Why are you so crazy about Katzenberg, Violet? I don't mean that question as a put-down to you or him. However, I am only wondering why you seem to be obsessed with Katzenberg.
Are you sure you are not him?
Award archives...
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- AV Forum Member
- Posts: 9094
- Joined: October 25th, 2004
- Location: Binghamton, NY
I'm not him. 
I just think he deserves respect is all.
K is WAY COOL. It's so obvious how much he loves animation. He saw it as a burden when he came to Disney and then he got to love it more than anything. That's pretty amazing.
He was instrumental in making Disney what it is. He ran the TV and movie division for the first ten (and VERY successful) years.
No matter how much a certain bitter old man with a website wants to rationalize away everything he did, the truth will not die!
I just think he deserves respect is all.K is WAY COOL. It's so obvious how much he loves animation. He saw it as a burden when he came to Disney and then he got to love it more than anything. That's pretty amazing.
He was instrumental in making Disney what it is. He ran the TV and movie division for the first ten (and VERY successful) years.
No matter how much a certain bitter old man with a website wants to rationalize away everything he did, the truth will not die!
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
-
- AV Forum Member
- Posts: 9094
- Joined: October 25th, 2004
- Location: Binghamton, NY
Roy Disney/Jeffrey Katzenberg
In Disney Row, an Aging Heir Who's Won Boardroom Bouts
Often Viewed as a Lightweight, Walt's Nephew Challenges Eisner, a Corporate Warrior --- Sparring Over the Princesses
By Bruce Orwall
2,373 words
5 December 2003
The Wall Street Journal
A1
English
(Copyright (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
Hoping to ensure a smooth transition from one generation of his family to the next, Roy E. Disney two years ago asked Walt Disney Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Michael Eisner to place one of Mr. Disney's children, such as son Roy Patrick, on the company's board.
Mr. Disney, the nephew of Walt, figured the company would always want the Disney family involved in its affairs. He was wrong. The request was ignored, says Stanley P. Gold, Mr. Disney's longtime investment adviser and fellow board member. Indeed, people close to Mr. Eisner say he found the idea absurd, coming at a time when critics were demanding that Disney find more-independent directors with strong business credentials.
Since then, Mr. Disney's relationship with Mr. Eisner, 61 years old, has run into a ditch -- the result of countless moments in which the older man felt his suggestions and criticisms were ignored. Mr. Disney, 73, quit the board on Sunday with a blunt resignation letter that called for Mr. Eisner's ouster. Mr. Gold, 61, quit the next day, issuing his own brutal attack on the rest of Disney's directors.
It's an all-too-familiar sequence of events for Mr. Disney. With a breezy manner, a kind face and an early resume of minor studio jobs, Mr. Disney over the years has been routinely disregarded as a lightweight heir and widely derided behind his back as "Walt's idiot nephew."
Long absences from the company's Burbank, Calif., headquarters, to sail in yacht races or visit his castle in Ireland, have only fed that notion. His opinions have sometimes missed the mark. He criticized Disney's attempts to revive its consumer-products division, for example, by marketing its princess characters, such as Cinderella and Snow White, as a group. The "Princess Line" is now one of Disney's hottest marketing conceits.
But over the years, he has used his name and his fortune to strike back at key moments, sometimes resulting in big changes at the company. He has twice quit the company as an executive and twice quit its board of directors, because he felt that the man in charge had let the company's creative heart die. In 1984, he resigned from the Disney board and, with Mr. Gold, recruited Mr. Eisner to replace Chief Executive Ron Miller. Mr. Disney's complaints and criticism helped halt the rise at Disney of studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg in the mid-1990s.
Now Mr. Eisner is the target. For the past couple of years, he and other Disney managers have fielded mounting criticism from Mr. Disney on several fronts. Many in Hollywood have privately applauded Mr. Disney's resignation letter, which succinctly bullets seven areas in which he thinks the company is falling short. The list ranges from Mr. Eisner's management style and succession planning to the state of the company's theme parks, which Mr. Disney says have been starved of the capital needed to maintain quality.
Mr. Disney and the pitbull-like Mr. Gold, his "bad cop" and the head of Mr. Disney's investment vehicle, Shamrock Holdings Inc., plan to campaign against Mr. Eisner with major investors in the coming weeks. But Disney's stock is widely held, with no dominant institutional shareholders that could singlehandedly pin Mr. Eisner to the wall.
