11 years ago, Michael Eisner retired after 21 years as the CEO of the Walt Disney Company. Eisner had the second longest-running term as chairman (after Walt Disney) and CEO (after Roy O. Disney). Everything needs a look back to what happened during his ternure at the Mouse House. While many fans and specialists hated Eisner over his misguided decisions to the point of being disastrous over the last years, they praised his first ten years as the president (1984-1994) for being the golden age in all aspects.
We'll go back to time... to 1984. This is when Disney was going through a horrible crisis and got on verge of bankrupcy. All because their then-current management was neglecting the company, I mean, the company became too conservative. The parks didn't get funds for new atractions. The studio was churning out bull f(bleep) s(bleep). Animation wasn't an assembly line like it is currently. Before the mid-80s, Disney only used to produce one animated movie for year (attaching it with an occasional animated short). Too different from today where we can have so many animated movies in production simultaneously. With no new attractions, park visiting has dropped flat. With no good movies, the studios' fortunes were in red. With no animated movies, animators were scared of their future. For example, The Black Cauldron took ten years of production and cost a fortune to be created: more of $25 million.
When Walt Disney passed away in 1966, there was no one to continue guiding the animators and giving them a sense of direction to keep things right. The only way for it was to pass the torch to those who were passionate about it: the Nine Old Men - Walt's circle of nine friends who understood and knew the secrets of great animation. They used them to complete The Jungle Book.
Years passed and those nine animators started training a new generation of artists, including Don Bluth, Glen Keane, John Pomeroy, John Musker, Ron Clements, Andreas Deja, Tim Burton, Henry Selick, John Lasseter, Brad Bird, etc. They were a team of yonug artists who mostly graduated from CalArts and had potential gallore. Disney's big fat bosses refused to follow new directions in creating animated movies in a fit of fear of critical and commercial hatred and the studio's instant death. As a result, from 1970 to 1981, we had nothing but formulaic movies. The lack of artistic freedom was enough for the aspiring animators who rebelled. Don Bluth took many of his colleagues with him and opened his own shop Don Bluth Animation, while John Lasseter moved to Lucasfilm's former CGI animation division and reshaped it into the famous Pixar Animation Studios. Fearing the loss of further artists, Walt's son-in-law and Disney's then-current president Ron Miller hired those new animators to work on an animated movie they would like to call one of their own: The Black Cauldron, Disney's infamous black sheep.
Before The Black Cauldron was released, in 1984, a new management took the company under their wings. With Roy E. Disney's guidance, Miller hired Michael Eisner (then president of Paramount Pictures), Jeffrey Katzenberg (Eisner's colleague from Paramount) and Frank G. Wells (former president of Warner Bros.) to reestructure the company. Roy E. Disney became the studio's vice-chairman while Jeffrey Katzenberg took over Walt Disney Studios, consisting of both Walt Disney Pictures and Touchstone Pictures, as well as the then-future Hollywood Pictures, Miramax Films and Caravan Pictures. Obviously, each one of those last three studios is run by its own sub-president who reports to his big bosses.
Katzenberg's greatest triumph was Walt Disney Feature Animation. He wasn't sweet and nice in his first Disney days. Instead, he was an executive who was greedy for results and was still learning the animation production system. Therefore, he ended up doing what the older animators viewed as bulls(bleep): edit an animated movie by cutting completed scenes.
After finally reordering The Black Cauldron, Eisner and Katzenberg oversaw the story process of The Great Mouse Detective. It was due to the commercial death of the previous films that the executives introduced into the animation pipeline what was common in live-action: scripts. Futhermore, neither were interested into dismantling the animation studio as long as it produced The Great Mouse Detective in a shorter timespan and with half of the previous film's budget. The Great Mouse Detective cost $12 million and was a spectacular success for an otherwise spiritually deceased studio. Despite this, the film was know for its fast-paced scenes and something uncommon: static scenes! Still without knowing animation very well, Katzenberg f(bleep) up by nearly rejecting Henry Mancini's songs because he viewed them as old-fashioned.
