Iger Is Moving West, but Is He Moving Up Too?

ABC Inc. President Robert Iger is moving west, along with 300 to 400 of his New York-based staff, to set up shop just steps away from Disney honcho Michael Eisner.

Iger is house-hunting in Los Angeles now, and his move is expected by next spring. But top executives at ABC Entertainment, which leases offices in Century City, could take up temporary digs on the Walt Disney Co.’s lot before then--speeding the migration to Burbank that is pegged to the completion two years from now of a 10-story office tower there.

ABC denies speculation that the move is the first step in relocating the network’s headquarters entirely to the West Coast, becoming the first of the big three to leave New York. ABC executives say Iger and the network will retain dual bases in New York and Burbank.

Yet Iger’s move and a recent string of high-level executive shuffling at ABC have fueled speculation in Hollywood that Eisner has a bigger role in mind for his Manhattan-based TV chief.

The latest rumor, which according to Disney executives is totally unfounded, is that Iger, 47, will become president of Disney and will be succeeded at ABC by Steve Bornstein, the head of the powerful ESPN juggernaut that has been a key driver of the entertainment giant’s earnings. Sources said Bornstein has been lobbying for an expanded role, and the marketing and sales groups of ESPN and ABC Sports were merged under him recently.

“The heat wave is expanding the rumors gases in L.A. this summer,” a Disney spokesman said.

Eisner has continued to insist that he’s in no particular hurry to appoint a second in command to fill the post held briefly by former super agent Michael Ovitz and for years by the late Frank Wells, who died in a helicopter crash in 1994.

Disney sources said Eisner appears to be satisfied with the current structure, under which his three top corporate lieutenants--Sandy Litvak, Thomas Staggs and Peter Murphy--handle those business matters he has no interest in directly overseeing.

Eisner has resisted pressure from Disney shareholders to address the issue of succession. The closest he’s come is privately hinting that if he does name a president it will likely not be a successor but rather a corporate operational officer like a Litvak.

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Sources suggest that another reason Eisner wouldn’t appoint someone like Iger is that he’d risk losing other key executives, particularly Disney Studios Chairman Joe Roth, who oversees the movie, television production, home video and music sectors of the Burbank-based company.

Roth, whose own contract is up in a year, is highly regarded by Eisner, though lately he supposedly has come under intense pressure from his boss for spending heavily and for some disappointing results in the live-action movie division.

Eisner’s former studio head, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was angered by being passed over for the Disney presidency, was succeeded by Roth in 1994.

The word from Disney’s corporate offices is that Iger’s role with the company is not changing at all and that his planned move here is simply a matter of Eisner wanting all the executives reporting to him to be based within easy reach on the Burbank lot.

Even Judson Green, who runs Disney’s theme park business, spends most of his time here rather than in Orlando, Fla., where the company has its biggest park.

Iger, a 24-year veteran of ABC, has been commuting here weekly from New York since Disney acquired the network in 1996. He has been under mounting pressure to turn around ABC’s sluggish ratings and help justify Disney’s $19-billion investment in the company.

Some sources suggest Eisner ordered Iger’s move here to keep a tighter rein on his activities at the network.

Since the acquisition was announced, ABC has fallen from first to third in the prime-time household ratings. Its viewership has fallen 9% so far this season.

Iger has been giving the network special attention for more than a year. His appointment last week of Pat Fili-Krushel to president of the ABC Television Network reestablished a layer of management between him and ABC Entertainment executives.

The appointment, along with the move, fueled speculation that he was removing himself from day-to-day operations to prepare for his own rise up the Disney ladder.

“Moving out here furthers his chances of taking a bigger job at Disney,” one Hollywood source said. “If he thought he was not in contention for a higher post, he would not be moving here.”

Iger will be the only one of the three major network chiefs to be based in Los Angeles, joining the heads of Fox, the Warner Bros. network and United Paramount Network.

Iger, who is married to CNN anchor Willow Bay, will continue to maintain a residence and office in New York.

In a June 22 memo to his employees, Iger said he and Eisner had “given a great deal of thought over the past 2 1/2 years to the best ways our merged company can be successful in the years ahead.”

The 300 to 400 ABC employees who will relocate from New York to a building under construction next to Disney’s animation facility represent less than 10% of the work force there.

It’s been widely speculated since Disney’s purchase of ABC that the network’s headquarters would move to Burbank, with the more than 1,000 advertising sales and news personnel remaining in New York. But the memo specified that about 4,300 employees will stay in Manhattan. Presumably that will include sports and daytime television.

Iger, who’s vacationing in Portofino, Italy, said in his memo that in the next six months managers will work to determine exactly what areas and positions will relocate and that some senior-most executives will have offices on both coasts.