DisneyWar

by James B. Stewart

  Katzenberg stared at him dismissively. “If you need me to do this,” he said, “then you’re not the man for the job.”

  Despite the cool reception he’d gotten at his first meeting with new management, Kinsey had also kept working on the computerized animation venture with Pixar, which went by the acronym CAPS, for Computer Animation Production System. He still believed strongly in the potential to return Disney animation to its glory days by developing new computer technology. But one afternoon a secretary came to his office. “I’m here to collect your files on the technology group,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Jeffrey Rochlis wants them,” she replied. Kinsey had never heard of anyone named Rochlis. “He’s the new head of the technology group.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Kinsey said. “Jeffrey hired this guy without telling me? And he sent you to get my files without introducing himself?”

  “I’m just doing what I was told,” she said. Kinsey had the secretary take him to Rochlis. “There must be some misunderstanding,” Kinsey began. “I’m Stan Kinsey and I’m in charge of the new technology group. What’s all this about the files?”

  “Jeffrey just hired me to be head of new technology,” Rochlis replied.

  “Oh really,” Kinsey said, his tone controlled but icy. There was an awkward silence.

  “Maybe your problem is Jeffrey, not me,” Rochlis said. “I would have expected him to tell you what was going on.”

  The normally mild-mannered Kinsey marched to Katzenberg’s office, cutting past the usual line of people waiting to see him. “Sorry guys,” Kinsey said, as he entered the office and closed the door. Katzenberg was on the phone.

  “What’s your problem?” Katzenberg asked.

  “What the hell is going on?” Kinsey demanded. “Who is Rochlis?”

  “I hired him from Atari [actually Gulf+Western’s Sega unit]. You don’t have time for this stuff. It’s a good fit. Anyway, I go for the best athlete.”

  “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

  “No, no…”

  “Then I want a raise and a new title right now because I can’t believe this.”

  “Fine, you got the money and the title,” Katzenberg said. “Now get rid of the files.”

  Kinsey complied, and in the ensuing weeks, he heard a stream of complaints from animators and engineers that Rochlis was slashing costs and all but shutting down the technology projects. That February, while on a ski vacation, Kinsey realized that Katzenberg was right: He wasn’t the man for this kind of job, or this harsh new regime. As soon as he returned, he sent Katzenberg a memo proposing that Rochlis replace him as senior vice president for operations and that he dedicate himself to the lower-ranking technology job. “If you’re not happy, I’ll leave in July,” Kinsey promised. “I won’t cause problems.” Katzenberg shrugged, but readily agreed. Rochlis seemed thrilled by the sudden promotion. Kinsey got his files back, and immediately began reviving the computer animation project.

  In his new position, Rochlis began a series of meetings with studio executives, among them James Fleming. “You’re director of finance,” Rochlis said in a friendly tone, as Fleming nodded. “But what would you really like to do?” Fleming lit up at the question, since he had long harbored ambitions for a more creative job. “I’d love to move into marketing,” he said.

  “You’re fired,” Rochlis said abruptly.

  “What do you mean?” Fleming asked.

  “I only want people who love the job they’re in,” Rochlis replied. “You clearly don’t want to be in finance.”

  Over a thousand Disney employees lost their jobs during Eisner’s and Wells’s first year. Numerous Paramount executives replaced them, including virtually the entire television production unit under Richard Frank. Eisner stayed aloof from the purge, preferring to let Wells and Katzenberg carry out the mandate to cut costs. After working his way through the studio ranks, Rochlis was dispatched to the Imagineers, whom both Gary Wilson and Wells thought were long overdue for serious cost cutting.

  However they felt about Katzenberg’s often-abrasive style, holdovers from the prior regime, as well as Roy, were in awe of his energy and productivity. He was more accessible than either Eisner or Wells. A line always formed outside his office, where two secretaries fielded and placed phone calls. Katzenberg used two phones at once, with one party on hold as he finished one call and had a secretary start dialing the next. On his desk was a stack of three-by-five index cards for each call, on which he’d written what it was he wanted to accomplish. While still on a phone he’d use a free hand to wave in the next visitor to his office, squeezing brief meetings in between calls. He tried and usually succeeded in keeping calls and conversations to thirty seconds or less.

