Disney
& Hollywood
LITERATURE
seldom portrays the lives of businessmen at the office,
and when it does they are usually typecast either as crooks
or bores. That is a pity, since some workplaces are weird
enough to merit closer interest from fiction. The Walt Disney
Company, for example, an entertainment giant, is famed within
its industry for having one of the most political, dark
and back-stabbing cultures of any firm in America. The contrast
between its wholesome fairytales for children and the personal
hatreds and betrayals that play out at its headquarters
in Burbank, Los Angeles, is striking.
For the past year or so, Disney has been in a state of open
warfare. Roy Disney, nephew of Walt and a large shareholder,
is fighting to oust its longstanding chief executive, Michael
Eisner, and to prevent the rise of his ally, Bob Iger.
Mr Disney's family name lends him moral stature, and he
styles the power struggle as a fight of good against evil.
Mr Eisner stands for ruthless commercialisation of Disney's
innocent cartoon characters, contends Mr Disney, who privately
nicknames him the Wicked Witch after the character in “The
Wizard of Oz”.
In “DisneyWar”, James Stewart, an investigative
journalist, lays bare the inner workings of the firm in
detail. His principal subject, Mr Eisner, seems to accept
that his actions are sometimes villainous, referring often
to his “dark side” as an explanation for the
vicious way in which he treats colleagues who threaten his
position.
But Mr Stewart's history is farce as well as morality tale.
Executives behave like schoolgirls; Jamie Tarses, a television
manager, orders that none of the people who report to her
are to talk to Lloyd Braun, a rival. One of many hilarious
moments in the book comes when a consultant hired to help
top Disney executives with teamwork declares after spending
time with them that “the results of my research indicate
that you guys are not a good team. You're not a team at
all. You're not even a group.”
At the outset of his career at Disney, Mr Eisner wrote a
memo explaining that “We have no obligation to make
art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation
to make a statement.” That view of Hollywood's priorities
is shared by Edward Jay Epstein, whose book “The Big
Picture” describes the way in which studios are catering
more and more for young audiences, meaning more car chases,
more special effects, less dialogue and, in the end, worse
movies.
“The Big Picture” describes how Hollywood works,
and even makes sense of some of Mr Eisner's behaviour, such
as his payment of $140m in severance to Michael Ovitz, former
boss of CAA, a talent agency, for 15 months' work. Disney
shareholders have brought a lawsuit against the firm's directors
for not firing Mr Ovitz for “cause”—which
would have meant no payment. Mr Epstein rightly describes
Hollywood as a close-knit community with a stronger hold
on its employees' loyalty than any single company within
it. Though Mr Eisner was willing to betray Mr Ovitz by firing
him in a humiliating way, going on to prove incompetence
would have breached the community's rules. As for Mr Eisner's
indulging of the dark side of his personality, what else
could be the point of succeeding in Tinseltown?
Other
Reviews
|