Company Town : ‘Dis’ Is Not What Geffen Expected

Author and journalist Robert Sam Anson promised he would stir things up when he took over as editor of Los Angeles magazine last month. And with his debut issue that hits newsstands this week, he’s already making good on that promise.

Few Hollywood insiders were surprised that his first target was Disney honcho Michael Eisner, who was the subject of another scathing piece Anson wrote three months ago for the hip New York Observer. In the article, Eisner was referred to as “Captain Queeg” (among other things) and someone who “wears a rug” and whose “erratic removed-from-reality decision making” resulted in the acrimonious split with his longtime golden retriever, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and the abrupt resignation of his beloved TV chief, Rich Frank.

In the July issue of Los Angeles, Anson writes a column revisiting the same ground, but this time with a talkative David Geffen as the mouthpiece and self-righteous defender of his best friend, Katzenberg. As the magazine’s publicity machine puts it in its cover sheet faxed to journalists last week, “Geffen disses Eisner.”

Geffen says some pretty incendiary things, such as: “Michael is a liar. And anyone who has dealt with him, genuinely dealt with him, knows he is a liar.”

But no one was more shocked to read his own quotes than Geffen, who claims he thought he was being interviewed for Anson’s long-in-the-works book on Disney--not a magazine article. He says he gave the interview well before Anson took the job at Los Angeles.

Geffen hit the roof last week when he read a squib in the Hollywood Reporter about his interview.

“I was shocked to find out it had been turned into an article for Los Angeles magazine,” he says. “No one had told me or asked my permission. I never gave an interview to Los Angeles magazine. It was a discussion for a book written about the Disney company. I had zero interest in giving an interview like this to Los Angeles magazine. I was never told.”

An angry Geffen says he spoke to Anson last week and that Anson apologized.

“He had no right to use it,” Geffen says. “I was sandbagged.”

Geffen says he doesn’t dispute the quotes, and he says he’s known Anson since Anson wrote a profile on him for Esquire magazine about 20 years ago.

Anson refused to discuss the matter.

“I’m not going to talk about my reporting methods,” he says.

Anson rejects the suggestion that he has it in for Eisner, insisting: “Not at all. I’m very admiring about a lot of what Michael has done, and the book will show that.”

In the piece, Geffen insists he was not the one who initiated the idea for DreamWorks, a company that is likely to be a competitive thorn in Eisner’s side as the fledgling firm attempts to build its TV and animation businesses.

While Geffen’s comments can’t further damage his already dismal personal relationship with Eisner, the article does come at a time when there was beginning to be a sort of unspoken cease-fire between Eisner and the DreamWorks team. The reality is that Geffen and Eisner, who used to be friends, probably won’t have business dealings together in the future, so professionally speaking, the magazine piece will have no impact.

When contacted about the piece and its contents, Eisner declined to comment.

Although a source close to Eisner says Eisner doesn’t give the magazine any credence, he can’t be happy that Capital Cities/ABC, which owns Los Angeles magazine, installed Anson as editor. Disney supplies ABC with some of its biggest hit TV shows, including “Home Improvement” and “Ellen.”

Eisner was said to be furious when Cap Cities/ABC cut a joint-venture deal with DreamWorks--the new studio formed by Geffen, Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg--last fall just weeks after his blowout with Katzenberg. Cap Cities also has a 1% stake in DreamWorks.

And sources at Disney say executives are miffed that ABC has, in effect, pitted Disney and DreamWorks against each other. Both Disney and DreamWorks are working on midseason comedies, “Buddies” and “Champs,” respectively, that will soon be vying for the best slots that become available on ABC.

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Eisner has been known to vent his anger when criticized by companies that do business with him, though sources say he hasn’t done so with ABC.

Two years ago, Eisner openly expressed his displeasure with an ad campaign by Time Warner’s Six Flags unit that mocked Disney’s theme parks. Eisner was said to be especially upset because Disney and Time Warner are involved in ventures together, such as Time Warner’s distribution of Disney magazines.

Some sources believe Anson is peeved at Eisner, whom he’s never met or talked to, because Eisner and his Disney colleagues refused to cooperate with the writer on his forthcoming book, “The Rules of The Magic,” which, according to the author, is the “inside story” on the corporate success at Disney from 1984, when Eisner, the late Frank Wells and Katzenberg took over the studio, until 1994, when Wells died and the longtime regime came apart.

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In the book, Anson says Eisner is treated as “a really, really complicated, highly talented figure . . . by no means is he cartoon evil.”

Anson’s original publisher, Paramount Communications-owned Simon & Schuster, dropped his work-in-progress in the spring of 1993 because it claimed the manuscript was hopelessly behind schedule and because the author failed to get cooperation from several key figures.

Anson, however, was utterly convinced that then-Paramount Communications’ Chairman and Chief Executive Martin Davis, former boss of Eisner and Katzenberg, was behind the publisher’s “suppression” of the book. He filed suit against Simon & Schuster, claiming the publisher breached its contract after learning the book would contain negative references to Davis. The parties made an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed sum that Anson says was “more than enough to make it worth my while.”

A month after Simon & Schuster dumped the book, Anson retained a new publisher, Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, which was to publish the book in early 1994.

Of the book’s current status, Anson says, “I’m well along.” He hesitates to say when he expects to deliver it, but says he expects publication sometime in 1996.

Eisner is working on his own book with journalist Tony Schwartz, who helped financier Donald Trump write the bestseller “The Art of the Deal.” The book is reportedly about Eisner’s years at Disney and offers his management philosophy, not a tell-all or conventional autobiography.

As for his immediate chores at Los Angeles magazine, Anson says that because of the demands of editing, he will not be writing a regular column for the publication, which will pay a fair amount of attention to Hollywood.

Another controversial Hollywood-related story in the new issue is a fake review of Oliver Stone’s controversial upcoming movie “Nixon”--by the deceased President himself. Anson, who did not write the piece but did write a 1984 book on Richard Nixon titled “Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon,” says, “It’s very amusing.”