Unseating Mr. Eisner will be much more difficult than Mr. Disney's past missions -- though not because Mr. Eisner's track record has been so stellar lately. The company has faced mounting criticism since 1997, amid declining financial and stock performance.
But Mr. Eisner has endured, largely because he is a skilled corporate warrior. He has spent much of the past two years trying to rid Disney of its reputation for poor corporate governance, by adopting new company guidelines devised by top experts in the field. Those same rules enabled him to neutralize Mr. Disney and Mr. Gold when, about 18 months ago, they reversed their longtime support of him and began to question his leadership.
This week, the Disney board planned to use a mandatory-retirement clause in its new corporate-governance guidelines to force the resignation of Mr. Disney and two other board members. Mr. Disney's team disagrees with the company's interpretation of the rule, but he avoided the issue by quitting before he could be ousted.
Mr. Disney also lacks the clout he had in 1984, when he controlled nearly 5% of Disney's shares. Today, his 17.5 million shares represent less than 1% of Disney's two billion shares outstanding. And he recently agreed to sell as much as 7.5 million shares, or 43% of his stake, in an exotic contract with Credit Suisse First Boston that allows him to continue voting those shares for five years.
Early in his career, Mr. Disney didn't give many people the idea that he was a corporate rabble-rouser. After he graduated from college in 1951, his father, Roy O. Disney, company co-founder and brother of Uncle Walt, arranged a meeting with Hollywood's ruling mogul, the late Lew Wasserman. That resulted in a job as a page for NBC, followed by 20 years of jobs around the Disney lot. He was an apprentice film editor on the "Dragnet" television show, which filmed on the Disney lot, and then on the documentary "The Living Desert." He worked as a cameraman, and sometimes produced and directed nature films for the Sunday night network staple "The Wonderful World of Disney."
Mr. Disney first joined the board in 1967, the year after Walt Disney's death. He gradually assumed bigger titles in the film studio, despite the fact that his bosses rarely listened to him. Mr. Disney says the studio at the time was held back by what he calls the "What Would Walt Think Syndrome" -- an attempt to recreate his uncle's visionary magic that instead resulted in the recycling of old ideas.
"A couple of times I said, `You know what? He's dead,' " Mr. Disney says. But his ideas about freshening up the studio were unheeded, and in 1977, he quit his executive job with a letter that foreshadowed this week's blow-up: "The creative atmosphere for which the company has so long been famous and on which it prides itself has, in my opinion, become stagnant."
Mr. Disney remained on the board while Mr. Miller moved up to eventually become chief executive. Mr. Disney, meanwhile, began an investment company, Shamrock Holdings, and put Mr. Gold, a Los Angeles lawyer, in charge of his money. By 1984, however, Disney was in rapid decline and seemingly void of ideas for how to bounce back. Corporate raiders were circling and threatening to sell Disney off in pieces.
Amid all of that, Mr. Disney made a dramatic decision: He resigned from the board and, along with Mr. Gold, went out to recruit new and stronger management. After a months-long internal struggle, they installed Mr. Eisner, then a hotshot film executive at Paramount Pictures, as the company's chairman and chief executive. Frank Wells, a former Warner Bros. executive who was close to Mr. Gold, was named president.
The maneuvers led to Disney's storied revival in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but they took a personal toll. Mr. Disney says that he and Mr. Miller still don't speak to each other, though he periodically is in touch with Mr. Miller's wife, Diane Disney Miller, who is Roy Disney's cousin and Walt Disney's daughter. The Millers didn't return a call seeking comment.
While the new management set out to fix Disney's theme parks, which appeared to be its most pressing problem, Mr. Disney took over the area of the company nobody wanted -- its broken-down feature-animation unit, which the new team initially didn't see much potential in. Mr. Disney was "the only one who was interested in animation" at the beginning, says Bill Mechanic, a former Disney video executive who later headed Twentieth Century Fox. Even Mr. Eisner, in his 1998 book, "Work in Progress," said: "No one deserves more credit for focusing our attention on animation . . . than Roy Disney."
As Disney's animation renaissance picked up steam, however, it was steered day to day by Mr. Katzenberg, the brash studio chief who had come with Mr. Eisner from Paramount. The two men and Mr. Disney got along for a while, but the hard-charging Mr. Katzenberg had no patience for tracking down Mr. Disney, in Ireland or elsewhere, to consult with him on daily details and screening schedules. Mr. Disney, meanwhile, says he thought Mr. Katzenberg was disrespectful to artists when, for example, he hauled them into the office for a meeting at 7 a.m. on a Sunday. He also says that Mr. Katzenberg was "a usurper of credit" -- not just from him but from the company's animators. People close to Mr. Katzenberg say that Mr. Disney was unable to handle the younger executive's rising profile.
