Waking Sleeping Beauty Page #2

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Analysts attribute the jump

to two factors.

Splash, the youth-oriented comedy

about a mermaid in Manhattan,

stunned Hollywood by racking up

over $6 million in its opening three days.

That's the best opening for any movie

in Disney's history.

Another surprise, the resignation of

Roy E. Disney as chairman of the board.

He's Walt's nephew and son of Walt's

brother, the company's co-founder.

The real heartbeat of this company was,

is and will always be the film business.

Because from the film business

comes the ideas

that then generate new things

in the parks.

New promotions, new--

A kind of a sense of continuing newness

about the company in general.

And when that began to fail--

And I actually, somewhere along the line,

began hearing things like,

"Well, I don't think they really wanna stay

in the movie business,

because it's not doing very well

and we don't really even need it anyway."

And that gave me all sorts of problems,

because I, you know--

I remember saying at one point,

"Well, if you really think that way,

then what you're doing

is running a museum."

SCHNElDER:
People always talked

about Roy as the idiot nephew.

That was his nickname.

Nothing could be really further

from the truth.

He was smart, unassuming

and powerful.

You could easily underestimate him,

but you did so at your own peril.

In 1984, the corporate raider Saul

Steinberg turned his sights on Disney.

He threatened to buy the company,

break it up and sell the parts for a profit.

The board countered by paying Steinberg

a premium to buy back his shares.

It was greenmail.

For years,

Roy and his cousin-in-law, Ron Miller,

sat across the boardroom table.

And now the two were at odds

with how the board was handling

the takeover threat.

ROY:
And we finally came to the conclusion

that we can't do anything on the inside,

because I'm the lone voice of dissent

on this board.

So I resigned

from the board of directors.

And it got enormous amounts

of attention.

I had a stack the next morning

of phone messages

that probably was three,

four inches deep.

One of the messages in that stack

was Eisner.

And I had known Michael

because he'd come maybe a year

before that on to the board at CalArts.

Michael wasn't an M.B.A.

He was an English major.

He grew up in New York,

where one of his first jobs

was programming kids' television for ABC.

SCHNElDER:
And Michael had an amazing

track record coming from Paramount.

He'd had hits, Oscar nominations,

Terms of Endearment.

He was a winner when he was hired

to come in and run Disney.

He also was a man

who liked to blow things up.

It was Frank Wells that gave Roy

the idea of making Michael the chairman.

Frank and Roy were classmates

at Pomona College in the early '50s.

ROY:
I thought, you know,

Frank's more of a businessman

and Michael is a little nuts.

And the two together kind of in some ways

made me think of Walt and my dad.

So we began saying,

"How would you two like to take this job?"

There's been a management shake-up

in the Magic Kingdom of Disney.

Two Hollywood studio executives

have been chosen

to run Walt Disney Productions,

the first time outsiders

have been brought in at the top.

The Disney board of directors chose

Michael Eisner

of Paramount Pictures as chairman,

and Frank Wells of Warner Bros.

as chief operating officer.

ROY:
The first goal, really,

of new management

is gonna be getting back

in the movie business

in a very serious way,

in the sense of not only

just making movies,

but coming up with new ideas.

Their partnership really

made the company special.

There was this perception that Michael

was a shoot-from-the-hip,

back-of-the-napkin kind of guy,

and Frank was very organized

and ran things in an orderly manner.

But in many ways, it was the opposite.

Michael was kind of the sane one.

And Frank, he did bold and crazy things,

like swimming oceans,

climbing the great summits of the world

and calling at 3 a.m.

to ask what Goofy's original name was.

Please welcome my mountain-climbing

Disney teammate, Frank Wells.

I figured out from this employee forum

what the difference is

between chief operating officer

and chief executive officer.

Chief operating officer is in charge

of doing dangerous things,

like when I have to fly here

with Tinker Bell on a tiny wire.

Chief executive officer,

he's in charge of funny.

Frank?

Hi, Michael.

ROY:

I came back to the company in 1984

and, rather cavalier way at the time,

said to Michael,

"Why don't you let me

have the Animation Department,

because I may be the only guy right now,

with all these new people coming in,

who at least understands the process

and knows most of the people."

The state of the art at that moment

was kind of waning

and the enthusiasm of the studio itself

towards it had not been real strong.

So I just felt a little protective about it.

MlNKOFF:

And I was in John Musker's office.

And I think it was Steve Hulett

came in

with the memo saying that

Ron Miller had resigned.

And we were shocked

and it was a huge bombshell to go off.

But I thought it was,

you know, terrific news,

that maybe it meant that things were

gonna actually get better at the studio.

And John, I think, felt the same way.

He seemed pretty excited about it.

But Ron was worried,

in a sort of melancholy mood, said,

"It could always get worse."

It was an invasion from Hollywood.

The parking lot was jammed

with BMWs and Porsches.

And I remember interior decorators

tearing down walls

that hadn't been touched since 1939.

New Berber carpeting replaced

decades-old linoleum.

I couldn't figure out

what's wrong with linoleum.

I mean,

Walt Disney walked on that linoleum.

Even the snack machines

were being torn out.

Goodbye, vending machines.

KEANE:
I had no experience

with Hollywood at that time.

My experience was with kindly old men

with cardigan sweaters.

And they would sit around

and pat you on the back.

And here's these guys hollering foul

language in the middle of story meetings.

And a splash of cold water,

suddenly a wake-up to reality.

You're in the real world here.

Hello. I'm Michael Eisner.

And welcome to

The Disney Sunday Movie.

SAWYER:
Michael Eisner is the

irreverent kid from the Disney generation

who has taken over the toy store.

The money alone

is right out of Fantasyland.

His salary and stock options are worth

tens of millions of dollars.

He may look every inch

the company chairman

when he is taping the introduction to

The Disney Sunday Night Movie.

But in fact, he's having more fun

than any other boy on the block.

Look, Mickey.

Some of our friends are coming.

Hey, Minnie.

So one of the first things

that Michael did as CEO

was to bring in Jeffrey Katzenberg,

his colleague from Paramount,

to run the Film Division of Disney.

Jeffrey got his start in

New York politics,

working in the office of

Mayor John Lindsay,

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