  Despite his prodigious efficiency, Katzenberg was notoriously late to meetings. Rather than gather at the appointed time, animators in Glendale waited for a call reporting that Katzenberg had left his office, then posted an observer along his route so his progress could be monitored: “He’s at the corner of Riverside and Magnolia,” someone would report from his car phone. The animators would be waiting as Katzenberg walked through the door of their conference room. He’d hold out his hand and someone would slip a chilled Diet Coke into it. He never said “thank you,” not out of any disrespect, they assumed, but because it was a waste of time.

  In television, Eisner moved swiftly to revive Disney’s long-running Sunday night program, which Card Walker had canceled the year before out of fear that it would compete with the newly launched Disney Channel on cable television. Under various names and networks, “The Wonderful World of Disney” had run continuously for twenty-nine years, and, as Walt had put it, was his “way of going directly to the public.” Original movies like Davy Crockett were some of the biggest hits in the early days of television, even if, in more recent years, the Disney fare had sometimes seemed stale, predictably saccharine, and attracted mediocre ratings. Eisner had already proven himself with the weekly movie at ABC, and he persuaded ABC chairman Fred Pierce to revive the weekly Disney tradition on Sunday evenings opposite the CBS ratings juggernaut, “60 Minutes.”

  Eisner was convinced that, just as Walt had hosted the Disney program each week as the voice and face of the company, the new program needed a host to give the program continuity. Walt was hardly a professional actor, but he was a legendary storyteller, and he came across as warm, inviting, and down-to-earth; a natural for the new medium of television. Eisner sounded Roy out about doing it, but he declined, in part out of his inherent shyness and aversion to celebrity. A search ensued: Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, Cary Grant were considered, and Grant was even approached, but turned it down.

  The executive in charge of the search brought name after name, all rejected for one reason or another by Eisner. Finally he reported that he’d approached Tom Hanks’s agent, and that Hanks was interested. Hanks had co-starred in Touchstone’s first hit, Splash, and had co-starred in the Paramount-produced hit sitcom, “Bosom Buddies.” The executive thought the wholesome, all-American Hanks was a suggestion Eisner couldn’t refuse, but he rejected Hanks out of hand as too young. Only then did it dawn on him that Eisner was going to reject every candidate except for one.

  Finally Eisner broached the idea to Wells. “I don’t want to do it, but I guess I’ll have to do it,” he maintained, arguing that the chief executive needed to be the face of Disney to show that the company wasn’t being run by the “ghost of Walt.” He also ran the idea by Sid Bass, who Eisner maintains was enthusiastic.

  Without telling anyone else, and using his wife as the producer, Eisner made a short tape with himself as host. The results were discouraging: For someone who was quite relaxed and animated in person, he came across as stiff and awkward; he spoke too fast; he emphasized the wrong words; he looked fat. Even Jane was critical, and one of his sons said his father would embarrass him by going on television. Disney executives, including Katzenberg, were pretty much unanimous
that the test was a failure. But the criticism left Eisner even more determined. The company hired a professional director to coach him. He lost weight, changed his wardrobe, and rehearsed his delivery. He even suggested changing his first name to “Mickey” to encourage the audience to identify him with the company, though no one was sure he was serious. Still, one of his first tapings, to introduce the movie Help Wanted: Kids, showed scant improvement. “This isn’t going to work at all,” Katzenberg warned him. Roy, too, was dismayed. If Roy had realized that Eisner was the alternative, he might well have accepted the offer to be the host. “You have to learn how to relax,” he told him.

  “I’m trying, but it’s not as easy as it looks,” Eisner said.

  Eisner stubbornly persisted in the face of almost unanimous criticism. Walt hadn’t been all that smooth, either, he reasoned. When he told Katzenberg during a flight on the corporate jet that he’d made a final decision to host the show, Katzenberg thought he finally understood: Eisner saw himself as Walt’s heir.

  *Though derided by architectural critics at the time, Lapidus’s hotels have recently been undergoing a critical reappraisal, and Lapidus has been cited as a role model by a new generation of architects.

