The Comedown of the Walt Disney Company

Morgan N. Knull

Morgan N. Knull is a candidate in political philosophy at Louisiana State University and can be reached by email at mnknull@eatel.net.

These are tough times for the Walt Disney Company. The stock [was] down forty percent [in 2001], tourism is falling off at Disney theme parks, advertising dollars are drying up at Disney-owned ABC, and the movie division has been forced to postpone the release of Big Trouble, a film starring Tim Allen the plot of which involves a suitcase, a bomb, and a plane.

While larger economic and political events have contributed to some of Disney’s woes, others are entirely the responsibility of the company’s management. After more than a decade of nonstop success, during which the company’s stock doubled and blockbusters rolled out of the studios, Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s winning streak ground to a halt in the late l990s. To restore profitability, Eisner sought to further diversify the company, through such ventures as opening the California Adventure theme park and by gobbling up the Fox Family Channel (formerly the Christian Broadcasting Network) and its 81 million subscribers.

But the Disney portfolio remains heavily concentrated in discretionary economic sectors such as entertainment, travel, and media, leaving it vulnerable to recession. Worse still, even the New York Times has turned against Disney lately, complaining that the company’s model suburban town, Celebration, Florida, lacks an adequate number of minority homeowners.

By July 2001, investors and analysts had begun to notice that the Mouse was ailing. “I’m nervous that we’ll all-including me-lose sight,” Eisner confessed that month to reporters. “I have to tie myself to the vision and I have to say to myself, ‘What is Disney?’”

In its early decades, Disney articulated its corporate mission so clearly that not even a Michael Eisner could mistake it. Walt Disney founded his company in 1923 to produce animation that would delight children and adults alike. A man whose rise from an impoverished youth in Missouri to artistic prominence seemingly embodies the very limitless possibility of America, Disney sought to infuse his characters, and later his sprawling theme parks in California and Florida, with wholesome American virtues.

Central to Disney’s aesthetic was an almost Victorian notion of childhood as a sacred developmental stage, in which the young should be sheltered from the cruelties and disappointments of adult life. “Mickey is a clean mouse,” he insisted. He fretted about naming one of the Seven Dwarfs “Dopey” for fear it might encourage drug use. He forbade the sale of newspapers and alcohol in Disneyland, lest it undermine the enchanted mood that Disney’s “Magic Kingdom” was intended to evoke.

Creators, however, do not always make good businessmen, especially when they’re more committed to their artistic work than their financial bottom line. By the time of Disney’s death in 1966, his company’s future was not certain. The Walt Disney Company was in the process of leveraging assets to fund construction of Disney World in Florida, a project that would not be completed until 1971. Disney’s successors were loyal to his vision of family entertainment, but lacked his creative knack. The grand concept of Epcot, which initially was conceived as a prototypical residential community of the future, remained unbuilt, and Disney was making few new animated films. Park revenues grew stagnant, talent fled to other studios, and investors began whispering about acquiring Disney and breaking the company apart.

Morale was at a low point when, faced with a hostile takeover in 1984, Disney’s board of directors hired Michael S. Eisner to turn things around. Eisner could not be more unlike Walt Disney. He spent a privileged youth living on Park Avenue, attended private schools, and broke into the film industry on the strength of family connections and his considerable chutzpah. Known as brash, imaginative, and a little ruthless, Eisner promised to return Disney to greatness. But, as he now acknowledges, it required transforming the company into a different kind of business than Walt envisioned.

Today, Eisner’s imprint is what defines Disney in practice, even if homely photos of Walt still are slapped on the literature intended for the public.

The Walt Disney Company has annual revenues of over $25 billion, and its corporate tentacles reach into nearly every area of entertainment-and in some cases beyond. It owns film companies (Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone, Miramax, Merchant Ivory Productions), networks and cable stations (ABC, ESPN, A&E, History Channel, Lifetime, Family Channel), a soft core porn pay-per-view channel (Viewer’s Choice/Hot Choice), radio stations, music labels, book imprints, a daily newspaper, retail stores, sport teams, and even housing developments. It produces sitcoms as various as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the now-cancelled Ellen. Despite protests from European intellectuals who have likened Disney parks to concentration camps, the company owns a theme park outside Paris, which joins the Toyko Disneyland as part of Disney’s overseas marketing arm.

Admirers and competitors alike stand in awe of Disney’s irresistible appeal to consumers. For all the cutting edge quality of corporate divisions such as Miramax (which, incongruously, produced both Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love), the company enjoys such an enduring luster of goodness that the public equates the Disney name with a stamp of virtue.

Miramax itself is emblematic of the Eisner era at Disney. Founded by two brothers, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the film company was acquired by Disney in a deal that allowed the Weinsteins to retain artistic control so long as they did not release any films rated NC-17. (The “NC-17” rating was created a few years ago by the Motion Picture Association of America to denote films to which no child under the age of seventeen should be admitted-even when accompanied by a parent or guardian. Since the rating of “R” no longer seems to deter youngsters, and no longer shocks parents, “NC-17” was introduced to indicate that a film has highly adult subject matter.) Or, at least, that was the original agreement. After producing the controversial film KIDS, which many critics assailed for its glorification of drug use and underage sex, Miramax created a shell company to handle the distribution of the film, thus technically evading Disney’s proscription against NC-17 films. (In the end the Weinsteins opted to release the film unrated.)

