DisneyWar: The Battle for the Magic Kingdom
by James B Stewart
(Simon & Schuster)
All unhappy companies are unhappy in their own ways, it would appear. Certainly the misery that has permeated the Walt Disney Company for the past two decades has much to do with the quirks of its egomaniacal CEO, Michael Eisner, who is the star of DisneyWar by James B Stewart, a well-known chronicler of corporate misdeeds and delusions.
Eisner’s Disney was a far cry from the low-key, eccentric company run by Walt himself, the eponymous founder who died in 1966, and who ushered Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Daffy, Snow White and many other delightful creatures on to the world stage. Before Eisner, the studio was a relaxed place where work ended around lunchtime. Card-playing was a favourite afternoon activity, and Tuesday nights were reserved for games of baseball. Every few years a full-length cartoon came out, and sometimes a sweet movie with real actors, invariably geared for family viewing. After Disney’s death the company began to slide, and a hostile takeover seemed imminent when Eisner was brought on board in 1984.
Eisner was an unlikely fit for Disney. He was hard-driving, Jewish and urban, having been raised on fashionable Park Avenue in New York City: the opposite in every way of Disney, who came from the Protestant heartland of the Midwest, and whose laid-back personality cast a gentle glow over the empire that bore his name.
Roy Disney, a nephew of the founder, engineered the arrival of Eisner, who had made a name for himself at ABC, where he worked under the legendary Barry Diller. He followed Diller to Paramount, producing some hits, such as Flashdance, and earning a reputation for getting things done. He sauntered into the studio at Disney with brash self-confidence, firing a large number of people, hiring friends and acquaintances, and whipping up flames of creativity that led, in fairly short order, to a number of huge hits, such as Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Toy Story.
In a very real sense, he revived Disney as a major purveyor of animated films, and he acquired a range of valuable assets, including ABC, Miramax and the ESPN cable sports franchise. These, with other bold moves, proved wonderfully lucrative for shareholders of Disney, and the famous old studio became, once again, a real player in the entertainment industry.
Stewart tells this story with an almost indecent gusto, and the result is a thoroughly readable and entertaining book. He often creates little scenes, complete with dialogue, that bring the wheeling and dealing of high-powered executives to life, as in 1995 when Eisner attended a conference at Sun Valley where, after making a witty presentation, he met billionaire Warren Buffett.
Buffett congratulated him on the talk, and Eisner (cleverly) blurted out that he had just been talking to Larry Tisch, who owned CBS at the time, about acquiring that television network for Disney. He abruptly suggested that perhaps Buffett would sell him ABC instead, “for cash”. (Buffett’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, had a controlling interest in Cap Cities, which owned ABC.) With casual astuteness, Buffett replied: “Sounds good to me.” After relatively brief negotiations, that was that. Eisner had himself a brand new toy: a major TV network.
For me, the most riveting parts of the book concern the titanic battles between Eisner and his colleagues Michael Ovitz and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Ovitz, the most powerful agent in Hollywood, had been Eisner’s best friend before he hired him as, supposedly, a powerful number two.
Eisner quickly realised he did not want a rival, and made life impossible for Ovitz, who was not the sort of man who would take such a thing lying down. Nor did the wildly ambitious Katzenberg (who later co-founded DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen) enjoy dealing with the megalo-mania of his boss. After many screaming fits and lots of litigation, Disney had to pay huge sums to get rid of Ovitz and Katzenberg.
Eisner comes across in this book as one of the most unlikeable people in the entire world. In fact, one is almost not sorry for him when his health collapses and he has to undergo heart surgery. That such a highly strung man would have cardiac problems is not surprising, of course; it goes with the territory. But Eisner gains some stature in his response to the illness. He wrote to one friend: “Death has always been for me the feeling of air turbulence, hitting the shoulder of the highway … Not now. It simply is. I have been there and it was okay.” This is melodramatic, but death — or near-death in this case — is fascinating stuff.
In trying to make sense of Eisner, Stewart reaches wildly for comparisons: King Lear, Richard III, Macbeth and others. These are not especially useful comparisons, and they underscore the fact that the author of this immensely readable book lacks a real thesis.
Stewart doesn’t need one, however. This is really a book about the rise and levelling-off of Michael Eisner, a chronicle of his successes as well as his screaming fits, lies, back–stabbings and misjudgements. One learns a good deal about the great projects he passed on, for example, from The Lord of the Rings to such popular TV series as The Sopranos, CSI and Survivor.
Somewhere in the interstices of this book lies another good book, one that attempts to understand the bizarre, hit-or-miss way that projects succeed or fail in the largely brain-dead world of the entertainment industry. — Â