Culture Vultures: The Michael Mouse Club

...As Uncle Walt's values now outpunch Uncle Sam's on any number of fronts, we should rejoice at this modest setback on the long march to a whole new, wholly Disney world...

...Moral: beware an agent who gets more magazine profiles than his clients...

...Everyone's dumping on Ovitz now, though they fawned over his appointment at the time...

...44 February 1997 • The American Spectator Ovitz was gone...

...amazingly, they were absolutely identical—like two Michael Keaton clones in a still from Multiplicity...

...Who are these guys...

...As he cleared out his desk, he was surely whistling while he ceased to work?probably the duet of the warthog and meerkat from The Lion King, "Hakuna Matata...

...And, if that's not enough to cause meltdown in Uncle Walt's Frigidaire, then don't forget Powder—the first Disney film to be directed by a convicted pedophile...

...Wildmon...

...It's a truism that power is erotic, but not until this generation of media moguls came along did the biz-exec profile join the literature of onanistic fantasy...

...tiitt...

...Given that 8o percent of all toys sold in America are now made in China, even the dopey U.S...

...There was chairman Michael Eisner, president Michael Ovitz, and aging founder Michael Mouse...

...But the Chinese negotiations stalled, despite Ovitz's best efforts to distance the company from a Disney film, directed by Martin Scorsese, showing a positive portrayal of the Dalai Lama...

...For example, like many of Her Majesty's subjects, I loathe the Disneyfied WinnieThe American Spectator ?February 1997 45 the-Pooh and far prefer the British original...

...n a way, Eisner is the son Walt never I had...

...One of these three, of course, is just an empty suit...

...When Disney swallowed ABC, Ovitz became Eisner's "point man" (profile jargon again) at the network...

...The only difference was that Ovitz was smaller than Eisner—in the same way that The Hunchback of Notre Dame is exactly the same as Beauty and the Beast, only not as big...

...Shepherd drawings rather than the Disney movie...

...77 (It's one course Eisner and Ovitz might have benefited from...

...As the presiding superagent at the Creative Artists Agency, Ovitz's greateststrength was in "packaging" talent—if you wanted, say, Tom Hanks for your new film, he'd make sure the director's seat and the supporting roles were also filled by CM clients...

...now, increasingly, they prefer to salivate over a handful of middle-aged executives—the "Kings of the Deal," America's "New Establishment," as Vanity Fair calls them...

...Well, to start at the beginning, until December the Walt Disney Company was headed by a triumvirate of Mickeys...

...It seems only fair that the Chinese should be able to buy Disney toys...

...An inspired choice," declared People...

...They had the same suit, same shirt, same hair, and the same unnerving permanent goofball smile as Mickey and Donald greeting guests at Disneyland...

...Even more amazingly, although the film had not yet opened, the display was already as faded and dust-covered as everything else in the store —an eerie example of Disney's ability to blend in and take over wherever it goes...

...their big stars were all semi-retired (Pluto, Scrooge McDuck...

...After all, they make most of 'em...

...To accompany its story on the big split, the New York Times helpfully ran a picture of Eisner and Ovitz together at Disney Studios in Burbank and, MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...

...It was he who had Aladdin's mother written out of the picture: "Eighty-six the mother," he ordered...

...When he departed Disney, Ovitz was given a farewell pay-off of $90 million...

...I quote from memory...

...Is there a home in America that doesn't have something by Disney...

...But at a studio like Disney, the skills that made Ovitz a superagent are especially useless...

...the big bucks were in the lunchpack of Notre Dame...

...and, after fifteen years, Herbie the Volkswagen, having exhausted every conceivable sequel except Herbie Has His Passenger-Side Airbag Removed, had been sold for parts...

...In truth, if the press could have got over that "most powerful man in Hollywood" tag they pinned on him, they'd have realized that his studio track record could be summed up by a Disney straight-to-video sequel —Honey, I Shrunk Everybody...

...But, inevitably, even this "authentic" Pooh is licensed by Disney and, whether you buy the British original or the American travesty, you wind up with a Chinese Pooh: both versions are made in the People's Republic...

...For all the endless coverage analyzing Ovitz's differences with Michael Eisner, most of us still find Disney executives as hard to tell apart as Chip 'n' Dale...

...Sadly for Ovitz, it took a year to realize it was him...

...there are enough of us, it seems, to make it worthwhile launching a "Classic Pooh" line of cuddly bears—based on the E.H...

...If you're one of those old-fashioned movie buffs whose main interest is the movie, you're probably wondering: Eisner...

...The mom's a zero...

...The king's two biggest deals—persuading Sony to buy Columbia and Matsushita to buy MCA—proved to be disastrous, and very nearly destroyed two illustrious studios...

...Under his aegis, the network dropped from first place in the ratings to third...

...Indeed, thanks to Ovitz, the deals became far more interesting than the reels...

...media roused itself and ran a few pre-Christmas stories on the Yellow Peril's annexation of the festive season?mostly on the lines of: how come all these cute little American icons have to be stuffed and stitched up by Chinamen...

...To see off the corporate raiders, Roy Disney, the archetypal Hollywood "idiot nephew," fronted a boardroom revolt that removed Walt's son-in-law, brought in Eisner and Katzenberg, and transformed the company...

...Once, for a radio program, I trudged the streets of New York with some suitably audiogenic street kids: they had no home, no parents, no car, no beds, no food, no clothes, but they had a doll of Beauty from Beauty and the Beast...

...Celebration was Walt's idea, but the Disney Institute is Mike's: it's a sort of Disneyland of the mind, where Mickey can show he's got something between those two big ears...

...By contrast, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Disney exec who "greenlighted" (sorry, this media profile jargon is infectious) most of their recent hits, was like an old-time Broadway fixer...

