CAA (with Michael Ovitz)

The Jurassic Park story begins with a client who had stopped producing work. Michael Crichton had been Ovitz's client and close friend since the late 1970s, but for years he was dissatisfied with what he was writing. Ovitz describes his role as staying present: weekly lunches, persistent encouragement, and even deliberately bad ideas meant to make Crichton laugh or prompt him to improve on them. His account presents loyalty as a long-term investment in a person, rather than a commission earned only when work is already arriving. [The source transcript is imperfect in places, so this is Ovitz's recollection, not an independently verified production history.]

The creative spark came from a concrete premise: young people stranded in an amusement park off the coast of South America, with prehistoric animals at its center. Ovitz and Crichton spent nearly three hours discussing whether such creatures could be bred with the technical capabilities of the 1990s. Crichton then wrote a draft in about five months. Ovitz read it overnight and judged it both a strong book and a potential film, using his own reading experience as a signal: a story that keeps a reader turning pages has cinematic promise. The transcript contains awkward wording about the characters' ages and setting; the analysis can only report the premise as Ovitz recounts it here.

CAA's next move was to assemble a package around a specific director before seeking a distributor or financing. Ovitz believed Steven Spielberg was the one person who could make the film. He arranged for Spielberg to read the manuscript quickly, then asked him to commit subject to a budget. Spielberg agreed even though the project had neither distributor nor financing, and producer Kathy Kennedy and Frank Marshall helped establish a rough budget. Ovitz then took the assembled package to Universal's Sid Sheinberg: Crichton's book and screenplay, Spielberg directing, Kennedy producing, and a dinosaur premise he expected to have broad appeal. Universal did not own the project, so the studio had to decide whether to participate rather than simply assign its contracted talent.