The next morning, Aaron signed a lease on a two-bedroom Spanish revival bungalow near Plummer Park in West Hollywood.
He packed his Koreatown apartment in under an hour.
With his six-figure commission cleared, the dump was history.
The new place—complete with a private study and actual square footage—was the first real upgrade of his life.
At the end of the month, Steven Soderbergh walked into the I.M.
Pei-designed CAA building to finalize the deal.
Aaron took the lead, deliberately bringing Jack in to manage the busywork.
“This feels entirely surreal,” Soderbergh said, taking in the sterile, high-art minimalism of the conference room.
He was still processing the fact that Sex, Lies, and Videotape had closed for a record one-and-a-half million.
Aaron sat across from the director, turning a heavy Motorola cell phone over in his hand.
Under California labor laws, their first contract was capped at one year, but both men knew the paper was just a formality—they were tethered together now.
“Miramax called,” Aaron said, keeping the temperature in the room strictly business.
“They need you in New York for the re-edits.
Harvey is setting up to push the picture hard at Cannes.
That’s the real market, Steven.”
“When’s the release window?”
“Harvey wouldn’t have dropped seven figures if he didn’t have the rollout mapped,” Aaron replied smoothly.
“You’ll know his exact distribution strategy by May.
Right now, lock in on the edit.”
Aaron leaned back.
“What’s next?
You have another script ready to go?”
Soderbergh let out a nervous laugh.
“Aaron, the first one hasn’t even hit theaters.
Give me a second to breathe.”
“Take a vacation,” Aaron said, a flat but not unkind response.
“But keep a line open.
Call me the second you have a concept.”
Aaron wasn’t a hand-holder; he was a strategist.
Even CAA’s A-list didn’t get their agents to coddle them, and Soderbergh wasn’t going to be the exception.
The clinical quiet of the agency shattered that afternoon.
The noise didn’t come from the bullpen—it came from President Ron Meyer’s office.
Down the hall, Michael Ovitz sat perfectly still behind his mahogany desk.
He pressed the intercom.
“Susan, why is Ron breaking furniture?”
His assistant appeared in the doorway, her face pale.
“Judy Hofflund and David Greenblatt just walked.
They’re leaving to launch InterTalent.”
Ovitz didn’t blink, but the temperature in the room seemed to drop.
Judy and David weren’t just agents; they were Meyer’s former protégés.
It wasn’t a resignation—it was a coup.
They had walked out the door and stripped away a half-dozen junior agents and a lucrative chunk of the firm’s young comedy and TV roster on their way out.
CAA was built on poaching the industry’s best.
Watching a talent drain happen from inside their own walls was a bitter, unprecedented humiliation.
The retaliation was immediate.
Meyer marshaled a task force of senior partners to dismantle InterTalent before it could secure office space.
It was a scorched-earth corporate war: blacklisting their clients, leveraging executives to freeze their phone calls, and burying the defectors under the sheer weight of CAA’s market share.
Ovitz watched the bloodbath from his office, offering quiet, lethal approval.
Meyer was his oldest friend, though Ovitz occasionally worried Meyer’s temper might eventually crack the foundation of the agency.
Still, with Ovitz holding fifty-five percent of the equity and Meyer at twenty-two and a half, they were the undisputed kings of the board.
That evening, in the quiet of his new West Hollywood study, Aaron ignored the agency drama.
He laid out the files on his desk.
CAA’s partners were currently warring over two massive packages: Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.
These were the monolithic, fully-financed juggernauts that defined the agency’s prestige.
He bypassed them completely.
Instead, he pulled out a slim, four-page treatment for a script titled Ghost, written by Bruce Joel Rubin.
The senior agents had laughed it out of the Monday morning staff meeting.
Ovitz had dismissed it as a sappy, sentimental melodrama with zero commercial viability.
But Aaron saw the mechanics of a massive, cross-demographic blockbuster.
He also knew a fundamental truth: staying an agent was a gilded cage.
At best, he’d spend the next twenty years taking ten percent while managing the fragile egos of millionaires.
He didn’t want to service the machinery—he wanted to own the factory.
The Academy Awards were weeks away, and Los Angeles was saturated with industry parties and shifting alliances.
It was the perfect window to cross the line.
The next morning, Aaron met Bruce Joel Rubin at a diner off Hollywood Boulevard.
“I know who you are,” Rubin said, sliding into the booth.
“You’re the kid who closed the Soderbergh deal.
You want to represent this script?”
“CAA passed on it,” Aaron said, his voice low, cutting straight to the point.
“I’m not passing.
I want to buy the rights for a hundred and fifty thousand.
Forty thousand up front to lock the option.
If I don’t have this picture greenlit and in pre-production within three years, the rights revert entirely to you.”
Rubin stared at him.
“You’re a junior agent.
You think you can get a major production house to finance this?”
Aaron met his gaze evenly.
“I’m not interested in managing your calendar, Bruce.
I’m interested in getting the movie made.”
Rubin’s eyes narrowed as he realized the implication.
“You’re moving into producing.”
“I’m getting a film made.
Are we doing this?”
“One condition,” Rubin said, leaning forward.
“When this goes to screen, my name stays on it.
I’m not getting rewritten out of my own concept.”
“Done.”
They formalized the paperwork at a boutique entertainment law firm on Wilshire before noon.
Aaron walked out with the exclusive option to Ghost secured in his briefcase.
It was a massive, calculated risk.
Under guild regulations and antitrust laws, agents were strictly forbidden from acting as producers.
By signing that paper, he had just lit a match under his career at CAA.
As they parted ways on the sidewalk, Aaron handed Rubin a business card for a manager at a rival firm.
“You’re really not going to rep me?” Rubin asked, confused.
Aaron’s expression remained perfectly neutral, but his eyes were sharp.
“My priorities have shifted, Bruce.
I’m done sitting on the sidelines.”
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Thanks for reading!
P.S.
I dropped a reference picture in the chapter comments.
Check it out !