By the time Disney's comeback crested with "The Lion King," Mr. Disney had had enough. He ramped up his complaints about Mr. Katzenberg to Mr. Eisner, which dovetailed with Mr. Eisner's own irritation at Mr. Katzenberg's growing ambition. When Mr. Wells died in a 1994 helicopter crash, Mr. Eisner was able to deny the president's job to Mr. Katzenberg in part by citing Mr. Disney's opposition. In his book, Mr. Eisner says that Mr. Disney threatened to resign if Mr. Katzenberg got the job.
Once again, Mr. Disney prevailed. But Mr. Katzenberg's departure, too, proved costly. An ensuing legal battle over how much it would cost to settle Mr. Katzenberg's contract resulted in a payment of more than $250 million to the former executive, who went on to create DreamWorks SKG, a major competitor in the animation field.
For at least the first dozen years after taking the helm at Disney, Mr. Eisner carefully minded his own relationship with Mr. Disney, calling him "the soul of the brand." Mr. Disney today stresses that he returned the loyalty. In an interview this week, he said his wife, Patty, insisted that he mention the fact that, when Mr. Eisner had his quadruple-bypass surgery in 1994, Mr. Disney hurried to the hospital from Ireland.
(MORE)
But Messrs. Gold and Disney say that things weren't the same at the company after Mr. Wells died, as no one was there to make up for Mr. Eisner's weaknesses. The problem, they say, worsened after Disney's performance began to decline in 1998 and the stock price took a hit -- the result of its diminishing animation franchise, a struggling ABC television network and other problems.
Mr. Disney realized he was increasingly out of the loop. He didn't know until after the fact, for example, that Disneyland had closed its outdated Submarine Voyage ride in 1998. "They said, `Well, we'll just have a nice lake from now on,' " Mr. Disney says. "That's just not the way this company should work."
Some company executives say privately that Mr. Disney, who once complained about the company being too beholden to Walt's vision, often falls into the same trap. He is intensely protective of how the company's classic characters are marketed. He has raised concerns about how characters behave in Disney video games, and he has discouraged spinning off popular characters on the Disney cable-television channel such as "Lizzie McGuire" as brand-name products. According to people familiar with the matter, his objection to plans for a line of white Mickey Mouse plush toys at Christmas a couple of years ago required the intervention of Mr. Eisner. Mr. Disney felt that the original design of Mickey Mouse was sacrosanct.
These issues are at the core of Disney's recent struggle to revive its brand. A few years ago, Disney launched its "Princess Line," which brings together merchandise based on famous Disney female characters. Mr. Disney, people familiar with the matter say, complained that it erodes one character's personal mythology to show up in another character's world when that isn't the way it is in Disney storytelling. But the princess program has become one of Disney's most popular consumer-products efforts, generating retail sales of $1.3 billion annually.
About two years ago, the disputes spread to the boardroom. Mr. Gold says he confronted Mr. Eisner after a compensation-committee meeting about a rich contract for an ABC executive. He says that Mr. Eisner snapped: "I've always told you and Roy that I would leave if you lost confidence in me. Are you losing confidence?" Mr. Gold says he replied: "I'm getting very close." Since then, Mr. Disney's concern has risen when the company's stock price has fallen -- especially last year, when it sank to eight-year lows.
Mr. Eisner has no intention of leaving, however. As criticism intensified, he dug in his heels, firing back at Messrs. Disney and Gold in board meetings and dropping the pretense of deference that had long characterized the relationship.
Recognizing that they face a long, uphill battle, Mr. Disney's team is banking on the idea that a prairie fire can be lit among small investors who agree, as Mr. Gold puts it, that Mr. Eisner's reign has resulted in "a cheapening of the integrity of the Disney company." Encouraged by supportive e-mail from Disney fans, employees and shareholders, they hope to use the Internet as a tool to organize opposition to Mr. Eisner, perhaps through letter-writing campaigns or a show of force at Disney's next annual meeting.
"It clearly has struck a nerve with a lot of people," Mr. Disney says. If he can oust Mr. Eisner, he says, it will enable his family to ride back into the Magic Kingdom. "That would be the ideal, fairy-tale Disney ending," he says.
THIS WAS ON AINT IT COOL NEWS:
"Thursday, March 29, 2001
MORIARTY's RUMBLINGS Re: SHREK; SPY KIDS; McCOOL’S; CHEATERS; Spoilers In Trailers; Valenti & More!!
Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
What day is it?! Where am I?! Who the Hell took my pants?!
When you're immersed in a major project, the way Harry Lime and I are right now, you tend to lose all sense of what's going on outside your particular corner of the world. I do, anyway. I get a sort of tunnel vision, and unless I am forcibly dragged out of the Labs, kicking and screaming, I find it incredibly easy to become a hermit during these periods of creative possession.
Thankfully, I've been lured topside at least four times in the past week. As a result, this week’s RUMBLINGS is chock-full of geeky goodness for you. It's a cornucopia... a plethora of material. Spilling over, as it were. I’m trying to make up for all my time sequestered, so let’s get right to it!
SHREK IS DREAMWORKS' LATEST HERO!!
If you want to blame anyone in town for my fascination with the test screening process, blame Jeffrey Katzenberg. When I first moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1990, I managed a theater in Sherman Oaks where Disney did most of their test screenings. It seemed like once a week I'd see Katzenberg and Eisner show up for the start of the movie, then huddle in the lobby during the film, checking in on key moments, sitting in with the focus group. Eisner skipped a lot of lesser Touchstone and Hollywood efforts, but not Katzenberg. He was hands-on, involved no matter what size the production was. I was impressed by just how much of the responsibility for those films Katzenberg seemed willing to shoulder. That's not even taking into account the many stories I've heard from Disney animators about how Katzenberg took part in the process of making films like BEAUTY & THE BEAST and THE LION KING and THE LITTLE MERMAID and ALADDIN.
It didn't surprise me that Dreamworks set up an animation unit to try and challenge Disney when it started. It only would have surprised me if Katzenberg had ever left animation behind. It's been the thing he's professed the most personal pride in over the years. He was part of the team that actually got an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. It’s something he’s passionate about, something he feels he’s particularly good at. Whenever Dreamworks releases a major theatrical animated feature, I’m going to pay attention. THE PRINCE OF EGYPT. ANTZ. CHICKEN RUN. These are good films. These are films that rival the quality of any animated features being done anywhere right now. Each of them is totally different in style, in execution. Heck, even a failed effort like THE ROAD TO EL DORADO is visually extravagant, produced with real care and craft. Now we can add SHREK to the list of successful animated experiments for this company, another step forward for Katzenberg and the talented team of people who have hung with this film over almost six years of development. It’s a crowd-pleasing comedy with a big heart, a visual marvel, one of those films you’ll find yourself staring at, dumbfounded by some detail of the incredible fantasy world that’s been created for this knowing parody of fairy-tale conventions that belongs right next to William Goldman’s classic THE PRINCESS BRIDE in any collection."
Often Viewed as a Lightweight, Walt's Nephew Challenges Eisner, a Corporate Warrior --- Sparring Over the Princesses
By Bruce Orwall
2,373 words
5 December 2003
The Wall Street Journal
A1
English
(Copyright (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
Hoping to ensure a smooth transition from one generation of his family to the next, Roy E. Disney two years ago asked Walt Disney Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Michael Eisner to place one of Mr. Disney's children, such as son Roy Patrick, on the company's board.
Mr. Disney, the nephew of Walt, figured the company would always want the Disney family involved in its affairs. He was wrong. The request was ignored, says Stanley P. Gold, Mr. Disney's longtime investment adviser and fellow board member. Indeed, people close to Mr. Eisner say he found the idea absurd, coming at a time when critics were demanding that Disney find more-independent directors with strong business credentials.
Since then, Mr. Disney's relationship with Mr. Eisner, 61 years old, has run into a ditch -- the result of countless moments in which the older man felt his suggestions and criticisms were ignored. Mr. Disney, 73, quit the board on Sunday with a blunt resignation letter that called for Mr. Eisner's ouster. Mr. Gold, 61, quit the next day, issuing his own brutal attack on the rest of Disney's directors.
It's an all-too-familiar sequence of events for Mr. Disney. With a breezy manner, a kind face and an early resume of minor studio jobs, Mr. Disney over the years has been routinely disregarded as a lightweight heir and widely derided behind his back as "Walt's idiot nephew."
Long absences from the company's Burbank, Calif., headquarters, to sail in yacht races or visit his castle in Ireland, have only fed that notion. His opinions have sometimes missed the mark. He criticized Disney's attempts to revive its consumer-products division, for example, by marketing its princess characters, such as Cinderella and Snow White, as a group. The "Princess Line" is now one of Disney's hottest marketing conceits.
