Creative Artists Agency (CAA)

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How Things Get Done in Hollywood

6/21/10 - When talks over Disney’s attempted sale of Miramax bogged down last month, Bryan Lourd, a managing partner in the powerful Creative Artists Agency, jumped in.

Lourd, who represented a bid organized by Bob and Harvey Weinstein and the investor Ron Burkle, worked phones, rattled cages, poured on charm when things got sticky and lobbied Disney chief, Bob Iger, until talks fell apart.

Lourd’s clients are behind perhaps a dozen of the biggest studio movies this year, like Robert Downey Jr. in “Iron Man 2” or Oliver Stone with his coming “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” But Lourd, in close coordination with his business partners, has been pushing to expand Creative Artists — already heavily involved in the sports business — well beyond the confines of the entertainment industry, which has not been much fun of late, even for the big players.

In the last few weeks, Lourd and his agency partners — Kevin Huvane, Richard Lovett, David O’Connor, Rob Light and Steven Lafferty — have talked with potential investors, including the private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and TPG.

The idea is to form a financial alliance that might give Creative Artists backing for new ventures, whether in sports, video games or the sort of investment activities it has fostered through Evolution Media Capital, a satellite that represented the Weinstein-Burkle bid for Miramax.

The sale of a stake in the agency could also let its owners tap some of the wealth that has largely been locked inside their sprawling private business. But people briefed on the discussions insisted that no managing partner was planning to leave.

Hollywood’s top agencies have been under pressure for years, as erosion in home video revenue, a drop in film production and fragmentation in the TV business have clipped income for stars and filmmakers and turned deals like the still-pending Miramax sale into bargaining quagmires.

For Lourd and his associates, a group which bought Creative Artists from its co-founders, Michael Ovitz and Ron Meyer, in 1995, the challenge has been to keep their company from becoming a gilded cage that might shrink if it failed to connect with a larger business world.

Deep inside the movie business, at any rate, things sometimes still go the way they should for a top player. Engineering a new version of “The Karate Kid” for Sony was mostly a matter of getting one of Lourd’s clients, producer Jerry Weintraub, who made the original film, to talk with a Lovett client, Will Smith.

In the first 10 days, Karate Kid has taken in $107 million at the domestic box office.