Word: disney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Eisner's revival of Disney has made him the current king of Hollywood and the darling of Wall Street. More important, though, is that Disney fans have begun to recognize him as a corporate hero of sorts, a long-awaited, trustworthy heir to Walt. Eisner has established himself as a charismatic, young-dad figure by appearing each week as the host of the Disney Sunday Movie, where the husky-voiced executive clowns with Mickey, Minnie and other colleagues. "This job is so perfect for him," says Dawn Steel, president of Columbia Pictures and a former co-worker at Paramount...
...Disney is not just kid stuff. Under its Touchstone label, Disney is making movies that often contain more than a sprinkling of sex and mayhem. "Disney is still Disney, the one ingrained in the American memory," says Robin Williams, who stars in Good Morning, Vietnam. "But it's a different Disney, doing different things. Touchstone is from the same family, but it's a new child in town. This Minnie has nipples...
...Mickey has teeth. When it comes to dealmaking, Disney is aggressive and stingy almost to a fault. Its executives control budgets fiercely, skimp on employee salaries, comb Hollywood for actors who are down on their luck, and drive mean bargains with everyone from talent agents to foreign governments. Disney can be "terrible to negotiate with," says Tom Selleck, who co-starred in Three Men and a Baby. "But I applaud the fact that they're tough. I think they've brought some sanity back to this business...
Like so many companies started by a brilliant, autocratic entrepreneur, Disney almost did not recover from the loss of its original leader. Even though Walt, who formed the company with his brother Roy in 1923, was never talented enough as a drafter to draw most of the characters he invented, or even to duplicate his trademark signature for autograph seekers, he was a one- man show. As corporate legend has it, Disney dictated the entire narrative of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) from memory as his animators scribbled the tale onto storyboards. When Disney died...
...Walt Disney's successors were terrified of tampering with what had been a winning formula. When contemplating new ideas, they constantly wondered aloud, "What would Walt have done?" During the 1970s, Disney's top executives allowed the creative side of the company to wither while they focused their attention on real estate development, which seemed a surer bet. This outraged the largest individual stockholder, the late Roy Disney's son, also named Roy, who owned 3% of the company. "I remember thinking that if that pattern went on much longer, the company would become a museum in honor of Walt...