Powerhouse by James Andrew Miller

Powerhouse by James Andrew Miller was an interesting oral history on Creative Artists Agency, the firm that, along with other businesses it's in such as corporate consulting and marketing services, represents many Hollywood and professional sports stars.

The agency was started in 1975 by five agents who left William Morris and Miller particularly covers Michael Ovitz, one of the five and the man who became CAA president. There was great detail in the book about how Ovitz to further his career both prepared and hustled, with anecdotes about him as a junior staffer at William Morris noticing that the company president always came back in after dinner, so Ovitz would make sure he was also there, ready and willing to help with anything needed, and out of this became the assistant to the president at twenty-two years old. In terms of Ovitz's preparation and ferreting out of information, Miller devotes quite a bit of space in the book to how CAA got into corporate advising when they figured out a Japanese corporation interested in buying a studio and set up the deal, collecting $46M in fees in the process.

Also interesting in Powerhouse was material around how Ovitz and Ron Meyer, one of the other co-founders, had styles and strengths that very much complimented one another and then around how Ovitz seemed to become corrupted by the power he held and just how messy his leaving CAA was. He had negotiated a deal to leave CAA and take over Universal, but made things so difficult the deal eventually fell apart and Ron Meyer was offered and took the job. Ovitz then left to work under Michael Eisner at Disney, with that relationship fairly immediately running into trouble and Ovitz out within about a year.

The book's later part covers what CAA has become since Ovitz, with it a powerful corporation in huge competition with the agencies UTA and the much larger WWE/IMG.

I found Miller's book on ESPN, These Guys Have All the Fun, to be more interesting due to the subject matter, but Powerhouse was a solid read for anyone interested in the machinations of power and the entertainment world.

Interesting pieces on writers - by Boris Kachka and James Andrew Miller

There were two tremendously interesting pieces I've seen in the past few days that dealt with writers and work they've produced.

For New York Magazine, Boris Kachka wrote "Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist. Neither was Jonah Lehrer" on the former superstar writer and it's a fascinating view into someone's downfall. Lehrer initially got himself in trouble with news that he was recycling his old blog posts into new magazine articles, but then  deeper problems when questions arose about sources referenced and veracity of his claims.

It's a fascinating read about someone working in the the same cognitive science area as Malcolm Gladwell and the Freakonomics guys, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. I've enjoyed tremendously work from Gladwell, Levitt and Dubner, but can also see how someone writing in this realm of squishy science could potentially use liberties in supporting stories to tell and points to make. Unfortunately for Lehrer, he took it too far... with an additional supporting anecdote from the Kachka piece being how Lehrer was becoming less of a writer and more of a speaker and insight guy with an entertaining story.

The other piece on writers and writing to note here was "A Problem of Churchillian Proportions" by James Andrew Miller for the New York Times. Miller along with Tom Shales wrote the tremendously entertaining Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN and in this piece he examines the circumstances around the upcoming book The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965. As detailed by Miller, William Manchester wrote two volumes on Churchill and then realized he wasn't going to be able to finish the third book and would need a co-writer. Manchester developed a friendship with newspaper writer Paul Reid and after he was contracted to co-write the book, Reid found himself taking over upon Manchester's death in 2004.

Miller relates in his Times piece how at that point, Bill Phillips came in as editor of the book and helped Reid work through the writing process over the next six years. It's really a fantastically interesting view into the impact a great editor can have on writing.

"Those Guys Have All the Fun" by James Andrew Miller & Tom Shales

Just finished reading Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. It did drag on at times in it's 750 odd pages, but was a worthwhile read for anyone interested in sports… and particularly sports journalism.



Here’s what stuck with me from it…

Style of the Book

It was written as an oral history with segments of interviews done with people in the business or related in some way to ESPN (both within and outside the company). Some 500+ interviews by Shales and Miller went into this effort and there’s frequently interspersed text from the authors linking together the interview segments. At first I thought the book would lack in narrative flow, but I’d say it worked fairly well as an approach.

That said, I did have jump out to me one interview segment given in two different places in the book (ESPN exec John Skipper about personality Tony Kornheiser on page 677 as well as 610). Maybe this was done intentionally rather than being a mistake in construction then overlooked in the editing process, but I found it pretty jarring as a reader.

ESPN Business Early On

It was pretty interesting reading how the idea for ESPN began with the intention of showing local Connecticut sports, but then the realization that it cost no more to send a signal nationally. Shortly after this was made what turned out to be the brilliant decision to buy a satellite transponder for broadcasts when it was still relatively inexpensive as cable was a new thing. These early years were pretty fast and loose (with Stuart Evey as the Getty Oil money guy helping lead the party charge), but the business took hold… in large part due to the dual revenue stream of both advertising dollars and cable operators paying to run the channel.

Content on the ESPN Networks

It came across in the book that the deals with various sports properties drove the company forward (with the NFL being by far the most important partner), but also there was significant mention of key non-game broadcast content provided via various platforms (with the non-TV platforms obviously being more recent).

ESPN the Magazine was created to slap back at Sports Illustrated and their CNNSI sports network and (while I personally find the graphic-intensive delivery to be annoying) established a new way to reach the audience. Additionally, programs such as SportsCentury (produced by wunderkind and future exec Mark Shapiro) established ESPN as a credible news outlet and source for documentary filmmaking. Non-game content discussed at length in the book were successful programs like Pardon the Interruption with Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser and College Gameday.

Perhaps successful from a ratings perspective, but not critical view was the LeBron James spectacle “The Decision”... which showed the ongoing tightrope that ESPN had and continues to have to walk between journalism/reporting and game broadcasting/league partner.

Journalists at ESPN

In the beginning, ESPN put a focus on showing a professional production on screen and worked to have solid on-air talent. Among early hires were current notables like Chris Berman and Bob Ley. As time went on, there continued to be very interesting stories around the anchors and broadcasters, with Keith Olbermann and his acerbic brilliance often in conflict with management.

The closer to present-day stories about the writers for ESPN might have been the most compelling part of the book for me (with the following people featured)…

Buster Olney – excellent baseball writer and someone who puts incredibly long hours into the job.

Bill Simmons – created his Boston Sports Guy blog in 2001 and got noticed with a scathing review of that year’s ESPY Awards. Writes an enormous number of words and comes across as a bit of an ESPN outsider… and who runs the ESPN writing website Grantland.

Dan Patrick – one of the early stars at ESPN… left fairly recently and now does a weekly column for Sports Illustrated.

Rick Reilly – a former Sports Illustrated star writer (one of the only ones in the sports writing world)… came not long ago to ESPN and it’s various platforms (including of course, The Magazine).

Wright Thompson – excellent young writer for the ESPN website and it’s E:60 investigative journalism. Also does great content for Grantland.

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The book could have I think been a bit shorter, but there was definitely solid content on an interesting and powerful (and with only around 6,000 employees worldwide) company.