DisneyWar by James B. Stewart

Author:James B. Stewart [Stewart, James B.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-02-17T14:00:00+00:00

Freed from his preoccupation with Ovitz, his own power now fully consolidated, Eisner showed little or no interest in finding another president. Despite the pleas of his wife and the advice of his doctors, he seemed even less interested in sharing power with a “partner.” As he indicated in his letter to Ray Watson, his chosen successor within the company was now Bob Iger, someone he barely knew, who had been with the company just over a year, and whom he had freely criticized, even in the letter to Watson when he suggested that he was naming Iger his heir apparent. Conspicuously absent from Eisner’s succession planning were both Sandy Litvack, who was continuing to function both as chief operating officer and Eisner’s main confidant, and studio head Joe Roth, whose duties had expanded to include both live-action film and the television studios. Litvack had outlasted all of his obvious challengers for the presidency: Katzenberg, Ovitz, Bollenbach. But Eisner resisted naming him president, later testifying that he never considered him a viable candidate. Litvack wasn’t physically imposing and lacked the polish that Wells had had. Eisner couldn’t see him representing Disney to the outside world. Perhaps, as so often happens in corporate suites, serving as Eisner’s hatchet man had earned Litvack Eisner’s contempt as much as his gratitude. Still, Litvack was generously paid; his options alone were valued at nearly $20 million in Disney’s 1997 SEC filing.

To outsiders, Roth seemed the most obvious candidate. He was handsome, urbane, and articulate. Just about everyone liked him, both inside Disney and in Hollywood’s creative community. In the wake of Ovitz’s departure, Eisner and Roth had several conversations about Roth’s future at the company, and the possibility that he might succeed Ovitz as president. In one of these meetings, Roth nominated himself, volunteering that “I could be president. I could function as a kind of junior partner. We could be a creative team.” But Eisner made clear that he didn’t want a real partnership, least of all a creative one.

“I want someone to take all the shit,” he said. “I need someone to make the trains run on time,” a job description that relegated a president to little more than a glorified administrative assistant. Roth readily agreed that he wasn’t the person for that kind of job.

Of course Roth had no way of knowing that Eisner had begun criticizing him almost immediately after he became head of the studio, or that he’d asked Ovitz to line up a replacement. Eisner was suspicious and resentful of Roth’s popularity, which he attributed to his profligate spending. Indeed, Eisner had diagnosed Roth’s eagerness to be liked as a need to overcome the harassment and ostracism he’d experienced as a child after his father was one of the plaintiffs in a landmark 1962 Supreme Court case that banned organized prayer in the public schools.

In the same email to Sid Bass in which Eisner lauded his meeting with Iger, Eisner compared Roth to Katzenberg: “Joe’s ego simply cannot deal with having a boss.

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