 |
| STAR RATINGS EXPLAINED |
| Unmissable |
|
| Excellent |
|
| Good |
|
| Poor |
|
| Tragic |
|
|
| BOOK DETAILS | Released
21 March 2005 | | Author
James B Stewart | | Publisher
Siomon & Schuster |
|
|
|
Disneywar: The Battle For The Magic Kingdom
|
|
|
|
Review
A bevy of top Disney executives, together with their superpowered corporate leader Michael Eisner, is on a team-building holiday, complete with hikes, bike-rides and in-depth interviews with a professional consultant.
The consultant is pissed off. “You guys are not a good team,” he says. “You’re not even a group.” The executives squabble about whether they’re a group or not, which pretty much proves the point: Disney has become The Simpsons.
DisneyWar is the story of how a fading cartoon studio turned into an increasingly bloated, dysfunctional multimedia giant whose ups and downs are a wilder ride than anything at Disneyland. It’s also the story of Eisner, the mouse mogul now being attacked by the same people who asked him to save Disney from obsolescence in 1984. Before Eisner came, the Disney executives knocked off early each day for card-games and softball. Eisner and his henchman Jeffrey Katzenberg yanked the studio into an age of corporate takeovers and billion-dollar deals, while insisting they upheld creativity.
Eisner wrote, “We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art or to make some significant statement.” Indeed, Eisner wasn’t to blame for the culture of overblown event movies that led to debacles like the Disney-produced Pearl Harbor, which Eisner called “as close to a sure thing as you get in this business”. But under Eisner, Disney became divided and paranoid, leading to furious bust-ups with Katzenberg, Pixar, the Weinstein brothers and even Walt’s nephew, Roy E. Disney.
Stewart’s book is intermittently fascinating, if indigestible at 500 pages. Although Stewart interviewed Eisner several times, there’s little vivid insight or characterisation, which goes for the rest of the crowded cast. The story fragments as Disney diversifies, with too many names and backstabbing tangles. Yet there’s great stuff, like terrifying accounts of Eisner’s company purges, his row with the Weinsteins over Fahrenheit 9/11, and how campy Johnny Depp freaked out executives during the filming of Pirates Of The Caribbean. (Seeing dailies of Depp as Jack Sparrow, Eisner exclaimed, “We’ve hired the sexiest actor in the world and he looks like this?”)
The book is timely because the DisneyWar isn’t over. In recent weeks, Eisner has said he will step down as Disney CEO this September in favour of Robert Iger, the one-time president of ABC, which Disney acquired in one of the largest company mergers in history. You learn plenty about the merger’s fall-out and about Iger himself, whose succession won’t end the controversy. And Stewart raises a big question mark over whether Eisner is really finished at Disney…
Reviewed by Andrew Osmond
Write Your Review
To write your review please login or register.
|
|
|
|
