HEARTS OF THE CITY: Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news. : Good Day at Pride Rock

So they strode to the mountaintop, and the Dreamer said to the Deal Maker, “Is this the right time in your life?” The Deal Maker gazed over the highlands, flinty and fine in the afternoon light. He nodded slowly, yes. And so it was done.

Hey, I didn’t make up this stuff. Maybe I embellished a little but the words and the locale are precise. That’s how Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz described the consummating moment of their upcoming corporate marriage at Disney--the marriage that will accelerate Disney’s drive to own and control exactly one half of the civilized world, the other half having been reserved by Microsoft.

As an aside, do you think that Carnegie and Rockefeller, back when they were top guns on the industrial pile, talked to each other in the same, Promethean language?

For example, if Carnegie called Rockefeller to propose that the two of them suck the guts out of a small railroad that was giving them trouble, do you think Carnegie said, “John, is this the right time in your life to suck the guts out of the Central Lackawanna?”

Probably not. Of course, those old boys did not make their money by dabbling in our dream lives.

Mssrs. Eisner and Ovitz plan to do exactly that, and ultimately they will hold more power over us--power of the spiritual sort, which is the greatest power of all--than any group of the old industrial barons.

Do we like that? Sure we do. Just read the local paper, listen to the TV. Everyone likes it.

In Washington, a new appointee usually gets gnawed over, picked at almost instantly. Not in Hollywood, and especially not with Ovitz and Eisner.

Perhaps it’s the vicarious thing: We all picture ourselves being taken to the mountaintop and asked, “Is this the right time in your life?”

And perhaps we also look at Eisner/Ovitz and say to ourselves, “Better these guys get control of my dream life than Snoop Doggy Dogg.”

Why, then, does the hoopla have this nagging undercurrent, this sense that there’s a dangerous downside to the idea of one company owning--or about to own--Disneyland and Disney World, ESPN, the Kansas City Star and six other newspapers, Lion King, the California Angels, ABC Nightly News, 10 television stations, Pocahontas, Home Improvement, Barbara Walters, the Disney Channel, and the Mighty Ducks?

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In part, I suspect the nagging undercurrent comes from our own, ongoing relationship with Disney. These days we all have one, and it contains a fair share of ambivalence.

Take, for example, Disneyland. The first theme park, one of the century’s great strokes of capitalism by Walt himself, Disneyland has grown into something odd, an entity that seems to enjoy forcing 4-year-olds to wait an hour to ride Dumbo for 3 minutes.

Indeed, a day at Disneyland amounts to a day of waiting interspersed with tiny bits of reward.

You wait an hour for a ride, an hour for food, 45 minutes for the parade. I know the times are correct because Disney puts up signs announcing the length of the wait. It is a small universe designed around waiting.

Why does Disneyland make people wait? Most likely because it can. If a duplicate of Disneyland sprang up across the street that did not make people wait, they would go there. But no duplicate exists.

Then comes a more subtle matter, which might be called the McDonaldization of emotions.

In the end, the entertainment business sells emotion. It makes you laugh, cry, and that keeps you coming back. The director John Ford did it one way, Oliver Stone does it another.

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As movie critic Richard Schickel once said, Disney’s emotions seem to have been manufactured at a hidden platitude factory in Burbank, and they never vary whether the product is Snow White or Lion King. Loyalty is rewarded, ambition made suspect, a slow blink always signifies love, and, in the end, sweetness is all.

So Disney threatens to become our General Motors here in L.A., or, at least, what General Motors used to be. And the nagging undercurrent stems from its threat to drag our dream lives into a Disney universe where everyone must wait small eternities to be fed the hoariest platitudes.

Will Disney pull this off? No doubt Eisner/Ovitz would love it because it would translate into untold dollars. But I doubt they will.

Hoopla aside, mountaintop annointments aside, the entertainment business has not yet proven vulnerable to large-scale domination. And many have tried. Remember Coca-Cola? TransAmerica? Time-Warner? Sony? Matsushita?

Only five years ago we were asked to believe that Hollywood would soon be a creature of Japan, a vassal of the great hardware manufacturers and their “synergies.”

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Then the Japanese receded, and we were asked to believe that Time-Warner would use its “synergies” to roll over the competition.

Now Time-Warner mostly walks around in circles, firing its executives, and we are asked to believe the true “synergies” lie with Disney, ABC, Eisner and Ovitz.

Who knows. Maybe they will fool us this time. Maybe they will pull it off. But I am betting the other way. In five years, we should know one way or the other. Hey, we’ve got the time. Let’s wait.