But over the years, he has used his name and his fortune to strike back at key moments, sometimes resulting in big changes at the company. He has twice quit the company as an executive and twice quit its board of directors, because he felt that the man in charge had let the company's creative heart die. In 1984, he resigned from the Disney board and, with Mr. Gold, recruited Mr. Eisner to replace Chief Executive Ron Miller. Mr. Disney's complaints and criticism helped halt the rise at Disney of studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg in the mid-1990s.
Now Mr. Eisner is the target. For the past couple of years, he and other Disney managers have fielded mounting criticism from Mr. Disney on several fronts. Many in Hollywood have privately applauded Mr. Disney's resignation letter, which succinctly bullets seven areas in which he thinks the company is falling short. The list ranges from Mr. Eisner's management style and succession planning to the state of the company's theme parks, which Mr. Disney says have been starved of the capital needed to maintain quality.
Mr. Disney and the pitbull-like Mr. Gold, his "bad cop" and the head of Mr. Disney's investment vehicle, Shamrock Holdings Inc., plan to campaign against Mr. Eisner with major investors in the coming weeks. But Disney's stock is widely held, with no dominant institutional shareholders that could singlehandedly pin Mr. Eisner to the wall.
Unseating Mr. Eisner will be much more difficult than Mr. Disney's past missions -- though not because Mr. Eisner's track record has been so stellar lately. The company has faced mounting criticism since 1997, amid declining financial and stock performance.
But Mr. Eisner has endured, largely because he is a skilled corporate warrior. He has spent much of the past two years trying to rid Disney of its reputation for poor corporate governance, by adopting new company guidelines devised by top experts in the field. Those same rules enabled him to neutralize Mr. Disney and Mr. Gold when, about 18 months ago, they reversed their longtime support of him and began to question his leadership.
This week, the Disney board planned to use a mandatory-retirement clause in its new corporate-governance guidelines to force the resignation of Mr. Disney and two other board members. Mr. Disney's team disagrees with the company's interpretation of the rule, but he avoided the issue by quitting before he could be ousted.
Mr. Disney also lacks the clout he had in 1984, when he controlled nearly 5% of Disney's shares. Today, his 17.5 million shares represent less than 1% of Disney's two billion shares outstanding. And he recently agreed to sell as much as 7.5 million shares, or 43% of his stake, in an exotic contract with Credit Suisse First Boston that allows him to continue voting those shares for five years.
Early in his career, Mr. Disney didn't give many people the idea that he was a corporate rabble-rouser. After he graduated from college in 1951, his father, Roy O. Disney, company co-founder and brother of Uncle Walt, arranged a meeting with Hollywood's ruling mogul, the late Lew Wasserman. That resulted in a job as a page for NBC, followed by 20 years of jobs around the Disney lot. He was an apprentice film editor on the "Dragnet" television show, which filmed on the Disney lot, and then on the documentary "The Living Desert." He worked as a cameraman, and sometimes produced and directed nature films for the Sunday night network staple "The Wonderful World of Disney."
Mr. Disney first joined the board in 1967, the year after Walt Disney's death. He gradually assumed bigger titles in the film studio, despite the fact that his bosses rarely listened to him. Mr. Disney says the studio at the time was held back by what he calls the "What Would Walt Think Syndrome" -- an attempt to recreate his uncle's visionary magic that instead resulted in the recycling of old ideas.
"A couple of times I said, `You know what? He's dead,' " Mr. Disney says. But his ideas about freshening up the studio were unheeded, and in 1977, he quit his executive job with a letter that foreshadowed this week's blow-up: "The creative atmosphere for which the company has so long been famous and on which it prides itself has, in my opinion, become stagnant."
Mr. Disney remained on the board while Mr. Miller moved up to eventually become chief executive. Mr. Disney, meanwhile, began an investment company, Shamrock Holdings, and put Mr. Gold, a Los Angeles lawyer, in charge of his money. By 1984, however, Disney was in rapid decline and seemingly void of ideas for how to bounce back. Corporate raiders were circling and threatening to sell Disney off in pieces.
Amid all of that, Mr. Disney made a dramatic decision: He resigned from the board and, along with Mr. Gold, went out to recruit new and stronger management. After a months-long internal struggle, they installed Mr. Eisner, then a hotshot film executive at Paramount Pictures, as the company's chairman and chief executive. Frank Wells, a former Warner Bros. executive who was close to Mr. Gold, was named president.
