Word: disneying
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...WALT DISNEY HAD a cunning formula: use the highest illustrative art to make horror movies for kids. Next to Pinocchio (play hooky and you will morph into a donkey), Bambi is the most artful and potent--and the scariest--of Walt's early features. After the youngsters have watched a movie in which a child sees its mother shot and killed, the grownups can stay around to see deleted scenes and ancient storyboards. Later, the kids can play the eight interactive games...
...annual disney shareholders' meeting last week in Minneapolis, Minn., the hefty document that attendees were most eager to get their hands on was not an annual report. It was James B. Stewart's DisneyWar (Simon & Schuster; 572 pages), which chronicles how CEO Michael Eisner--who announced last year that he would step down in 2006--turned their pop-culture institution into a Tragic Kingdom...
Bookstores around Minneapolis' Convention Center reportedly did not have it in stock, which was one scrap of good news for Disney president and COO Robert Iger. A leading candidate to replace Eisner, Iger cannot be helped in his bid by his portrayal in DisneyWar as Eisner's beaten cur--a disrespected, whiny No. 2 with poor judgment, serving a CEO who wanted a nonthreatening deputy to "take all the s___" of running a company. And Eisner says more than once that Iger is unfit to take his job. Iger, he says, "can never succeed...
...this for Iger: at least he is not Eisner, who is to DisneyWar what Cruella De Vil was to 101 Dalmatians. Amazingly, Stewart--Pulitzer-prizewinning author of the insider-trading exposé Den of Thieves--had the cooperation of Eisner and Disney, having approached them in early 2003 to do a book on how Disney was adapting to the changing media world. Eisner granted him interviews; Stewart even wore a Goofy costume at Walt Disney World. But within a few months he had ringside seats as Roy Disney, nephew of founder Walt Disney, launched a shareholder revolt against...
...giant to hobble owes much to Eisner. Hired in 1984, he brought back the company--moribund and churning out flops like Tron--by turning out hit movies like Pretty Woman and Beauty and the Beast. The story gets good when things go bad, beginning in the early 1990s, as Disney falls to intracorporate civil war and Eisner's golden gut turns to lead. (Treasure Planet, anyone...