In an announcement last week that impressed people in and out of Hollywood, Creative Artists Agency head Michael Ovitz said he had hired Robert Kavner, an executive vice president of AT&T, to help him chart the voyage into the multimedia universe. Like many a move by Ovitz, this one should set Hollywood scrambling to catch up.
Kavner, 50, is a former chief financial officer for AT&T who’s spent the last three years heading its new-business ventures. Until this week a leading candidate to succeed AT&T chairman Robert Allen, Kavner is the business-world equivalent of top box office – and conversant in the technical language of multimedia. ““He has relations with every company in Silicon Valley, every movie studio, every telephone company and every cable company,’’ enthused Ovitz. If all goes well, Kavner will be the man who helps cast a CAA client such as Tom Cruise in a ““Top Gun’’ videogame or gets Sydney Pollack to direct an Oscar-winning interactive movie.
Hollywood agencies already have the dollar signs of Silicon Valley in their sights. The movie business, at a stale $5 billion a year, has begun to overlap with the estimated $9.8 bil-lion-a-year videogame business – an exponentially growing playground that includes CD-ROMs and interactive PC-based games. In one early example, New Line Cinema has struck a deal to make a mov-ie based on the videogame Mortal Kombat.
Eager to cash in, CAA rival International Creative Management (ICM) has a half-dozen agents scouting Silicon Valley for techno ““talent’’ such as software engineers or programmers. The relatively staid William Morris has assigned six to eight agents to similar duty. But when the Armani suits descend on Silicon Valley campuses, they’re greeted with skepticism. ““We’ve had all the agencies come through,’’ says John Scull, cofounder of PF.Magic, a maker of interactive videogames. ““They’re like “people who know people who know people’’’ – and nothing else. ““They just sense that there’s money here.’’ Tom Zito, head of interactive-game maker Digital Pictures, has dubbed the resulting no man’s land ““Silliwood.''
Mold breaker: Ovitz chose Kavner to bridge that culture gap. And he intends to do more than book talent. ““This isn’t about signing up clients,’’ he said. ““This is about putting our clients into associations that will be productive in the future.’’ If his move proves to be as astute as it now looks, it will only add to his reputation as a man who can ““think outside the box,’’ as creativity consultants call it. Ovitz broke the mold of the old Hollywood agent in 1989 when he did behind-the-scenes brokering of the deal for Sony to buy Columbia Pictures. Two years later he took on Coca-Cola as a client and lined up top-drawer film directors to make its ““Always Coca-Cola’’ ads.
Ovitz got to know Kavner over the last two years as he crisscrossed the country visiting cable and telephone companies, broadcasters, hardware and software makers. About a month ago, over dinner, Ovitz told him, "” “Look, maybe you should think about doing something with me.’ The next day, we started to talk.''
A long list of mergers have come to nothing in the last year, as national multimedia intoxication brought together some drunken lovers. The odds on this marriage are a little better. And if the honeymoon goes well, you can bet that other partners will follow Ovitz and Kavner to the altar.
