Ari Emanuel Photographed by Brigitte Lacombe One of Ari Emanuel‘s first appearances in the pages of The Hollywood Reporter came in our venerated Next Gen feature. Emanuel, then a 33-year-old agent at ICM Partners, was a member of the class of 1994. He listed his inspiration as his father, his power spots as The Palm and The Ivy, and his career goal was “Besides getting money and power, I haven’t figured it out yet.” Over 30 years later, as the head of two of the largest companies in entertainment and sports — he leads TKO as executive chair and CEO and is executive chairman of WME Group — Emanuel has money and power in spades. And, as of September 22, he can count himself as an author, too. In Roll the Calls, his new memoir, Emanuel tells his story from the beginning for the first time. Here, in honor of the book’s publication and his upcoming Los Angeles tour stop on Sept. 29, he shares with THR an exclusive excerpt about his earliest days in the mail room at Creative Artists Agency, the audiobook version of the excerpt as read by Bob Odenkirk and an updated version of his infamous Next Gen questionnaire.
Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from Roll the Calls by Ari Emanuel, excerpt read by Bob Odenkirk. Ari Emanuel ℗ 2026 Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.My first day in L.A., after purchasing a used 1983 Le Car, lipstick red with a pullback black canvas top and white racing stripe (Le Car painted inside the stripe), I go all in for top-of-the-line auto insurance. Whatever else I skimp on, whatever else I do without, I splurge on the best car insurance. Of all things that might go wrong in Hollywood, my father is most worried about a smashup without adequate coverage.
Now the question is, Am I going to sleep in this Le Car? Because after blowing my wad to insure it like a Lamborghini, I can’t afford an apartment.
On the verge of sleeping in the park, I’m bailed out by my friend Mendelsohn. The same friend who first mentioned the idea of agent ing to me. By coincidence he’s moved out here too. His apartment, on Wilshire and La Cienega, has only one bedroom, but he graciously offers me his couch.
First night in town, going for burgers with Mendelsohn. The talk is all about mailrooms. He knows everything about them. He worked in the William Morris mailroom in New York, and long before that— when he was still a teenager— he landed a gig in the mailroom at The Tonight Show.
Some days he was plucked from the mailroom to drive Johnny Carson to and from Burbank. Carson would try out his monologue on Mendelsohn. Think that’s funny, Mike? Think they’ll laugh? Gee, Mr. Carson, it made ME laugh!
Mailrooms have been berry berry good to Mendelsohn, and yet he’s burned out. That’s why he’s working at a bank right now, step one in his master plan to acquire the financial know-how to become a producer.
Best of all, he says of the bank, normal hours! Vacations! Holidays! Weekends!
Mazel, I say, setting my alarm for 4:30 a.m.
When the alarm goes off, I jump into Le Car and drive as instructed to a local bagel shop, where I buy dozens of plain and poppy seed and onion and raisin, plus several gallons of coffee, plus a vat of fresh- squeezed orange juice, plus two tubs of cream cheese, plus some fresh fruit. Then I cart this smorgasbord to the offices of CAA and lay it out before everyone arrives.
To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted.
In my brief orientation it was explained to me that catering would be my first duty every day. If this seems demeaning, at least it’s simple. My task the rest of the day is impossible. I’m to empty the huge sacks of mail that arrive each day at CAA and distribute it all to dozens of people I don’t know.
No one gives me introductions; no one gives me a list of names or a face book.
Just figure it out, asshole, that’s the ethos of the job.
Of the whole agency.
Every mistake earns me a scathing reprimand. People wave their arms, get right in my face. This letter isn’t for me, dickwad! Sometimes the yelling seems to come from deep down in the yeller’s soul. As if I killed their grandma.
Sometimes it feels as if the yeller is actually getting off, as if they’re a textbook sadist. And sometimes it feels like basic revenge, because the yeller got yelled at when he worked in the mailroom.
The yelling isn’t what throws me, though; it’s the things that make people yell.
The tiniest infractions.
Hey, asshole, what happened to that script I sent out last week?!
Hey, fuck-o, can you explain why this envelope doesn’t have a stamp?
Hey, dipshit, we’re out of garlic bagels again!
It occurs to me one day that the reason might be power. Maybe CAA wants all new employees to understand raw power by first making us feel the horror of powerlessness.
They don’t understand: I’ve never known anything else. I grew up without power. At home I was the youngest and told myself I was the dumbest. At school I was hopelessly lost. The only place I experienced anything close to power was the wrestling mat. So I know my way around this powerless feeling, as I know my way around the Art Institute of Chicago.
You wanna try to make me feel powerless? Knock yourself out.
I also don’t react to stress the way others do. With dyslexia, ADHD, it’s always stress in my head, so when there’s stress outside my head, when there’s chaos and change and disorder, it feels like some cosmic symmetry is being restored.
What others call stress, I call normal.
I call peace.
Of course I have moments. Now and then I curl up in a corner and wonder: Would people yell less if I fit the mold? Everyone at CAA is Harvard, Princeton, Yale. No fellow Macalester alums in this bitch. But I quell this creeping paranoia by reminding myself that two of the firm’s co-founders aren’t exactly Rhodes scholars. Ronnie Meyer dropped out of school at sixteen. Mr. Ovitz got his business degree on the fly, attending school while working grunt jobs.
Both men also grew up poor. Their dads were salesmen. Meyer’s father sold dresses door to door; Mr. Ovitz’s father sold liquor. The whole point of this place is sales.
The whole point of Hollywood.