In 1988, Disney released Oliver & Company, which was suggested by Jeffrey Katzenberg. But the biggest shot was Who Framed Roger Rabbit. This movie somehow knocked into Katzenberg's sensibilities. Finally, for the first time, he wasn't a mere executive doing his job as he was happy at anything he did. Onwards, most of the projects had sense. Thanks to the combined efforts of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Howard Ashman, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast became classics which went to become part of pop culture. Inspired by the MGM musicals and romance stories, the early-90s' animated movies are the best. Thanks to the increased workload, new executives were hired, including Thomas Schumacher and Peter Schneider. As a result, the next animated movies acquired form and gained much success, renewning interest in Disney animation (Aladdin and The Lion King).
Jeffrey Katzenberg had a set of expensive rules. Usually, a character or song was deleted during production, or some character such as Chip from Beauty and the Beast was expanded to more scenes. Things like these were too expensive for a movie's budget, but were alwayas executed masterfully. Jeffrey Katzenberg went to become the next Walt Disney, an important man to guide everyone in the studio. As for Eisner, he created the synergy - a system that takes advantage of a product in every single sector. To explain it better, a movie such as The Lion King could gross more by having television cartoons, theme park attractions, a Broadway musical, toys, video games, apparel, soundtracks and home entertainment media. Everything centered around just one product!
In 1994, Disney suffered a new decay caused by the death of vice-president Frank G. Wells. This caused an ugly fight for his position. The biggest loser was Jeffrey Katzenberg himself. He judged himself capable of being vice-president of a great media empire. But Eisner, other execs and even Roy viewed Jeffrey as "too creative" to manage a corporation. This led to Katzenberg's firing, resulting in an epic battle covered by the press featuring Eisner and Katzenberg demonizing each other in the news. The war wasn't over until Disney paid Katzenberg the damage of $200 million as he wanted 2% of the profits from the films he helped produce from 1984 to 1994.
Disney was still enjoy great success with The Lion King and other projects with Katzenberg's blessing such as Pocahontas. During the corproate reestructuring, Thomas Schumacher became the feature animation president. Peter Schneider became an executive while Joe Roth filled for Katzenberg's position. Meanwhile, Katzenebrg himself founded DreamWorks Pictures with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, which created a colateral effect that could have unknown proportions. Disney and other studios felt pressured by this, but not so much than Universal Studios.
At DreamWorks, Katzenberg established an animated feature film division to compete with Disney. He intended to prove to Eisner that he had a golden touch and could manage a corporation with the help of it. Sure, DreamWorks is an independent major studio. Market analysts always claim that if not for some successes or the good name of its founders, DreamWorks would be fatally devoured by the majors. All the other studios are sheltered by big entertainment megacorporations: 20th Century Fox belongs to 21st Century Fox, Columbia Pictures belongs to Sony Corporation, Warner Bros. belongs to Time Warner, Disney belongs to... the Walt Disney Company. DreamWorks is also assaulted by corporate executives. Spielberg tried to lure Sid Sheinberg, a Universal executive who helped him to produce Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestral and Jurassic Park, but failed. Without a great name in the business side, the studio was always in debt which, luckily, was always paid by the success of Gladiator and Shrek. Further debts were paid by the closure of the music and video game divisions.
As you see, both Eisner and Katzenberg got scarred by the split. The Prince of Egypt was going to be a landmark. Instead, that title went to Shrek, a critical and commercial darling that became Disney's worst nightmare.
Starting in 2000, Disney wasn't in good shape since movies, parks and television (ABC) started showing inferior results, as Eisner decided to adopt an egocentristic approach (micromanagement). As a result, the best executives left the company, such as parks executive Judson Green and then Katzenberg's replacement and other units' president Joe Roth (who left to found both Revolution Studios and Roth Films). The problem was: how do you manage something where important decisions can't be given by the pointed out executive and must be reported to the president for a final say?
Joe Roth was an excelent executive, bringing good names from Hollywood to work on Disney, since so many artists distanced themselves from Katzenberg, such as Robin Williams. Joe was also loved by animators for greenlighting ambitious projects and those dropped by Katzenberg. He did so to prevent artists from getting themselves engulfed by DreamWorks which was spoiling them with the highest salaries. Among the projects greenlit by Roth are Home on the Range, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet, a project that Katzenberg hated for being too segmented. Meanwhile, the executives managing the studio operations, Thomas Schumacher and Peter Schneider, were know for the economics, such as "the less spent, the best!" Due to the alleged faillure of test-screenings of the epic Kingdom of the Sun, the studio was forced to produce a more economical movie quickly. The Emperor's New Groove, mostly viewed as "filler movie", garnered the best critical reviews from the audience and the press in Disney's history. It cost $80 million, excluding the #30 million allegedly spent into the epic version, whose scenes are stored in the archives.
