Watching the 7 Dwarfs’ Kin, Greedy and Nasty
I’ve spent few hours more edifying than the morning I sat in a 43rd-floor Century City law office made over into a courtroom, seeing how the other half fights.
“The other half” is a cliche of miscalculation; it really means the fraction of a percent of Americans who count their holdings in eight or nine figures.
And “fights” wasn’t the faceless, run-of-the-mill gladiator grapplings of meta-mergers, like the Corpora-phage of the Week, AT&T; swallowing MediaOne. It was personal, Goliath vs. Goliath, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the K in DreamWorks SKG, vs. Michael Eisner, the uber-CEO who put the dollar signs back in Disney.
Katzenberg is suing Disney for up to $250 million--10 lifetimes of lottery winnings to me and thee, but “golden crumbs” at Disney, as Tom Wolfe would say, and just under half of the $589 million in compensation that Eisner took home last year as the world’s best-paid CEO.
The $250 million is Katzenberg’s estimate of his promised 2% bonus on profits generated from here to eternity by every movie and TV show and related merchandise created in the years he spent at Disney, before leaving two years shy of the end of his contract.
Men and women who occupy these fiscal heights usually parade before us in black tie, cutting ribbons, bestowing awards on one another, posing with Mickey the Mouse or Bill the Louse. To see them in court is to see them afresh and wonder: Is life at the top just a mosh pit of egos with price tags attached?
Disney tried to close the proceeding to the public. Countering Katzenberg’s case would mean displaying its playbook, and that would be like making Coca-Cola crack the safe on its secret formula. Coke’s is called “Merchandise 7X”; let’s call Disney’s “Merchandise $X.” “Profit” is so elastic a term in Hollywood’s thesaurus that movies only seem to make money when studio accountants wish them to.
Worse, said Disney--owner of ABC, which creates such lofty fare as “World’s Deadliest Storms”--the media (that’s me) have “little interest in the issues other than titillating the public with gossip and tales of corporate infighting.”
Amen! There’s a measure of pleasure in witnessing the high and mighty get down and dirty; even the ancient Greeks delighted in their gods quarreling like mortals.
But little interest? Surely this is riveting to backers of DreamWorks SKG. And the labors of all those lawyers multiplied by hours per day times so many dollars per hour must be of interest to Disney shareholders, as must Eisner’s revelation that he wasn’t sure who paid the co-author of his autobiography, himself or Disney.
If the trial of every two-bit drug dealer is open to all comers, then fling wide the doors here. Of course the public should know. The public should fill up those empty seats upholstered in fabric so exquisite it could be made into Armani neckties. We’ve paid for our peek into a place more alien to most of us than Kosovo, a world where even the incompetent seem always to fall upward. These fellows govern popular tastes, direct our disposable income. A hundred million changing hands here could cost a family an extra buck for a Disneyland meal, two bits more for an action figure to mollify the kid. You bet we’re looking.
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The week’s seminal testimony was Eisner’s. An attorney read his autobiographer’s notes quoting him as saying of the 5-foot-4-inch Katzenberg, “I think I hate that little midget,” and speaking dismissively of his ci-devant friend as “my retriever,” the “end of my pompom. I’m the cheerleader.”
If he even said that, Eisner said, he was kidding or angry, and anyway, he warned the lawyer, “You’re getting into an area that I will say is ill-advised.”
So much pique, so much ego, so much obsessing about who’s where in the food chain. Hard to think of them as moguls making family entertainment; they’re more like the eighth and ninth dwarfs, Greedy and Nasty.
The midget remark, predictably, grabbed the headlines--embarrassing, yes, but for my money nothing as embarrassing as Thursday’s news out of Sacramento:
After vowing to defy California amusement parks in the wake of a fatal Christmas Eve accident at Disneyland, an assemblyman who said he would settle for nothing less than state inspection of theme parks has quietly muffled his own thunder. His bill, altered after secret talks with Disney (sound familiar?), would let parks make their own inspections. It would let them keep only records of injuries requiring overnight hospital stays, and if state employees want to examine those records, theme park employees must watch them do it.
What do you know: It is a small world, after all.
Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com
