Word: disneyized
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...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...
...longtime heir apparent at Disney was Ron Miller, Walt's shy but well- meaning son-in-law, who was made chief executive in 1983. Miller gamely tried to push the company out of Walt's shadow, primarily by starting Touchstone Pictures to enable Disney to produce adult fare without compromising the company's image. In 1984 the Touchstone label produced Disney's first hit in more than a decade, Splash, in which Daryl Hannah played a frisky mermaid. But by then the company's profits and stock price were already plunging. The same day that Disney released the film...
Flustered and unfamiliar with the ways of Wall Street, Miller's regime wound up paying Steinberg $52 million in greenmail to sell back his Disney stock and let them alone. But the company's weakened condition gave Roy Disney the leverage he needed to push for a new slate of leaders. One of his informal advisers had been Frank Wells, a former vice chairman of Warner Bros., who had taken time out from show business to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents (he had to turn back 3,000 ft. below the summit of Mount Everest...