When Joe Roth had left, the studio situation went from bad to worse. The studio lost its perfect leader which was replaced by Peter Schneider and Thomas Schumacher. Schneider's gimmick was simple and clear: producing low-budgeted movies solidifying the Disney brand. Schneider's greatest triumph was Remember the Titans starring Denzel Washington, Hayden Panettiere, Kate Bosworth and Ryan Gosling. Produced in a modest budget, the film was a critical and commercial success. Animation-wise, the rule was... slice budgets, which heavily affected the likes of Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet, both of which had entirely rewritten scripts by cutting out entire scenes (those which recquired more CGI, which would inflate the budget).
The circle of the studio's superhits was finally over: according to Hollywood analysts, that circle started with The Little Mermaid and ended 10 years later with Tarzan. This means that, artistically, Disney is in the same state from 1985 when they released The Black Cauldron. They're searching for a direction for their animation output as well as an executive with a sense of direction. The studio's 1989-1997 musicals wore out their welcome. Later, they started trying anything: hiring music celebrities to write and sing songs (Phil Collins and Sting), revigorate the musical format (Home on the Range with songs and score by Alan Menken), trying out movies for older audiences (Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet), movies with fantastical elements (Lilo & Stitch and Brother Bear) and reviving fairy tales (Tangled).
The management crisis hit the stride on June 2001 when two of the studio's most ambitious movies weren't as successful as Beauty and the Beast and Dick Tracy. Pearl Harbor and Atlantis: The Lost Empire were raped by critics and pointed out Peter Schneider's Achilles heel - considering that he was the only person who didn't believe Toy Story's potential, to the point of attempting to force its cancelation. Peter Schneider officially resigned to helm Disney's stage musical division, but, behind-the-scenes, it is speculated that his leaving was connected to the studio's previous offerings. Were we happy now? NO!!!! That's because future films greenlit by him would meet their projected release dates and because many animators believed that the studio wouldn't change until there was a brand new change of management. Thomas Schumacher's newest ternure as president of Disney Feature Animation was short-lived as he instead moved to their stage musical division.
Dave Pruiksma, animator of Mrs. Potts and Chip, the Sultan, Flit and Mrs. Pachard, pointed out that the problem was the absence of challenges and artistic freedom. Part of Walt Disney's magic was undone by the dickery of the executives who only cared about the shareholders and 13th salaries. Whenever they let the artists do their own thing, they will have a perfect movie, which means that, as long as there's great pressure over the artists, chances that they'll have a hit in theaters are zero. They needed to go back to when Beauty and the Beast was released at the time the executives believed in animators. They needed an executive who knew, for example, to judge whenever a character was important and whenever a scene was important or not. Pruiksma also stated that his Atlantis character Mrs. Pachard could have been a more fleshed out character if there was a "creative" executive with a sense of direction finding out whatever the audiences would accept it.
With Schumacher gone, two new executives took over the reins. David Stainton assumed Feature Animation. Stainton was disliked by fans for producing cheapquels, but he was only given the management of the feature animation division because of his supporting of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Dick Cook, who started young as a Disneyland employee, assumed the general studio management. Stainton started a revolution in the studio, including kickstarting Disney's own computer-animated features as well as training veteran animators with new tools. Stainton was also criticized for the closure of the Orlando, Paris and Sydney studios, leaving many animators out of work.
But what happened to Eisner amid these events? Michael Eisner became the scapegoat for the company's financial decline. His most common mistake was his forced micromanagement which meant that all the final decisions were courtesy of the CEO and not from the company's each unit's own chairman. As a result, as a new millenium was starting, we witnessed many good talents walking out of Walt Disney Imagineering (creators of the Disney Park attractions) and ABC, whose ratings went south after the Disney merger in 1996 and wouldn't get better until Lost and Desperate Housewives happened. Eisner also got a bad rap for taking too long to acquire the Muppets per Jim Henson's wishes and refusing to produce Lord of the Rings as he wanted to produce only two films. Peter Jackson sold the idea to Time Warner's New Line which accepted the trilogy. By the way, Disney's complex nature may sound complicated for a common cinephile. Why not Sin City? It's a movie from Dimension Films, but that company belongs to Miramax which used to belong to Disney until 2010.
