Summary of Powerhouse: by James Andrew Miller | Includes Analysis

By Instaread Summaries

Summary of Powerhouse by James Andrew Miller | Includes Analysis

 

 

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James Andrew Miller’s Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency is an oral history of Creative Artists Agency, one of the most powerful talen

• Language: English
• Publisher: Instaread, Inc
• Release date: Feb 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683784692

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Summary

James Andrew Miller’s Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency is an oral history of Creative Artists Agency, one of the most powerful talent agencies to emerge in the entertainment industry over the past 40 years. Miller interviewed agents, actors, musicians, and executives who worked at or with CAA. He arranges excerpts from their interviews to provide a narrative of CAA’s history from its beginning to 2016.

CAA began in 1975 as a small talent agency. Under the leadership of Michael Ovitz, CAA quickly built itself into the dominant firm in the field. The firm’s innovation was to focus on cooperation. Clients were seen as clients of the firm as a whole, rather than as clients of individual agents, which allowed greater cooperation and innovation across departments than was then the norm at a talent agency.

Bill Haber, Ron Meyer, Michael Ovitz, Rowland Perkins, and Michael Rosenfeld, the founders of CAA, initially worked as agents for the William Morris talent agency. William Morris was very hierarchical and had few opportunities for aggressive young agents to move up quickly. The founders decided to quit in 1975 to form their own agency. Initially, the firm was so small that the founders’