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In 1975 Michael Ovitz and four colleagues (Ron Meyer, Bill Haber, Rowland Perkins and Mike Rosenfeld) left William Morris, and were cut loose before they could resign, then started Creative Artists Agency with borrowed money and a card table for an office. Ovitz later left to become Disney president in 1995, was pushed out after about 14 months, and received a severance reported at roughly $140 million, which triggered a years-long shareholder lawsuit.
CAA pooled its agents' efforts and compensation so that each client was served by several agents rather than owned by one. Because no single agent controlled a client, clients were harder to poach, information flowed across the firm, and agents gained more by cooperating than by hoarding relationships. Internal competition became a collective push to outgrow rival firms.
Packaging means an agency bundles a script, a director and stars from its own roster into a ready-made project and presents it to a studio as all-or-nothing. Controlling several scarce inputs at once shifts bargaining power from the buyer to the aggregator, which can then set terms and collect fees on the whole deal. The broader a firm's roster, the more combinations it can assemble, so each new client makes every existing client more valuable.
Ovitz's time at Disney shows that power built by brokering, meaning controlling access and trading favors between parties, does not carry over into running a large hierarchy with an entrenched chief executive. At CAA he owned the relationships and set the rules, but as Disney's number two he had a title without authority, faced executives who resented him, and depended on a CEO who would not share control. His outsider deal-making style made him isolated there rather than influential.