Waking Sleeping Beauty Page #3

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is running a museum."

SCHNElDER:
People always talked

about Roy as the idiot nephew.

That was his nickname.

Nothing could be really further

from the truth.

He was smart, unassuming

and powerful.

You could easily underestimate him,

but you did so at your own peril.

In 1984, the corporate raider Saul

Steinberg turned his sights on Disney.

He threatened to buy the company,

break it up and sell the parts for a profit.

The board countered by paying Steinberg

a premium to buy back his shares.

It was greenmail.

For years,

Roy and his cousin-in-law, Ron Miller,

sat across the boardroom table.

And now the two were at odds

with how the board was handling

the takeover threat.

ROY:
And we finally came to the conclusion

that we can't do anything on the inside,

because I'm the lone voice of dissent

on this board.

So I resigned

from the board of directors.

And it got enormous amounts

of attention.

I had a stack the next morning

of phone messages

that probably was three,

four inches deep.

One of the messages in that stack

was Eisner.

And I had known Michael

because he'd come maybe a year

before that on to the board at CalArts.

Michael wasn't an M.B.A.

He was an English major.

He grew up in New York,

where one of his first jobs

was programming kids' television for ABC.

SCHNElDER:
And Michael had an amazing

track record coming from Paramount.

He'd had hits, Oscar nominations,

Terms of Endearment.

He was a winner when he was hired

to come in and run Disney.

He also was a man

who liked to blow things up.

It was Frank Wells that gave Roy

the idea of making Michael the chairman.

Frank and Roy were classmates

at Pomona College in the early '50s.

ROY:
I thought, you know,

Frank's more of a businessman

and Michael is a little nuts.

And the two together kind of in some ways

made me think of Walt and my dad.

So we began saying,

"How would you two like to take this job?"

There's been a management shake-up

in the Magic Kingdom of Disney.

Two Hollywood studio executives

have been chosen

to run Walt Disney Productions,

the first time outsiders

have been brought in at the top.

The Disney board of directors chose

Michael Eisner

of Paramount Pictures as chairman,

and Frank Wells of Warner Bros.

as chief operating officer.

ROY:
The first goal, really,

of new management

is gonna be getting back

in the movie business

in a very serious way,

in the sense of not only

just making movies,

but coming up with new ideas.

Their partnership really

made the company special.

There was this perception that Michael

was a shoot-from-the-hip,

back-of-the-napkin kind of guy,

and Frank was very organized

and ran things in an orderly manner.

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