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WD_206/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 3 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 39.8 x 25 | | Size (mm): | 1020 x 640 | | Catalog #: | WD_0206 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"Blame Ovitz: When Art Started Imitating Hollywood" by NIKKI FINKE.
LA Weekly, November 18-24, 2005
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Note: Continued from the preceding "page" as "WD_205".
Unlike Castelli, who merely sold to Hollywood moguls, Glimcher dreamed of becoming a Hollywood player himself. In 1982, director Robert Benton gave him a cameo role as a bidder at an art auction in Still of the Night. According to Benton, Glimcher was so good that all of his footage made it into the movie. Then Ovitz pulled strings to get Glimcher an associate producer credit on Legal Eagles ,the 1986 CAA package about the art world. Glimcher consulted with director Ivan Reitman (who became a Pace buyer), staged the art-happening scene, selected artwork for the sets and provided information about how the art business operated.
Soon, Ovitz was buying almost all of his art from Glimcher. Shortly after, Boone lured away the hugely respected artist Brice Marden from Pace, apparently in retaliation for Glimcher stealing Schnabel. The act stunned New York’s art community. The following year, Glimcher took away abstract painter Malcolm Morley from Boone in an almost gothic tale full of charges and counter-charges, including grave-robbing, slander, lawsuits and just plain gossip.
And in the middle of it all was Mike Ovitz.
By 1986, Morley was a major talent helped along by his long-time dealer, Xavier Fourcade. Fourcade had guided Morley to success by the start of the 1980s when the artist was 50. And Fourcade had lent Morley $500,000 to remodel the Methodist church on Bellport, Long Island, where Morley did most of his painting.
Still, Morley wanted to leave. His lawyer initially contacted several galleries, including Knoedler, Castelli, Robert Miller, Pace and Boone. In fact, the gallery that Morley most wanted to be with was Castelli’s, but the éminence grise steered Morley to Boone, who already had a long relationship with Morley. By February 1986, it came down to a choice between Boone and Glimcher. Boone offered Morley an incredible contract, which Morley signed with no fanfare in April 1986. The artist took an immediate million-dollar advance so that he could repay the $500,000 he had borrowed from Fourcade. But by the time Morley got his money, Fourcade had AIDS. Morley pledged he wouldn’t leave the dealer right then. So instead of making the contract public in September, as they had originally agreed, Boone, Morley and Morley’s lawyer decided to wait until after Fourcade’s death. That November, Pace announced it was organizing a show of prints for Morley. The artist flew to Los Angeles to make prints at Gemini G.E.L., the prestigious printmaker that Leo Castelli himself used. Staying at a friend’s home, Morley spent three months in Los Angeles mixing and mingling with the art world here. That’s when Ovitz made his move.
The first Boone learned of it was when producer Doug Cramer organized a lunch in Santa Monica at Michael’s Restaurant in Morley’s honor. Midway through, Morley took a phone call and then returned to his seat of honor. Then Morley took another call. And another. Three times in all. And each time, the phone call was from Ovitz. Cramer telephoned his pal Boone and told her that “something weird” was going on. Immediately, Boone became nervous. She grabbed the next plane to Los Angeles and arranged to meet with Morley. That’s when the artist began besieging her with questions. “I hear you’re going bankrupt,” he told her. “I hear Eric Fischl and David Salle are leaving your gallery. I hear you’re going to retire to the country and have a baby. I hear you cheat your artists.”
Boone was shocked. At first, Morley wouldn’t tell Boone who was spreading the rumors. When she pressed, he stammered, “Mike Ovitz is saying it.”
Boone asked Leo Castelli to intercede on her behalf. “I thought that probably Malcolm would be better off with Mary,” Castelli recalled during our interview. “Arne’s is a bigger gallery with lots of artists. He can’t take as good care, as Mary does, of artists. So that was my judgment. I spoke to Malcolm. He said, ‘Well, I’ll consider it.’?” (Morley later told Vanity Fair he was surprised to get the call from Castelli. “It was like God spoke! He said, ‘Stay with Mary. You can pop over the road anytime. We’ll have coffee...’”)
In February 1987, Fourcade died. The Morley-Boone contract was supposed to be announced. But Morley was still in Los Angeles, where Ovitz continued on an almost daily basis to lobby him, planting seeds of doubt about Boone while praising Glimcher. “Malcolm kept telling everyone that Michael was pushing and representing Arne and telling him that’s where he should go,” recalled Doug Cramer. According to a story in the New York Post , Ovitz told Morley that Boone was “going nowhere fast, that she was about to lose Eric Fischl and David Salle, that she was a pathological liar who had to pay her lunchmates like Philip Johnson to break bread with her.”