The maneuvers led to Disney's storied revival in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but they took a personal toll. Mr. Disney says that he and Mr. Miller still don't speak to each other, though he periodically is in touch with Mr. Miller's wife, Diane Disney Miller, who is Roy Disney's cousin and Walt Disney's daughter. The Millers didn't return a call seeking comment.
While the new management set out to fix Disney's theme parks, which appeared to be its most pressing problem, Mr. Disney took over the area of the company nobody wanted -- its broken-down feature-animation unit, which the new team initially didn't see much potential in. Mr. Disney was "the only one who was interested in animation" at the beginning, says Bill Mechanic, a former Disney video executive who later headed Twentieth Century Fox. Even Mr. Eisner, in his 1998 book, "Work in Progress," said: "No one deserves more credit for focusing our attention on animation . . . than Roy Disney."
As Disney's animation renaissance picked up steam, however, it was steered day to day by Mr. Katzenberg, the brash studio chief who had come with Mr. Eisner from Paramount. The two men and Mr. Disney got along for a while, but the hard-charging Mr. Katzenberg had no patience for tracking down Mr. Disney, in Ireland or elsewhere, to consult with him on daily details and screening schedules. Mr. Disney, meanwhile, says he thought Mr. Katzenberg was disrespectful to artists when, for example, he hauled them into the office for a meeting at 7 a.m. on a Sunday. He also says that Mr. Katzenberg was "a usurper of credit" -- not just from him but from the company's animators. People close to Mr. Katzenberg say that Mr. Disney was unable to handle the younger executive's rising profile.
By the time Disney's comeback crested with "The Lion King," Mr. Disney had had enough. He ramped up his complaints about Mr. Katzenberg to Mr. Eisner, which dovetailed with Mr. Eisner's own irritation at Mr. Katzenberg's growing ambition. When Mr. Wells died in a 1994 helicopter crash, Mr. Eisner was able to deny the president's job to Mr. Katzenberg in part by citing Mr. Disney's opposition. In his book, Mr. Eisner says that Mr. Disney threatened to resign if Mr. Katzenberg got the job.
Once again, Mr. Disney prevailed. But Mr. Katzenberg's departure, too, proved costly. An ensuing legal battle over how much it would cost to settle Mr. Katzenberg's contract resulted in a payment of more than $250 million to the former executive, who went on to create DreamWorks SKG, a major competitor in the animation field.
For at least the first dozen years after taking the helm at Disney, Mr. Eisner carefully minded his own relationship with Mr. Disney, calling him "the soul of the brand." Mr. Disney today stresses that he returned the loyalty. In an interview this week, he said his wife, Patty, insisted that he mention the fact that, when Mr. Eisner had his quadruple-bypass surgery in 1994, Mr. Disney hurried to the hospital from Ireland.
(MORE)
But Messrs. Gold and Disney say that things weren't the same at the company after Mr. Wells died, as no one was there to make up for Mr. Eisner's weaknesses. The problem, they say, worsened after Disney's performance began to decline in 1998 and the stock price took a hit -- the result of its diminishing animation franchise, a struggling ABC television network and other problems.
Mr. Disney realized he was increasingly out of the loop. He didn't know until after the fact, for example, that Disneyland had closed its outdated Submarine Voyage ride in 1998. "They said, `Well, we'll just have a nice lake from now on,' " Mr. Disney says. "That's just not the way this company should work."
Some company executives say privately that Mr. Disney, who once complained about the company being too beholden to Walt's vision, often falls into the same trap. He is intensely protective of how the company's classic characters are marketed. He has raised concerns about how characters behave in Disney video games, and he has discouraged spinning off popular characters on the Disney cable-television channel such as "Lizzie McGuire" as brand-name products. According to people familiar with the matter, his objection to plans for a line of white Mickey Mouse plush toys at Christmas a couple of years ago required the intervention of Mr. Eisner. Mr. Disney felt that the original design of Mickey Mouse was sacrosanct.
These issues are at the core of Disney's recent struggle to revive its brand. A few years ago, Disney launched its "Princess Line," which brings together merchandise based on famous Disney female characters. Mr. Disney, people familiar with the matter say, complained that it erodes one character's personal mythology to show up in another character's world when that isn't the way it is in Disney storytelling. But the princess program has become one of Disney's most popular consumer-products efforts, generating retail sales of $1.3 billion annually.
