Word: disneyism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Michael Eisner is happy doing things. He just has to be doing everything. In 1989, during the televised extravaganza that launched the Disney-MGM Studio theme park in Florida, Eisner noticed that a spangle from the costume of one of the 1,200 dancers had fallen on the red carpet. He waited till the cameras had passed, then darted out, picked up the spangle and put it in his tuxedo pocket. At Disney, neatness counts. So, for the chairman and ceo, does a twin obsession for the big picture and the smallest, shiniest detail...
Last week Eisner was a very happy man. A fortnight after springing word of the Walt Disney Co.'s $19 billion acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC, he announced that Michael Ovitz had agreed to leave his post as mega-boss of Creative Artists Agency and join the Mouse conglomerate as president, effective Oct. 1. In June, Ovitz, a.k.a. Hollywood's Most Powerful Man, had passed up a $250 million offer to run MCA. So the news that he would be Eisner's-or anyone's-No. 2 left observers giddy with admiration. "Disney now is not only the world's biggest...
Eisner could use the help. "When Michael took over," says Richard Rainwater, an Eisner confidant who helped bring him to Disney, "it had a $2 billion public market valuation. Today, after the merger, it's a $30 billion to $40 billion business. And he's got a team that can take a company that size and have it grow at surprisingly high rates." And the two Michaels? "They have always liked each other, and they'll have an absolute ball together...
...hire capped the busiest period in Hollywood's game of musical moguls since 1984, when Barry Diller moved from Paramount to 20th Century Fox, Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg from Paramount to Disney, and Frank Wells from Warner Bros. to Disney. Those shifts cued the creation of Fox as a fourth TV network and Disney's growth into a multimedia behemoth . Now, in less than a year, Katzenberg leaves Disney and starts DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen; Ovitz's partner Ron Meyer takes the vacant post at MCA; and Ovitz, the top dealmaker, joins Eisner, the most powerful showman...
...radio in the '40s on the Jack Benny show and, for a time, in partnership with his wife Alice Faye. In 1947 he had a hit song with Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette). Today, he's known to the vcr generation as the voice of Baloo the Bear in Disney's animated Jungle Book...