in the number one and number two spots and leave them there when we walked to business dinners, before coming back to retrieve them. We worked insanely hard, but we fostered the illusion of working impossibly hard. I believed momentum was everything—once a company relaxed, it was done for."

"In March 1993, I flew to New York to meet François Gille, the multilingual managing director of Crédit Lyonnais, which now reluctantly owned MGM. After a leisurely conversation about the south of France and our mutual love of the region’s cuisine, we turned to the studio. Gille had met with eight leading investment banks. All offered the same advice: to deal with its $3.2 billion in troubled entertainment assets, the bank should break up MGM, lay off its 2,400 employees, and sell what assets were left, mainly the lion logo and sister studio United Artists’s 1,100-title film library. (MGM’s library already belonged to Ted Turner, and Lorimar already owned the famous studio lot.) On paper, that course seemed prudent, as the studio was burning through a million bucks a day. Total liquidation could shave the bank’s losses to $900 million. I said, “I have a different point of view. I think you should put another $150 million into MGM so it can start distributing movies again.” “And why would that be best?” “Because your bank wants to open branches in New York and do more business in America. It would be terrible public relations to fire more than a thousand Americans and plow the MGM name underground for good.” After letting that point sink in, I said, “I believe I can get you most of your money back, if not all of it.” CAA could jump-start the studio with a few movie packages, which would buy the French time to revive UA’s tent-pole franchises: Rocky, the Pink Panther, James Bond. New production would boost the older titles’ value. When Crédit Lyonnais eventually sold MGM, as required by the feds, it would get a much better price. Gille said, “No one else agrees with you.” I stayed impassive, but my heart leaped. In any multiplayer contest, you want to be the outlier. I told Gille, “Everyone you’ve met with is in the business of selling assets. But I’m in the business of building assets, and I think you are, too.” “You’ve given me a lot to think about,” he said."