Theme parks wise, they optioned to invest less in new park projects such as Disney's California Adventure (the original Disneyland's neighboring park) and Hong Kong Disneyland, which opened without most of the classic attractions from the park's other versions. To add shit to the injury, the repairing state of the other parks was so abysmal that it kickstarted campaigns petitioning for changes. It used to be commonplace sites posting pictures of the park needing maintenance. Animation wise, the big suits' decisions crushed the artists' ones. By the way, the glut of vice-presidents met negative press and the ass ideas lowered the animators' moral. For example, believing that changing the original title of Kingdom of the Sun to Kingdom IN the Sun would salvage production wasn't better. Treasure Planet cost less than its initally projected inflated budget, despite this, the team had to remove 95% of swords references from the film.
Personally, Eisner caused unexpected changes when he wanted the gender from the title protagonist of Chicken Little to be changed from a girl to boy, which happened when most of the film was already written on storyboards. To add to the problems, Stainton was hands off the Florida unit's My Peoples, alleging that the film's concept wouldn't resonate well in overseas markets. Why didn't they see that before approving a project? Along the dickish decisions, there were layoffs gallore, studios' closures and (sometimes torturing) training veteran artists in CGI. These "adjustments" on Disney, on the guise of connecting to the MTV generation, were the final straw for the fans, animators and Roy E. Disney who left the studio amid this disaster.
Roy E. Disney's campaign was praised for reminding that Disney really needed a change, a change for better. It was also criticized for its preachiness, with many people thinking that Roy only cared about his agenda. His violence and preachiness even led Diane Disney Miller (Walt's daughter) to step in to say that she approved for Eisner's retiring and slammed her cousin's campaign which she viewed as mean-spirited and sadistic. The campaign intentioned to showcase the corporation's ass dickery and use the internet (with the help of fans) to promote a vetoing against the then-current aegis on a shareholders' meeting in 2004. The negative shit of the anti-Eisner votes led Disney to strip him from his position and force him to find his successor. Meanwhile, entered Comcast offering billions to take Disney under its wing, without success. Roy's campaign was boosted by the sored animators and other supporters which petitioned in favor of him. Such sympathy came from the parks' cast members as well.
While an outside candidate was expected, many people supported an executive among Disney itself (which knew the machine very well) to replace Eisner. The champion was then vice-president Bob Iger who joined Disney through their acquisition of ABC in 1996. At time, he was ABC's chairman and, while being Disney's vice-president, was later hired to prove that he could renew ABC into a powerhouse. He achieved it with lots of sacrifices and got praise internally and externally.
Having selected his successor, Michael Eisner decided to left the company one year before it was intended. He retired on September 2005 after the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland. During the 50th anniversary celebrations of Disneyland, Eisner was the second-rate and Iger was announced as the elected CEO and applauded by the masses. He spend 20 years in the magic kingdom having a beef with the likes of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. His arguments with Steve Jobs to renew the Disney-Pixar deal reached a new low. Thanks to Iger, both companies reconciliated with Disney's acquisition of Pixar in 2006. Good news were that the American theme parks were given more good press than before. Disneyland had to be refurbished to celebrate its 50 years. The Orlando version got new rides such as Expedition Everest.
In fact, Michael Eisner is not a monster like many people view him. He actually saved Disney from death in 1984 and converted a mere studio and theme park company into a badass media conglomerate. His only flaw was over-centralizing the decisions from the late 1990s to early 2000s. This caused frictions and ass dickery, reduced Disney to a mere brand (just like he did with ESPN which came alongside ABC) and turned special films into cookie-cutter ass shit (the sequels were rock bottom). He forgot the basics, the respect to the magic of its characters and whatever they represented to the audiences. Thankfully today, Disney could never be more better.
Translated from www.animation-animagic.com/colunas.aspx?idConteudo=132
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