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A Titanic Tale
bA Titani

The Economist


Feb 24, 2005


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?



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