About two years ago, the disputes spread to the boardroom. Mr. Gold says he confronted Mr. Eisner after a compensation-committee meeting about a rich contract for an ABC executive. He says that Mr. Eisner snapped: "I've always told you and Roy that I would leave if you lost confidence in me. Are you losing confidence?" Mr. Gold says he replied: "I'm getting very close." Since then, Mr. Disney's concern has risen when the company's stock price has fallen -- especially last year, when it sank to eight-year lows.
Mr. Eisner has no intention of leaving, however. As criticism intensified, he dug in his heels, firing back at Messrs. Disney and Gold in board meetings and dropping the pretense of deference that had long characterized the relationship.
Recognizing that they face a long, uphill battle, Mr. Disney's team is banking on the idea that a prairie fire can be lit among small investors who agree, as Mr. Gold puts it, that Mr. Eisner's reign has resulted in "a cheapening of the integrity of the Disney company." Encouraged by supportive e-mail from Disney fans, employees and shareholders, they hope to use the Internet as a tool to organize opposition to Mr. Eisner, perhaps through letter-writing campaigns or a show of force at Disney's next annual meeting.
"It clearly has struck a nerve with a lot of people," Mr. Disney says. If he can oust Mr. Eisner, he says, it will enable his family to ride back into the Magic Kingdom. "That would be the ideal, fairy-tale Disney ending," he says.
THIS WAS ON AINT IT COOL NEWS:
"Thursday, March 29, 2001
MORIARTY's RUMBLINGS Re: SHREK; SPY KIDS; McCOOL’S; CHEATERS; Spoilers In Trailers; Valenti & More!!
Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
What day is it?! Where am I?! Who the Hell took my pants?!
When you're immersed in a major project, the way Harry Lime and I are right now, you tend to lose all sense of what's going on outside your particular corner of the world. I do, anyway. I get a sort of tunnel vision, and unless I am forcibly dragged out of the Labs, kicking and screaming, I find it incredibly easy to become a hermit during these periods of creative possession.
Thankfully, I've been lured topside at least four times in the past week. As a result, this week’s RUMBLINGS is chock-full of geeky goodness for you. It's a cornucopia... a plethora of material. Spilling over, as it were. I’m trying to make up for all my time sequestered, so let’s get right to it!
SHREK IS DREAMWORKS' LATEST HERO!!
If you want to blame anyone in town for my fascination with the test screening process, blame Jeffrey Katzenberg. When I first moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1990, I managed a theater in Sherman Oaks where Disney did most of their test screenings. It seemed like once a week I'd see Katzenberg and Eisner show up for the start of the movie, then huddle in the lobby during the film, checking in on key moments, sitting in with the focus group. Eisner skipped a lot of lesser Touchstone and Hollywood efforts, but not Katzenberg. He was hands-on, involved no matter what size the production was. I was impressed by just how much of the responsibility for those films Katzenberg seemed willing to shoulder. That's not even taking into account the many stories I've heard from Disney animators about how Katzenberg took part in the process of making films like BEAUTY & THE BEAST and THE LION KING and THE LITTLE MERMAID and ALADDIN.
It didn't surprise me that Dreamworks set up an animation unit to try and challenge Disney when it started. It only would have surprised me if Katzenberg had ever left animation behind. It's been the thing he's professed the most personal pride in over the years. He was part of the team that actually got an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. It’s something he’s passionate about, something he feels he’s particularly good at. Whenever Dreamworks releases a major theatrical animated feature, I’m going to pay attention. THE PRINCE OF EGYPT. ANTZ. CHICKEN RUN. These are good films. These are films that rival the quality of any animated features being done anywhere right now. Each of them is totally different in style, in execution. Heck, even a failed effort like THE ROAD TO EL DORADO is visually extravagant, produced with real care and craft. Now we can add SHREK to the list of successful animated experiments for this company, another step forward for Katzenberg and the talented team of people who have hung with this film over almost six years of development. It’s a crowd-pleasing comedy with a big heart, a visual marvel, one of those films you’ll find yourself staring at, dumbfounded by some detail of the incredible fantasy world that’s been created for this knowing parody of fairy-tale conventions that belongs right next to William Goldman’s classic THE PRINCESS BRIDE in any collection."
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
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DW
No, but there's a lot of people who think he had nothing to do with the rise of Disney those first ten years, and are always putting down DW movies. (a lot on other animation websites) I'm not criticizing anyone's opinion specifically but I just wanted to show concrete reasons why I like him.
And I also wanted to show why I would NEVER support SaveDisney....the man who founded it is a HYPORCITE and a LIAR. I'm willing to put up other articles to back this up as well.