  Three

  Just days after assuming his post at Disney, Eisner had gotten a call from legendary International Creative Management agent Sam Cohn in New York. Cohn represented director Paul Mazursky, who’d made the critically acclaimed and modestly profitable Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and An Unmarried Woman. He had rewritten a French comedy about a bum who moves in and takes over the lives of a wealthy couple after they save him from drowning in their swimming pool. Translated to southern California, the script became Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and the story appealed immediately to Eisner—a romantic comedy with a populist spin that could be made on a budget—even though Universal had had the rights to the script and had passed on the project.

  In his quest for talent at bargain prices, Eisner had the idea to resurrect careers that had fallen into eclipse, in this case, Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler. Dreyfuss was just emerging from drug rehabilitation a few years after winning an Oscar for The Goodbye Girl, and Midler’s The Rose had been nominated for four Academy Awards but her career had slowed in years since. Eisner had loved Midler ever since seeing her legendary act at the Continental Baths during the 1960s, while he was scouting for new talent at ABC. He thought she needed to get away from the serious, overblown musicals she’d been making. A nonsinging comic role would be perfect. It fell to Katzenberg to get the movie made on a budget. He signed Dreyfuss and Midler for $600,000 each, with no profit participation (Your client’s career is “in the fucking toilet,” he bluntly told Midler’s agent), added Nick Nolte to the cast as the bum, and the final tab was a modest $14 million.

  Eisner and Katzenberg were acutely aware that, as the first live-action feature film to be released under new management, Down and Out was freighted with symbolic importance, sending an important message to the creative community, moviegoers, and Wall Street. Released under the Touchstone label created by Ron Miller, it set new standards for raunchy language and sex in a Disney-produced film and garnered an “R” rating. Eisner probably would have cut some of the language and sex had he still been at Paramount, but he wanted to give a director of Mazursky’s caliber free rein, in part to overcome the reputation for meddling he’d acquired at Paramount, and because he wanted to mitigate Disney’s stodgy image. Still, as he sat through a screening of the film with Roy and Patty, every profanity leaped out, and the relatively brief sex scenes seemed interminable. He found himself drenched with perspiration, apprehensive about their reactions. When the film ended, Eisner turned to Patty. “Well, how do you like your new guys?” he asked, referring to himself and Wells.

  “I love it. We’re in business again,” she said. Roy didn’t venture an opinion.

  Down and Out in Beverly Hills opened in January 1986, the first major release of the Eisner/Wells/Katzenberg regime. Audiences loved it, as did most critics. “Down and Out in Beverly Hills made me laugh longer and louder than any film I’ve seen in a long time,” raved Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. It eventually earned $62 million in U.S. box-office receipts, which put it ahead of Splash as Disney’s most successful live-action feature. Eisner’s instinct to cast Bette Midler in a comic role was especially vindicated; Midler went on to star in a series of hit comedies for Disney with other talented but moderately priced stars: Ruthless People with Danny DeVito, Big Business with Lily Tomlin, and Outrageous Fortune with Shelley Long. The films were all made on modest budgets and grossed at least $40 million each, which made them not just solid hits, but highly profitable ones. As he had said he would, Eisner had simply shifted his remarkably shrewd commercial instincts from Paramount to Disney, following the manifesto he’d written years earlier to make appealing story-driven high-concept ideas and eschew the blockbuster, mega-star mentality—hitting the “singles and doubles,” as he’d put it.

  The architectural competition won by Michael Graves had emboldened Eisner to pursue his vision of an architectural legacy with virtually everything Disney built. He had had little contact with Robert Stern while the architect was working on his parents’ apartment, but since then Stern’s lavish re-creations of turn-of-the-century shingle-style beach cottages had become the ultimate 1980s status symbol in wealthy enclaves like the Hamptons on Long Island. Eisner hired Stern to design the “casting center” where new employees were hired and trained for Walt Disney World (and where I rehearsed for my stint as Goofy). Then Stern built two more hotels, the Yacht and Beach Clubs, both evocative of a patrician New England past. They quickly became Eisner’s favorite hotels at the resort, the ones where he himself stayed.

