Word: eisner
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...turned out, Katzenberg escaped the jaws of a lion but got devoured by a mouse. Last week the empire that Mickey built announced that Katzenberg, 43, was resigning Sept. 30, when his contract with the company expires. Chairman Michael Eisner, 52, had rebuffed his longtime protege's plea to succeed the late Frank Wells as second-in-command. And rather than stay as czar of all the % rushes -- supervising Disney's huge, 40-film-a-year slate, including the bijou animation unit -- Katzenberg walked. Joe Roth, the former movie boss of 20th Century Fox who was running the Caravan unit...
...Michael never wanted a No. 2 person," says Richard Frank, who runs the TV unit at Disney. In fact, Eisner, who underwent a successful quadruple-bypass operation two months ago, was looking not to share power but to disperse it -- to impose a system not of hierarchy but lowerarchy, with division heads getting more power. "We're a large, multifaceted, multinational company," Eisner says. "We just all felt we had to decentralize, to run it in the divisional route...
Still, the last week was an emotional bath for both men, who have worked together for 19 years, ever since Katzenberg joined Eisner at Paramount Pictures. "Bittersweet is a good way to describe our parting," says Eisner. "I wished that Jeffrey were 10 years younger and didn't have the normal and natural ambition to move on." He felt he was at an executive-clock- ticking moment, and those things happen...
Hollywood went seismic over the news. The town regards Katzenberg as the most demanding boss and the keenest people pleaser in the business. People wondered why Eisner, if he didn't want Katzenberg to run Disney's business side as Wells had, didn't simply redefine the job and take the younger man on as a junior partner -- instead of what he will surely become, a ferocious competitor...
Katzenberg still speaks of Eisner with affection and respect. "For 19 years," he says, "Michael has been my mentor, teacher, No. 1 champion, my boss and my friend. I just wanted him to take me as his partner, to bring me into his inner circle. I did not want his job. I was prepared to be his No. 2 guy. This was a teacher and a student, and now the student asked to be a teacher's assistant. It's been Eisner & Son, and that's how Michael wanted it to remain...