...The company "Appearance Guide" forbids whiskers, celebrity rodents excepted...

...Still, I reckon I wasn't the only one whose reaction to the news that Mike Ovitz had quit Disney was: hang on, which Michael was he...

...Since Katzenberg flounced off to join Steven Spielberg and David Geffen at Dreamworks, Disney has shown intimations of mortality: with Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the company spent most of its creative energies on the action dolls and fast-food tie-ins...

...But look at it the other way round: maybe Uncle Deng Xiao Ping's boys could teach Uncle Walt's heirs a thing or two about how to loosen up on rigid Maoist conformity and stop attracting lawsuits from, say, that senior architect at Euro-Disney, who claimed he was sacked because of his mustache...

...Disney still likes to project a Snow White image, but under her skirts lurk another set of company faces —Bashful, Happy, and Sleepy in the seventies, they're now Pushy, Faggy, Sleazy, and Preachy...

...Plug every hole in your house, and the Mouse will still get through...

...Well, as it happens, yes, there is: China...

...And don't weep for Ovitz, either...

...And, when you think about it, a mouse is an odd image on which to build an empire: he's a skinny, devious creature who operates in the dark, squeezing through the tiniest crevice and defecating over everything...

...Midst marble halls and dreaming spires, guests submit to more than ioo academic disciplines: no room for history or classics, alas, but instead there's Better Home Videos, Lunch And Learn, Topiary Creations, Hydra-Quench Body Glow, and Couples Only?Learn to recapture that spark of passion with lively and fun ways to add spice to your partnership...

...If he learned nothing else during his long reign at CAA pitching overpriced movie stars, it's that there's absolutely no connection between performance and remuneration...

...Sure, it's nice if you've got Angela Lansbury or Mel Gibson for the voices, but that's not really what it's about...

...But neither film, for all the endless promotion on the Disney Channel, their ten TV stations, twenty-one radio stations, and dozens of ABC affiliates, came anywhere near The Lion King...

...For all the press about "the biggest entertainment conglomerate on the planet," the Mouse himself knows how recent Disney's revival is...

...The Reverend Donald Wildmon, the American Family Association, and the Florida Baptists organized a national boycott of all Disney products because of thefilm Priest, in which the eponymous hero is an active homosexual, and because the company has extended health benefits to the live-in lovers of gay workers...

...Ovitz...

...with Disney, the film is the star—the plot, the characters, the emotions, all those things that a packager of talent wouldn't waste ten minutes on...

...The New Yorker headlined its report on Disney's acquisition of ABC simply "Awesome," as if Playboy were unveiling a new Anna Nicole Smith centerfold—which, in a sense, these boys are the equivalent of, at least insofar as they've been artificially inflated out of all proportion...

...I know parents who've attempted boycotts of Disney only to find that it's impossible: Never mind the obvious stuff like videos and albums and dolls, Disney characters are stamped over half the available receiving blankets, changing tables, baby chairs, bibs, onesies...

...Think of what they'd have given him if he'd been really inept, instead of just modestly underperforming...

...As the self-help books would say, Ovitz is from Pluto, Eisner is from Goofy...

...44 They've exhausted every conceivable sequel except Herbie Has His Passenger-Side Airbag Removed...

...But, from his difficulties with the inscrutable Chinese to ABC's ratings to the damp squib of will she?/won't she?/I've come out/I've gone back in "Ellen" to the disappointing advance for the West End production of Beauty and the Beast, on one front after another, Disney is showing signs of imperial overstretch...

...The other week, I wandered into one of those run-down general stores in some junky nowhere town in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, and found, to my amazement, that even they had a display rack for a ioi Dalmatians spin-off—in this case, the coloring books...

...Poor old Eisner needs a deputy he can rely on, but, for all his enthusiasm, Ovitz was a mismatch...

...On June 8,1984, the day before Donald Duck's 5oth birthday, as the middle-aged quack was working the crowds at Rockefeller Center, Saul Steinberg, a much feared man back on Wall Street in the eighties, announced a hostile takeover bid for Disney...

...It would have been reasonable to assume that, after Walt's death, the company could only grow less weird...

...The surviving Michael, Eisner, is a detail man, whose control extends even unto picking out the carpet fabric for Disney hotels...

...Lyricist Tim Rice tells me that it's Swahili for "No worries for the rest of your days...

...For much of his brief tenure, Ovitz was preoccupied with plans to open a Disneyland in Shanghai, and introduce its movies and merchandising to the world's potentially biggest market...

...The company hadn't had a real hit since The Love Bug in 1969...

...After all, Disney isn't so foolish to believe its own publicity...

...Uncle Deng, it seems, has more clout than the Rev...

...So the Mouse acted: Mick the knife slipped on his fancy white gloves, and What happened when Disney slipped Ovitz a Mickey...

...The would-be corporate raider of Walt's lost ark intended to break up the empire, sell the studio, and run the theme-parks himself...

...But, under Eisner, it's begun to realize the old boy's more fanciful dreams—like the "Utopian community" they're building at Celebration, Florida, where every home will be linked to the town's health-system computer so they can monitor you for vital signs...

...Is there a home on the planet...

...On his shaded relentlessly beige-and-taupe office patio, with six perfect white tulips sitting beside an almost defiantly spotless desk," writes the New York Times's Bernard Weinraub, "Jeffrey Katzenberg cleared his schedule and chartered a plane, wearing only thigh-length boots and a peep-hole bra...

...Disney's renaissance is due to its animated features, from The Little Mermaid (1989) to The Lion King (1994...

...Still, the golden handshake—more accurately, the golden bum's rush—must have been music to his ears...