“Oh, Canada” writer/director Paul Schrader has very little appreciation for the money men in Hollywood and Michael Ovitz is one of the most notorious of them all. Having founded Creative Artists Agency in 1975 and served as its chairman until 1995, when he went on to hold a brief stint as president of The Walt Disney Company. Ovitz was responsible for shaping the careers of Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner, Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, and many more. He also worked closely with Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, two past collaborators of Schrader who the filmmaker feels fell victim to Ovitz’s control. In a recent interview with Vulture, Schrader discussed the challenge of actors aging out of roles, but in relation to De Niro specifically, felt Ovitz was to blame for all the bad films he’s been a part of.
“You had to deal with the devil,” Schrader said. “The devil was named Mike Ovitz. Mike had a scheme. He would find something that an actor or a client liked. Marty was good at preservations. And somebody else was paintings. With Bobby, it was real estate. Ovitz would encourage them, give them hints, give them very good suggestions, and they would go for it but then they needed money. What do you do when you need money? You work for it. ‘Oh my God, I just got the film for you. It’s not a great film, but it’s a great paycheck.’ That’s how Mike would trap these guys into doing it. He tried to sign me, but I didn’t go for it.”
Schrader went on to share that ultimately, its unlikely Ovitz would’ve found something that would keep Schrader financially bound. In truth, his attempt to woo Schrader went mostly ignored.
“I don’t know where he would’ve found my point of weakness,” said Schrader. “I had a meeting with him and then something like three days later, he invited me to sit with him at a Lakers game. And I said to his office, ‘I just met with him. I don’t want to be with him again.’ They said, ‘Mike is asking you to sit with him at a Lakers game.’ ‘Yeah, no, but I don’t feel like it.’ That was the end of that.”
At almost 80 years old, Schrader has been exposed to multiple shifts in the entertainment industry over his career, largely a result of men like Ovitz and others who want artists at the service of business goals. For a time during the 1970s, after the studio system of ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s failed, it was the artists who got to control the message put out in their work, but Schrader recognized the shift that occurred in the 1980s as focus groups and testing became a higher priority.
“I remember when it came to an end,” Schrader said of the independent movement of the ’70s. “Barry Diller, who had come up through ABC and was heading Paramount, had been very involved in market research at ABC. He brought over his head of market research, who used to be at an office way on the other end of the Paramount lot. Diller took that office and put it right outside his, so you had to go through market research to get to his office. So the message was absolutely clear: ‘We used to not know what we wanted. We know what we want now.’”
By the 1990s, Schrader felt the industry completely shifted and was already in a place where they censoring what kind of stories got to be told and what didn’t.
“I remember, when I made ‘Light Sleeper,’ I showed it to Mike Medavoy, who used to be one of the machers. I forget what company he was with at the time,” said Schrader to Vulture. “And Mike called me and said, ‘Oh, this is a really great film. I really loved it. But you understand, we don’t make this anymore.’ That simple. We don’t make this film anymore. It was that cold.”
“Oh, Canada” is currently in theaters from Kino Lorber.
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