Boone couldn’t take it anymore. “Listen, Malcolm,” she told him, “I don’t really want an artist in my gallery that does not want to be there.” She and Morley agreed to rip up their contract. Immediately Morley joined Glimcher’s Pace Gallery.
Briefly, Boone considered suing Ovitz and Glimcher for contract interference. Catching wind of this, Glimcher tried sending Boone a conciliatory letter, dated April 7, 1987, claiming, “It is important to me that you realize that none of this was directed at you by me in any way. You were, unfortunately, the unwitting legatee of the negative aspects of these long negotiations. Currently, the art world seems to revolve around gossip.”
He never mentioned Ovitz. Neither did Boone’s reply, dated 10 days later. “It is true that gossip and rumors are all too prevalent in the art world, however they are not present here. The reality of the events as relayed to me from sources whom I believe we would both find reliable and from collectors normally associated with your gallery is that you clearly maliciously slandered my reputation with information and stories you knew to be lies.” Glimcher did not respond.
Soon, the news that a Hollywood agent was interfering in the art world hit the headlines: “Money Changes Everything,” “The Art Boom and the Disease of Acquisition.” In September 1987, Vanity Fair published an article, “The Art of Musical Chairs,” that soft-pedaled Ovitz’s unsavory role in the Boone-Glimcher-Morley brouhaha. The article even had Ovitz claiming it was Morley who’d first brought up the rumors, and that Ovitz had knocked them down.
Exactly how close Glimcher and Ovitz had become was soon clear to Edith Newhall, who, as an associate editor at New York magazine, began reporting a lengthy profile of Arne Glimcher in 1988. After she wrote Glimcher a letter asking for an interview, the magazine suddenly received a phone call from Ovitz. The agent had a brief conversation with Newhall’s editor, Peter Herbst, saying he was calling on Glimcher’s behalf to find out what kind of article Newhall was writing.
On September 12, 1988, in an article headlined “Hollywood Casts Shadow on Art Scene,” the New York Post ’s Page Six reported that “any art dealer who doesn’t know who Michael Ovitz is better find out. It looks like the king of Hollywood dealmakers wants to tread on New York’s art turf,” noting that CAA was considering adding painters to its client roster: “The scariest thought for New York’s gallery owners could be that Ovitz may teach painters a new word: agent .” The article maintained that Ovitz had been “growing ever cozier” with Glimcher, and may even have become Glimcher’s partner.
Indeed, dealers commonly believed that Glimcher was giving Ovitz deep discounts — perhaps even selling him art at cost and without commission. Castelli, too, heard rumors that Ovitz had a “special deal” with Pace. In article after article, Glimcher insisted that everyone paid him a commission. And while researching her New York magazine article, Edith Newhall could not verify the charges. “I think I spoke to enough people who would have told me off the record that these things were true if they’d heard them,” Newhall explained. “And no one did. Afterward, when the article came out, no one wrote to me saying that I was wrong.” But when Robert Morley held his first Pace show the following year, Ovitz got the pick of the artist’s work. In fact, the painting was so big that Ovitz had to extend his dining room wall by eight inches. (Glimcher didn’t return calls for comment about this story.)
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Ovitz’s backing of Glimcher was no secret. In 1988, represented by Ovitz, Glimcher got executive producer credit on two big Hollywood movies, Gorillas in the Mist and The Good Mother. Glimcher was constantly dropping Ovitz’s name into every conversation. By 1989, Glimcher felt sufficiently schooled in moviemaking to jump from producer to director. That year, the hot property in Hollywood was Oscar Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love , and CAA controlled it. Ovitz delivered the book to Glimcher. (When the film came out in 1992, The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby said Glimcher at times didn’t even “seem to know where to put the camera.”)
By 1989, Ovitz secured a star for himself in the art cosmos when he finally made the cut for Art&Antiques ’ annual list of America’s top 100 collectors. Noting that Ovitz was “tight-lipped” about his collection, the magazine declared him “one of the most active collectors of blue-chip contemporary paintings,” and publicized his relationship with “close chum” Glimcher. Included in his collection, the editors said, were Picasso, Stella, Kiefer, Terry Winters, Fischl, “and lots of West Coast African art,” which also happened to be one of Glimcher’s passions. The following year, Ovitz was listed with his photograph and an interview.