I’m annoyed with myself for believing the myth that Hollywood is a sun-splashed enclave of creatives. It’s that too, but it’s also a nonstop sales convention. Everyone is selling. Their story, their body, their script, their face, their voice, their blood, their soul. I might not know what goes on inside Skull and Bones or Princeton eating clubs, but I know how to sell.
I feel as if I’ve always known. As if I never had any choice. People ask me when I knew I wanted to sell things, and it’s like they’re asking when I knew I had two brothers.
What a pleasant surprise to find Hollywood full of people like me. Salespeople, I mean. More surprising still is that the town was founded by salespeople.
That block-lettered sign in the hills is nothing but a sales pitch. People act like it’s Niagara Falls, some miracle of Mother Nature, but it’s just ad copy! HOLLYWOOD — it was nailed up there in the 1920s to lure prospective homebuyers. It’s a billboard, for crying out loud. No one anticipated that people were going to start projecting their dreams onto a billboard.
Whenever I’m feeling doubt, fatigue, fury, I use that sign to reorient myself. Whenever I’m lost in Le Car, coffee and vats of cream cheese spilling and sloshing across the floor mats, I look at the sign and concentrate on who I am, and where I am, and how those two things are aligned.
I’m not the world’s greatest mailroom clerk, I’m under no illusions about that, but I could sell circles around anyone at CAA. That’s what I tell myself anyway as I punch the pillow and pull the blanket under my chin on Mendelsohn’s couch, trying to catch a few hours of shut-eye before the alarm goes off at 4:30. Just give me a chance, you fucks.
Some nights I get the blues. When Robby first told me to go west, I pictured champagne flutes, Corvettes—glamour. Who doesn’t? Even the mailroom, I figured, would be glamour adjacent.
In two months I haven’t had one glimpse of glamour. Haven’t seen one star.
Funny how Tom Cruise never seems to make his way back to the mailroom.
The only star I’ve seen thus far is Mr. Ovitz.
Not that he isn’t big. For some, the biggest. And he knows it. He struts up and down the halls as though they’re red carpets.
You can always tell he’s approaching from the rising wave of ass-kissing.
Good morning, Mr. Ovitz. Good afternoon, Mr. Ovitz.
You only hear obsequious greetings, however, never actual conver sation. Mr. Ovitz doesn’t do chitchat.
You also never hear anyone call him anything but Mr. Ovitz. Never Mike, never Mikey. Never: Hey, yo, Mr. O.! What’s shaking?
If he were stabbing you in the chest with a carving knife (always a real possibility), you’d still be expected to follow protocol. Please, Mr. Ovitz, would you kindly stop stabbing me?
The first time Mr. Ovitz didn’t respond to my good morning, I was crushed. What a relief it was to learn that he speaks to no one.
His power derives from silence and mystery. And fear.
When he does deign to drop a word in the direction of another human, that word is cherished, then shared like scripture or revelation. I half expect Mr. Ovitz to arrive at the office one day wearing a white robe and sandals rather than his standard double-breasted Zegna.
Despite having no interactions with Mr. Ovitz, I’m on intimate terms with his belongings. It’s my responsibility, after I’ve spread out the bagels and filled up the coffee urn, to slip into Mr. Ovitz’s corner office and tidy.
Make sure his personal fridge is stocked with his favorite fruit juices.
Make sure his personal bathroom is supplied with toilet paper. (Charmin only; Mr. Ovitz is a devout two-ply man.)
Make sure his bowl of Hershey’s Kisses is filled to the brim.
Straighten his wall art.
It’s been strongly implied that if Mr. Ovitz’s gigantic portrait of Marilyn Monroe, or his equally gigantic portrait of the Buddha beside it, are even half an inch askew, my lifeless body will be found several days later floating face down in the Los Angeles River.
Saturdays—the closest I come to interacting with Mr. Ovitz. After coffee I run down to the office, scoop up his phone sheet and a package wrapped in brown paper that contains his mail, then speed over to his house on Roxbury.
Nerve-shredding experience, pulling up to Château Ovitz in Le Car, run- walking to the front door, ringing the bell.
When the door swings open, I’m always taken aback that it’s not an English butler before me. It’s Mr. Ovitz, wearing a cardigan.
I hand him the call sheet and package of mail. He doesn’t say thank you, doesn’t look me in the eye, doesn’t acknowledge my presence. In one motion he tears open the package of mail and closes the door in my face.
Excerpted from Roll the Calls by Ari Emanuel. Copyright © 2026 by Ari Emanuel. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Ari’s Next Gen Questionnaire From ’94
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Next Gen list, featuring Ari Emanuel, was published on Nov. 8, 1994. THR Ari’s THR Questionnaire From ’26
ARIEL EMANUEL Executive Chairman, WME Group; Executive Chair and CEO, TKO; Founder and Principal Investor, MARI Age: 65 Birthplace: Chicago Education: B.A. Macalester College (**I THINK THR SPELLED IT WRONG LAST TIME!) [Editor’s note: We did.] First job after college: Working as an assistant to agent Robert Lantz in New York City Big break: Taking control of the William Morris Agency for $44 million Career milestone: Buying UFC and then WWE to create TKO Career goal: Still trying to figure it out Inspiration: Staud and my kids Business philosophy: Know when you’re on the field. Know when you’re off the field. Lessons learned: Revenge is best served cold. Power spots: Only one meal a day. Leisure time: Working out, golf, surfing, sauna, meditation, breathing, ice bath etc. etc. etc.
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