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COVER STORY<br />
The RE-<br />
ANIMATOR<br />
In Conversation With<br />
Walt Disney's Nephew,<br />
Roy E., The Walt Disney<br />
Co.'s Self-styled<br />
"Owl in the Tree"<br />
By Ray Greene<br />
It<br />
was, to coin a phrase, a moment of<br />
truth. The Walt Disney Company —abastion<br />
of corporate stability in an industry<br />
where senior executives often measure<br />
tlieir careers in months ratlier than decades—found<br />
itself suddenly at a critical<br />
and destabilizing turning point. A major<br />
management shake-up, with historical implications<br />
for a studio that had come to<br />
symbolize the benefits ofexecutive continuity,<br />
seemed unavoidable. And since that<br />
process was, to an almost unprecedented<br />
degree, playing itself out in public, tliere<br />
were times when it seemed like all hell was<br />
on the verge of breaking loose.<br />
Stock fluctuations had major corporate<br />
shareholders up in arms. The press was<br />
filled to overflowing with speculation about<br />
what might come next. "Nobody paid attention<br />
to anything for eight months because<br />
of all the stufl^that was going on," says Roy<br />
E. Disney, vice chairman of the Disney<br />
board and the sole member of the Disney<br />
Co.'s upper echelon who bears the surname<br />
of its illustrious founders.<br />
Yes, to put it mildly, 1984 was a tumultuous<br />
time.<br />
That wasn't a typo. We said '84, not '94.<br />
For that was the year during which Disney<br />
Co.<br />
passed througli a period of corporate<br />
uncertainty that makes a more recent,<br />
much-publicized (and some would say ongoing)<br />
contretemps which ftoy Disney calls<br />
"the whole overly public thing with Jeffrey<br />
Katzenberg" Accm like a schoolyard snowball<br />
fight. You think the unfimely deatli of<br />
Disney Co.'s mountaineering president and<br />
COO Frank Wells and the departure of studio<br />
produt;fion chief Kiitzcnbcrg wasdisruptive?<br />
Well, 1 years ago, tliere was a very real<br />
possibility that one of that era's companyravaging<br />
corporate raiders— one Saul<br />
Steinberg— might seize control of the Disney<br />
empire in a hostile takeover, and then<br />
spin off and strip-mine its assets, leaving<br />
fiduciary rubble m his wake.<br />
T) get an idea of what "spin off and stripmine"<br />
means, the current state of once<br />
mighty MGM is an interesting case in point.<br />
Tfed Tlimer owns its library of movie titles<br />
("The Wizard of Oz," "Singin' in the Rain,"<br />
etc.). Sony Pictures Entertainment and its<br />
subsidiaries, Columbia and TriStar, are now<br />
ensconced on what was MGM's backlot.<br />
Former owner Kirk Kerkorian retains tlie<br />
right to use the studio's name and logo in<br />
connection with casinos like his moviethemed<br />
MGM Grand in Las Vegas. And<br />
Disney Co. itself has the right to use MGM's<br />
logo and likenesses of its characters to entertain<br />
vacationers at<br />
its theme park operations<br />
all over the<br />
world. If MGM's Leo<br />
the<br />
Lion could burst<br />
into song like one of<br />
the musical characters<br />
that made MGM<br />
famous, he'd probably<br />
croon a plaintive<br />
version of "I've Got<br />
Plenty of Nothin'"<br />
that wouldn't leave a<br />
dry eye in the house.<br />
In 1984, such a fate<br />
might have awaited<br />
Disney Co., which had belatedly ti"i
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