  But nothing excited Eisner’s architectural ambitions more than plans for an entirely new theme park in Europe. The old regime had just opened Tokyo Disneyland when Eisner and Wells took charge, and Richard Nunis explained that Disney had already tried but failed to negotiate an agreement with the French government for a similar park. As part of that effort, Disney had evaluated nearly twelve hundred potential sites in Europe, and had narrowed the choices to three: two along beaches on the Mediterranean near Barcelona, Spain, and the other in a large beet field east of Paris, near the town of Marne-la-Vallée. Eisner and Wells were both immediately enthusiastic. Tokyo Disneyland had attracted 10 million people its first year and had contributed $40 million to the bottom line. Their only regret was that Disney shared profits with the Oriental Land Company, a Japanese co-owner. “Start negotiating with both countries and see if you can get us a deal,” Wells told Nunis.

  There was much to recommend the Spanish sites, starting with the weather, but Eisner wanted France from the start. To him, France represented the pinnacle of Western culture, the antithesis of American mass culture that, ironically, Disney itself represented. Since his brief foray to Paris as an aspiring playwright, Paris had been where Eisner wanted to make his mark. Two camps within Disney quickly formed: the traditional parks people, led by Nunis; and Eisner, who was backed by Gary Wilson and Wells. Eisner argued that the weather in Paris wasn’t much worse than Tokyo, and the Japanese were willing to wait in lines for hours in subfreezing temperatures. Paris had a much larger population than Barcelona, was a year-round tourist destination, and was more of a transportation hub. Nunis argued that Spain had a far more cooperative government, was offering better locations near beaches, and was already a major tourist destination, Europe’s equivalent of California or Florida.

  Not surprisingly, Eisner prevailed. In December 1985, he flew to Paris to announce plans for a new Euro Disney on the scale of Disney World: a Magic Kingdom, thousands of hotel rooms, campground, golf course, convention facilities, an office complex, and residential development, all to be built on 4,400 acres fifteen miles from Paris. While he was there, he happened to visit a movie theater on the Champs-Élysées, where he saw the hit French film Trois Hommes et un Couffin. Even though he
had trouble understanding most of the French dialogue, Eisner loved the visual comedy and the audience’s delight in a story of three hapless bachelors trying to care for an infant.

  As soon as he returned, Eisner told Katzenberg to get the rights to the film. But a bidding war erupted, and it became obvious that Disney couldn’t pursue its usual low-budget strategy. “They are asking for a ludicrous deal,” Eisner wrote in a memo during negotiations. “If you add in the cost of a star, you are in the mega-cost picture and maybe we should forget it. On the other hand we could be at the threshold here, if we don’t go forward, of passing on the equivalent of Stripes or Tootsie or one of those movies. The only thing I know is that this movie will be vastly and wildly and spectacularly commercial.”

  When Eisner felt strongly, he was willing to pay, as he had for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Disney ended up paying $1 million, a huge sum for rights to a foreign film.

  The architectural competition for the Tishman hotels at Disney World proved just a warm-up for the much grander scale of Euro Disney. Eisner and his team of Imagineers had already embraced the ambitious notion of “reinventing” the theme park. As Tony Baxter, the Imagineer Eisner assigned to the project, put it in an early meeting: “We’re building a resort next to one of the most sophisticated, cultured cities in the world, and we’re going to be competing with the great art and architecture of Europe. We have to do something unique.” No one ever said that no expense was to be spared, least of all the tightfisted Eisner, but that was the message embraced by the Imagineers, encouraged by Eisner to think freely without regard to cost.

  This had also been implicit from the beginning, when, at Eisner’s behest, Wing Chao assembled a team of prominent architects—Stern, Graves, Venturi, plus Frank Gehry and Stanley Tigerman—who sequestered themselves over an Easter weekend at Stern’s offices in New York to brainstorm over a master plan for a European resort. Then Eisner staged an international competition for specific assignments within the master plan, adding a roster of prominent international architects to the competition: Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss architect who was dean of the architecture school at Columbia University; Hans Hollein from Austria; Rem Koolhaas from the Netherlands; Jena Nouvel and Jean-Paul Vigier from France; Aldo Rossi of Italy; Arata Isozaki of Japan, as well as additional Americans. They made their presentations at Eisner’s house in Bel Air over a four-day period, a veritable movable feast of architecture for Eisner, even though he thought most of the designs were far too cool, abstract, and restrained for a theme park.