“I’m sure my helping Glimcher in the film area didn’t hurt me in getting art,” Ovitz later acknowledged.
Ovitz put an addition atop his Brentwood Park mansion to serve as an art gallery. Built onto the second story, it was a secluded room, painted pure white, with a raised ceiling and enclosed in a glass dome with electronic louvers. The art gallery became a regular attraction for dining guests and Ovitz would act like a professor leading a group of tourists through the Louvre.
With the 1989 opening of CAA’s new I.M. Pei–designed headquarters, Ovitz now had not just one, but two grand showplaces for his art. He painstakingly mapped out which artwork would grace the CAA atrium lobby. Glimcher had the idea to hire Roy Lichtenstein to paint the giant mural, but instead of going to Leo Castelli, Lichtenstein’s longtime dealer, Ovitz went around him. “He tried to go straight to Lichtenstein and make the deal with him,” Castelli said. “He didn’t succeed in my case.”
Ovitz’s next move was almost as outrageous. He decided that the price for the CAA mural should be based on size, and, since his canvas was only half as high as Lichtenstein’s Equitable Life Insurance Building mural in NYC, he should only have to pay half as much. Explained Castelli: “I had to get the help of Arne Glimcher for him to see that I couldn’t do that.” Even so, Castelli said, Ovitz paid a bargain price of $1 million for the mural, based on Oskar Schlemmer’s 1932 Bauhaus Stairway. “But money is not always the main factor. Roy was pleased having it there,” Castelli noted.
In fact, Castelli himself was disappointed with the mural’s ultimate placement. In the Equitable building, there was plenty of room for the public to view Lichtenstein’s mural from afar. Ovitz had pledged the same viewpoint for the mural at CAA. Instead, people who came into the lobby were placed just a few feet from the Lichtenstein, so they had no perspective on the mural. It was smack in their face. Castelli said it was not what Ovitz had promised.
Ovitz acknowledged to me that except for the Litchenstein, Castelli wouldn’t do business with him.
Ovitz also decided the lobby needed an original sculpture by Joel Shapiro, a celebrated minimalist artist whom Ovitz had learned was also his second cousin through their mothers. Ovitz called Shapiro’s representative, Paula Cooper, who ran one of the most respected galleries in SoHo. A gentle, soft-spoken woman, Cooper had little to do with Hollywood. And even less to do with Hollywood collectors. She didn’t know who Ovitz was, nor did she care. But the blood relationship between collector and artist interested both Ovitz and Cooper. Eventually, Ovitz came into Cooper’s gallery in New York, and she in turn saw him on a trip to Los Angeles. “He was extremely kind,” she recalled, “and put a car at my disposal one day. I went to see his collection.”
Soon Ovitz bought something small of Shapiro’s, as did CAA partner Ron Meyer. Ovitz even took Cooper out to lunch one day and explained that they should build a better relationship because, he said, “we do the same thing,” she recalled. Ovitz wanted to place a Shapiro prominently in CAA’s lobby. And that’s when the trouble started. “There wasn’t a problem for quite a few years,” recalled Cooper. “And then a problem developed, and his behavior was absolutely extraordinary. I was so shocked.”
Ovitz wanted to commission Shapiro but at cost. He wanted to pay nothing to Cooper as Shapiro’s dealer, and also refused to allow Shapiro to make an artist’s piece of the work. Under normal circumstances, cast bronzes are done in editions, so that the artist can retain at least one. But Ovitz wanted a unique piece, which Cooper felt was ridiculous considering the low price he wanted to pay.
As he had with Castelli, Ovitz tried to circumvent Cooper and deal directly with Shapiro, on the grounds that they were “family.” Shapiro was eager to do the sculpture but told Ovitz a commission would have to be paid to Cooper. Ovitz, according to Cooper, became furious. Ovitz was on the telephone to her and, in several conversations, “bullying, screaming, hollering,” she recalled. “He behaved like a child.” Cooper was amazed. “The idea that someone felt they were so powerful that they could threaten me... He had nothing to do with my life. What could he do?” she wondered. In the end, Shapiro did do the sculpture and he kept a cast of it. But Cooper was out of luck. She received a fax from Ovitz’s attorney informing her that in their view the commission was satisfied.
“We didn’t get a commission,” she said. “We got nothing.”
