Creative Artists Agency
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| Limited liability company | |
| Founded | Beverly Hills, California, US (1975) |
| Headquarters | Century City, Los Angeles, California (US) |
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Key people
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Richard Lovett, President |
| Members | 3,400 clients (2016) 299 staff (2016) |
| Website | caa |
Richard Lovett, President
Kevin Huvane, Managing Partner
Steve Lafferty, Managing Partner, Head of Television
Rob Light, Managing Partner and Head of Music
Bryan Lourd, Managing Partner
Creative Artists Agency or CAA is an American talent and sports agency based in Los Angeles, California. It is regarded as a dominant and influential company in the talent agency business. It manages prestigious A-list clients. In March 2016, CAA had 1,800 employees.
Creative Artists Agency was formed by a handful of agents at the William Morris Agency in 1975. At a dinner, Mike Rosenfeld, Michael Ovitz, Ron Meyer, William Haber, and Rowland Perkins decided to create their own agency. According to one report, the agents were fired by William Morris before they could obtain financing. Their firm was incorporated in Delaware and had a $35,000 line of credit and a $21,000 bank loan and rented a small Century City office. Within a week, they sold a game show called Rhyme and Reason, the Rich Little Show, and The Jackson 5ive. An early plan was to form a medium-sized full-service agency, share proceeds equally, and do without nameplates on doors or formal titles or individual client lists, with guidelines like "be a team player" and "return phone calls promptly."
The firm grew. Representing numerous A-list actors and having about $90 million in annual bookings in the late 1980s, Ovitz led the agency to expand into the film business. By the mid-1990s, CAA had 550 employees, about 1,400 of Hollywood's top talent, and $150 million in revenue. In the 1990s, CAA was owned mostly by several key agents, including Michael Ovitz, Bill Haber, and Ron Meyer. Haber was credited for the revival of top TV producer Aaron Spelling.
Ovitz excelled at "packaging talent for movies and TV projects" and negotiating large deals between Japanese conglomerates, such as Sony and Matsushita, with Hollywood studios, such as Columbia/TriStar and MCA. Ovitz expanded the agency into advertising and telecommunications. In 1992, the Coca-Cola company placed CAA in charge of much of its marketing campaign, to work alongside advertising agency McCann Erickson. In 1995, CAA was described as the industry's most powerful agency.
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