Word: disneyisms
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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...
...rang out from Ovitz's new colleagues . Says Robert Iger, president of Cap Cities/abc: "My initial instinct, and the instinct that remains, is that I'm thrilled with it. Michael Ovitz knows our business, so there's a familiarity that will lend support." Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of the Disney subsidiary Miramax Films, calls Eisner and Ovitz "the greatest one-two combination since Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale--only they're both Koufax. Mike Ovitz is the No. 1 talent magnet. Talent loves him. If you say, 'Hey, Mike, I'm having trouble casting this movie,' in about an hour...
...Disney startled everyone for the second time in two weeks, naming Hollywood's ultimate insider, Michael Ovitz, as its new president. Ovitz, who headed the Creative Artists Agency, is now in the unaccustomed position of having a boss: Disney chairman Michael Eisner, who revealed two weeks ago that Disney would buy Capital Cities/abc for $19 billion...