And I also wanted to show why I would NEVER support SaveDisney....the man who founded it is a HYPORCITE and a LIAR. I'm willing to put up other articles to back this up as well.
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
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Oh. Well, for what it's worth, I happen to like both DreamWorks and Katzenberg, always have, ever since their inception. I think they make high quality films and are willing to take chances (Prince of Egypt, for example) and are also creatively innovative (Shrek). Not mention, I welcome more companies that want to make animated films. Animation is experiencing a renaissance of sorts and the more the merrier, I say! 
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How many times have we told you how he treated animators now? Give me a break. Katzenberg is not a flawless great man. He was just in the right place at the right time. End of story.
As for Pixar executives, they know enough to stay out of the creative process. Disney Executives would rather dabble.
As for Pixar executives, they know enough to stay out of the creative process. Disney Executives would rather dabble.
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No, Katzenberg was not a flawless great man, and neither was Walt Disney. Walt Disney could be a real jerk too. But at least people give him credit and don't pretend he never existed.
And if he treated animators so bad, why did so many of them risk their jobs in 1994 when they gave him a going-away-party, EVEN AFTER THEY WERE TOLD THEY WOULD BE FIRED IF THEY DID????
If people are more comfortable supporting a lying, pathetic old man who has purposely distorted history for his own benefit, that's their choice. It's so obvious what he's done and why he's done it, but because he's "Roy", HE"S the "flawless great man." I don't buy it. He really did these things, people. He hurt someone and by denying (as the company does) that Katzenberg had anything to do with the success of Disney, he continues to do so. It's on the Lion King DVD, on the Black Cauldren DVD ("edited by Roy Disney") on the SaveDisney website, everywhere. Roy's behavior is merely symptomatic of the company's behavior towards Jeff, and if Roy gets back to Disney, it's just going to continue as it is now.
No one says anything against this. No one remembers. Roy should be ashamed, but all he gets is support from Disney fans and ex-animators. It makes no sense at all. But there you are.
And if he treated animators so bad, why did so many of them risk their jobs in 1994 when they gave him a going-away-party, EVEN AFTER THEY WERE TOLD THEY WOULD BE FIRED IF THEY DID????
If people are more comfortable supporting a lying, pathetic old man who has purposely distorted history for his own benefit, that's their choice. It's so obvious what he's done and why he's done it, but because he's "Roy", HE"S the "flawless great man." I don't buy it. He really did these things, people. He hurt someone and by denying (as the company does) that Katzenberg had anything to do with the success of Disney, he continues to do so. It's on the Lion King DVD, on the Black Cauldren DVD ("edited by Roy Disney") on the SaveDisney website, everywhere. Roy's behavior is merely symptomatic of the company's behavior towards Jeff, and if Roy gets back to Disney, it's just going to continue as it is now.
No one says anything against this. No one remembers. Roy should be ashamed, but all he gets is support from Disney fans and ex-animators. It makes no sense at all. But there you are.
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
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And you know what else? I almost don't care what happens to Disney anymore. If Roy does get back and gets control, there's no way I'd support them. They can get sold off to Hallmark, Comcast and whoever else for all I care. It's just too sickening for words. Congratulations, Roy.
Whatever else happens, you've got the company back. And all you had to do was steal it from someone else.
Whatever else happens, you've got the company back. And all you had to do was steal it from someone else.
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
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Come on guys! Eisner, Katzenberg, Roy Disney, Jobs - they're executives! None of them are the creative people involved in actually making cartoons - they're basically just the money! So why do they engender so much love and hate? Why is there not this kind of emotion about the animators or directors or the in-betweeners even? 
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You really think Katzenberg is just in it for the money? He is VERY involved in the creative process with DW films and was also involved with the Disney films. Why else would he have started his own animation studio? That was the worst thing for him about leaving Disney and that was the REASON he started DW in the first place. 
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
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I get what you're saying, and I'm not saying the animators are not important. They are. But like you said, what about those who make the decisions.
I think Katzenberg should make his own movie about how Disney treated him like--****. Dream on, Jeffrey Katzenberg, about ever getting onto a Disney DVD.
I think Katzenberg should make his own movie about how Disney treated him like--****. Dream on, Jeffrey Katzenberg, about ever getting onto a Disney DVD.
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
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And if Disney continues to perpetuate these lies, in whatever form, whoever is running it, I really don't think it's worth saving.
Last edited by ShyViolet on February 14th, 2005, 11:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!