DisneyWar by James B. Stewart - ★★★★

I read Disney war, but it feels like it took me a really long time. It was a good story about the Battle of Michael Eisner, Katzenberg and others for the company Disney, different attacks from inside and out, disagreements over creative the incredible Disney Renaissance period with Little Mermaid Beauty and the Beast Lion King. And what happened afterwards, when Disney fell to sequels and bad films, when the park started to have trouble and they started to do everything on the cheap, like California Adventure. I kind of agree with Katzenberg in this, and think that Eisner comes off as an absolute maniac, especially what he did to his super agent, Mike ovitz, who he got to leave his agency, stop being an agency, become president of Disney, only to then decide that he couldn't stand him, didn't want to work with him and only do nothing but stab him in the back and destroy him. Professionally, Eisner comes off as a real psychopath, constantly claiming that he's sane and fair and reasonable while acting the complete opposite. It's interesting to see in the beginning, his main claim to fame at Paramount was making a few films cheaply that turned out to be big hits, leading to his continuous belief that the way to big hits was this underdog strategy, rather than just paying for a good director, paying for a good script, paying for a good crew, and making a good film, which seems like that would work out a lot more often than this bet on the underdog. Find the $20 million film that's going to make you $180 million strategy that Eisner seems to go with throughout the book. Very puzzling to watch. Eisner, who, from childhood, seemed like the man on the Wonderful World of Disney and the competent company runner of Disney when I went to the parks and so forth as a child, to actually in the back be just really a very strange businessman running his departments at each other and chasing away a mountain load of talent in almost every department that ends up beating Disney up and down the line Over the next few years, the only fortunate thing for Disney is the Pixar deal, the Star Wars deal and the Marvel deal, all of which and then later the fox deal, all of which required bringing in outside creative, outside ideas to try to restart the broken engine of creative that Michael Eisner and others have wrought upon the company. A great read, great business book, incredibly detailed, impossible, almost impossible to believe that the author was there, that he was doing the book at just the right time when all of this madness exploded. I think his original book was supposed to be a more positive take on Eisner, and instead it turned out this way, Disney war. Enjoy it. Thanks for reading. You.

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