How’d Disney Ringmasters Let It Happen?

In reaction to a boycott called last week by leaders of 15 million Southern Baptists, Walt Disney Co. issued a terse statement saying: “We’re proud that the Disney brand creates more family entertainment of every kind than anyone else in the world.”

Here’s something the company could have added: “In addition to all that family entertainment, we are shipping 100,000 albums by a group called Insane Clown Posse--two guys named Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope who dress in circus makeup, look like campy tag-team wrestlers and say boorish things using foul language.”

Their contribution to enhancing the Disney “brand” include the following lyrics:

“He gets buck naked

And then he walks through the streets

Winkin’ at freaks

With a two-liter stuck in his butt cheeks.”

And that’s the mild stuff. Joining the library of Disney lyrics created by such award-winning songwriters as Howard Ashman and Tim Rice are enough obscenities about intercourse, women and buttocks to make Snow White blush forever after.

Disney’s blunder over the release Tuesday of the Insane Clown Posse’s profanity-laden “The Great Milenko”--resulting in a virtually unprecedented recall after six hours of the Hollywood Records album’s release--raises this question: How could the stewards of the most valuable name in family entertainment let something like this get past them?

And how is it that a company that spends hundreds of dollars an hour for financial and legal due diligence to make sure its transactions make sense financially doesn’t perform the same due diligence on every one of its products to make sure that they make sense, period?

As critics of Disney and Chief Executive Michael Eisner point out, Disney does release controversial material. But generally, such decisions are made well in advance and after much thought. I

Although Disney eventually pulled the album, more puzzling is how the problem became so advanced in the first place, especially considering that members of Disney’s legal team reportedly reviewed the album lyrics in February and March and requested some changes. Apparently nobody said: “Whoa, Eisner might want to see this.”

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For Disney, it’s not the first such oversight or close call that has threatened to erode the Disney family brand. There was the man once convicted of child molestation who directed the Disney-released movie “Powder.” There was the plan to launch a controversial film about a gay priest on Good Friday, a shameless publicity stunt by its maverick Miramax unit that backfired, forcing a rescheduling of the release date. Then there was Miramax’s graphic teenage film “Kids,” which Disney insisted be released by a company owned by Miramax’s founders.

Disney’s top executives contend they didn’t know about the Insane Clown Posse album until it was out the door. But sources say that the information on the group’s album and the lyrics were made available to top management well ahead of time. Whether anyone looked at it is another matter, they concede.

Giving Disney the entire benefit of the doubt, here’s what you get: The company is so huge that there’s no management system that could close every gap, protect from every embarrassment.

The company also is distracted by problems such as slumping ratings at ABC and has a leaderless, chaotic record division that normally would have brought the album to the attention of executives at Disney’s highest levels.

As big as Disney is, it is relatively thin at the top in terms of executive manpower to oversee a company generating $20 billion a year in revenue. Behind Chairman Eisner is a relatively small layer of senior corporate executives over the division heads. As for Hollywood Records, it has been without a leader since Bob Pfiefer was cut loose recently.

But ignorance of your own operations isn’t much of an excuse in this case. Disney has the entertainment industry’s most valuable asset in its name for family entertainment, and failing to assure a safety net is about like leaving the front door open at night at Tiffany.

“They can’t always say they don’t know,” one former senior Disney executive said. “That’s like saying ‘We’re incompetent.’ They have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders of the company to know what’s going on.”

Disney spokesman John Dreyer disputes the argument that internal controls are inadequate, but concedes they didn’t work as planned this time. He didn’t elaborate on why, but said it wasn’t because of any lax management.

“It got past the controls. There was a mistake or two made. The system did work initially, but it worked at the back end,” he said, adding: “We practice self-restraint all the time.”

Disney Studios Chairman Joe Roth, who oversees music, says that because there’s not the standards and practices system there is for TV, executives have to “police their own divisions” and take responsibility for what is acceptable and not acceptable.

“This is not about censorship. All of these conversations about content are personal editorial choices, and they don’t have to do with pressure groups or civil liberties, but with our own personal interpretations of company standards. . . . There’s no code book.”

Disney does require that materials, such as the Insane Clown Posse album, must be screened and cleared by the company’s legal department, but sources acknowledge that the division’s primary concern is to ensure that Disney isn’t on any shaky legal ground with respect to defamation.

On the movie side, Disney has had its share of problems with content that many might find morally objectionable.

There’s talk within the industry that the studio’s current big summer release “Con Air,” an action-packed movie starring Nicolas Cage about a planeload of hardened criminals being transported to a new super prison, glorifies violence and those responsible for a variety of heinous crimes.

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But Roth, who’s responsible for running the movie studio as well as overseeing music and television, defends the movie’s content as acceptable because of its tongue-in-cheek tone.

“I read the material and didn’t think it was serious. It was done in a broadly cartoonish, humorous fashion,” says Roth.

Eisner supposedly pitched a fit when he first saw a screening of the movie, but Roth said the Disney chairman understood that the film was meant to be “campy,” and neither executive thought it was “out of keeping” with the R rating the film received from the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

Roth does acknowledge that because Disney has a family brand name to protect (the only one in the entire business), “you need to be more cautious here than any other entertainment company in Hollywood.”