But just for whom Ovitz was trying to save money wasn’t clear. In fact, exactly which pieces belonged to the agency and which to the building that Ovitz still co-owns became muddied in many minds. Several agents would hear Ovitz describe the same piece as his personally and then, days later, as belonging to the agency. As Ovitz’s art buying became an obsession, it became anobject of awe and even ridicule at the agency. Every time agents made a million-dollar deal with a client, they’d say, “I just bought another Lichtenstein for Mike’s dining room,” or, “I just bought Mike another Schnabel.”
By 1990, fulfilling the NY Post ’s worst fears, the agent did indeed begin representing the artists themselves. The New York art world had become as bewitched by Hollywood as the rest of the nation. Jasper Johns, John Baldessari and James Rosenquist turned up regularly at Hollywood-heavy parties with stars like Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper and Martin Scorsese. Eventually, even Schnabel made a movie about the life of art star Jean-Michel Basquiat.
That year Glimcher was so busy with his film work that he needed someone to run Pace for him so he could devote himself full-time to the movie business. The dealer wanted an expert who could lend a scholarly patina to the gallery. Ovitz had the perfect candidate: Richard Koshalek, the world-class art historian and scholar who headed MOCA and whose hiring was considered a coup for the entire city. Ovitz began secretly wooing Koshalek for the job of running Pace. According to Koshalek, no terms were ever discussed, but Ovitz was said to be offering a deal at Pace that would pay the museum head $300,000 a year, plus such perks as an apartment in New York, a car and driver and a liberal expense account. Koshalek passed and instead signed a new five-year deal with MOCA. (Glimcher ended up stealing Paula Cooper’s gallery head Doug Baxter, who took Shapiro with him to Pace.)
Even without the completed deal, Ovitz’s wooing of Koshalek seemed to pay off when the MOCA chief delivered a much-coveted recommendation of Ovitz to the Museum of Modern Art’s prestigious board in New York. With the backing of Koshalek and others, Ovitz was invited to serve on a MoMA side board as one of Rockefeller’s special Chairman’s Council members, composed of about two-dozen other influential businessmen.
In May 1991, Ovitz personally hosted a major fund-raiser at CAA for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s preview of new Richard Artschwager artwork. The event was perfectly timed so that mention of it, and a photograph, could be included in a Los Angeles Times Calendar cover story headlined “The Art of Hollywood’s Other Deals.” In it, Ovitz and his wife, Judy, were pictured standing stiffly with Koshalek and Artschwager beneath the CAA lobby’s Lichtenstein mural. Another photograph of Ovitz and Koshalek was printed in MOCA’s in-house newsletter. But in that same edition, Ovitz and his wife were listed as surprisingly stingy benefactors of MOCA’s exhibitions and programs.
By 1992, Ovitz was finally elected to MoMA’s board of trustees, the only Californian on the panel. He had achieved the highest recognition in the contemporary art world. But the truth was MoMA did not bring in Ovitz because of his invaluable art expertise. Attendance at MoMA’s all-important fund-raisers and film programming had been steadily dwindling. The museum needed Ovitz’s Hollywood movies and stars to draw crowds.
As his first delivery, Ovitz gave MoMA the premiere of Barry Levinson’s Christmas release, Toys. The museum made money. But the movie was such a disaster that many MoMA partiers walked out of the theater in the middle of the screening.
It was inevitable that, eventually, Ovitz’s art collection would impact his CAA business. All the time, Ovitz would huddle in his home with stars and directors he wanted to sign, but not before showing off his art to the likes of Tim Burton and Tom Hanks.
Just how far would Ovitz let art rule his life or his agency?
The answer came when Ovitz talked one of his signature clients, Sean Connery, into starring in the 1995 movie Just Cause , directed by Glimcher. The shoot was troubled from the beginning and got even worse when Connery saw the final scenes and pitched a fit. He demanded that the ending be redone. Glimcher refused. Things reached such an impasse that Connery threatened not to do any pre-release publicity for the movie. Studio boss Terry Semel called Ovitz and read him the riot act: “It is very important that you support Sean because he believes that all you care about is your fucking art dealer.”
Connery prevailed. As the press materials were being readied and the media junket was about to kick off, the movie went back into the editing room for weeks of furious recutting. “This caused an extraordinary breach between me and Mike,” Connery confided soon after. “I have done something that is not in keeping with who I am. I have kept my mouth shut. I have not said a word to any member of the press. I have behaved myself. If you knew me better, you would know just how hard that is.”
Ovitz almost lost a big client — all for the sake of his art.
©2005 LA Weekly
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