Many of us have read Rob Cohen’s story about how he discovered David Ward‘s script of The Sting while working for Mike Medavoy at International Famous Agency (IFA), which later merged with Creative Management Associates (CMA) in ’75 to become International Creative Management (ICM).
Cohen told the tale to journalist Germain Lussier in late November of 2008. I reposted the story in April 2012, or a couple of months before the release of a new Sting Bluray; I reposted it on 11.14.18.
I’ve known Medavoy since the early ’90s, and have always found him to be a decent hombre. I happened to run into him during the Neon/Parasite Oscar night party at Soho House on 2.9.20. I asked him about Cohen’s recollection and Medavoy said, “Yeah, I’ve heard that story.” He not only has a completely different recall but thinks it was “pretty silly” of Cohen “to have put himself at the center of it.”
I called Mike yesterday for the chapter-and-verse. Here’s how it goes, straight from the horse’s mouth:
“Tony Bill had been my friend and client. Sometime in ’72 he said to me, ‘I want to option a con-man project from a very talented writer named David Ward. Ward was the author of The Sting, except when Tony got it hadn’t been written. It was just on tape. The option would be $5000, he told me, so how about you and I putting up $2500 each and you can leave the agency business and co-produce the film with me? I said ‘I don’t have enough money to leave the agency business but I’ll be your agent on it.’ On top of the fact that I had a lot of clients at the time and was in the midst of putting together Young Frankenstein and later on Jaws.
“Bill then found Michael and Julia Phillips to cofinance the option. Michael had been an investment banker in New York. Anyway the $5K went to David Ward. Then one day I was playing tennis in Malibu with Robert Redford, who had gotten the script. He decided he was interested in it. By this point I had listened to The Sting on tape, and I thought it was terrific. Then a script version came in, and I read it and liked it.
“Around the same time Cohen came to me for a job. I gave him the script and he liked it a lot. So based on our liking the same script I hired him as my assistant — that’s how he got the job.
“While in London Michael and Julia had given it to Dan Melnick while I was gone, and they were interested and got into a negotiation. At that time Ward wanted to direct the movie at MGM. Donald Sutherland and Peter Boyle, who were also my clients, had gotten the script first and wanted to play the leads. At the same time I gave it to Zanuck-Brown, who had just moved from Fox to Universal, and then they got it to George Roy Hill, whom they’d worked with on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
“Then they gave it to Newman, who passed. Paul had an apartment in Manhattan, and George lived there also. So one night George and Redford sat in Newman’s apartment and tried to convince him, and at the end of the meeting Paul said he wasn’t gonna do it. But as he walked them to the elevator he said, ‘I’m just kidding, I’ll do it.’ And that was it. They came into the office and we made the deal. Right after that I was banned from the MGM lot.