With a penchant for generating enough controversy to guarantee buzz, the Weinstein brothers followed KIDS with another film that incited conservatives: Dogma, which the Catholic League and some bishops decried as a smear job. Although Dogma proved to be a box office flop, Miramax has scored enough blockbusters in films such as The English Patient and Life Is Beautiful, to retain the respect of peers in the filmmaking and production industry. But profit isn’t the only motive that drives the Weinsteins; they, like their patron Michael Eisner, are concerned with larger social and political goals. “People who think Disney is family entertainment are naive,” explained Patrick McDurrah, the Miramax employee who worked on the distribution of KIDS.

In his autobiography, Work in Progress (Random House, 1998), Eisner describes the moment when Disney released its first R film. It occurred with the film Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Eisner writes that by the mid-1980s, “Disney had become something of a filmmaking backwater,” and he was committed to reversing the decline of Disney’s reputation. Strangely, though, the vehicle he chose to accomplish this was a film rife with four-letter words and a sex scene. But Eisner was pleased with the result. “With its ‘R’ rating and adult subject matter, Down and Out in Beverly Hills represented another leap,” he concludes.

We sent a message that Disney was prepared to support talented filmmakers and to make movies that dealt frankly with contemporary adult life. . . . Disney went from nerdy outcast to leader of the popular crowd, from “out of it” to “cool.”

“Cool,” however, is not the way conservative and family groups describe many of Disney’s products. When Walt Disney Records released an album cut by the Insane Clown Posse, a Detroit rap group, the group’s filthy lyrics caused such embarrassment that Disney eventually yanked the album from music stores. The incident was not atypical. Drug use, sex, violence, and misogyny are recurrent themes in music that carries the Disney imprimatur.

Another Disney record label, Hollywood Records, released a single track called “Belly of the Beast,” which was recorded by a band that consisted entirely of felons incarcerated in a New Jersey prison. “To record the music, a studio was set up at Rahway Prison,” Peter and Rochelle Schweizer reveal in Disney: The Mouse Betrayed (Regnery, 1998).

When someone came up with the idea of shooting a video to promote a single from the album, it was filmed in the exercise yard at the penitentiary and featured prisoners rapping about the crimes for which they were imprisoned.

Can anyone doubt how Walt Disney would react to such a spectacle?

A more recent Disney-backed project illustrates the concept of corporate “synergy” that Eisner has promoted with aplomb. Investigative reporter John Connolly received an advance from Talk/Miramax Books to write an exposé on the private lives of former independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s staff. When Connolly’s manuscript, which also aired the dirty laundry of Washington journalists and insiders, circulated in the summer of 2000, it occasioned such a backlash that Talk/Miramax abandoned the book. Its working title? The Insane Clown Posse. Just like the rap group.

Perhaps the most explosive disclosure about Connolly’s book was his resolve to “out” several homosexuals employed by Starr. Disney is, after all, a company that has earned a gay-friendly reputation by extending benefits to the domestic partners of employees and from hosting an annual “Gay Day” at Disney World every June. (In an article entitled “Ten Things I Learned at Gay Days” Advocate magazine boasted, “Disney may say it doesn’t favor ‘specialty groups,’ but we know it secretly does.”) If this is true, why would a Disney publishing imprint make an issue of closeted homosexuals working for Kenneth Starr? The generous political contributions that Eisner, the Weinstein brothers, and other Disney executives have made to the Democratic party, Bill Clinton’s Defense Fund, and Hillary Clinton’s senate campaign suggest a possible answer.

Ironically, during Disney’s early decades, its screen releases drew the derision of some political activists who, in the words of Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan, detected a “right-wing agenda more or less implicit in Disney films.” Byrne and McQuillan, authors of Deconstructing Disney (Pluto Press, 1999), write that leftist critics have long regarded Disney as “synonymous with a certain conservative, patriarchal, heterosexual ideology which is loosely associated with American cultural imperialism.” This interpretation holds that the characters and plots of Disney films reinforce traditions and ideals that are reactionary in their glossing over of mankind’s checkered past.

But under Eisner’s oversight, Disney has self-consciously moved its animated films away from the wholesome spirit that once distinguished the studio’s films. The shift began, predictably, with a desire to yield more revenue. Writing in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, academic Ronald Ostman describes the Eisner technique:

Disney routinely might try to produce a multilevel film that appeals to children on a basic level and titillates accompanying adults on a different level (for example, sexually.)

When suggestive sexual innuendo alone isn’t enough to pack the house, Disney has engaged in historical revisionism with gusto, such as can be seen with the blockbuster Pocahontas.

The historical Pocahontas-who converted to Christianity, married an Englishman, and is buried in England-was transformed into a cover girl for Native American philosophies and present-day ecological concerns . . .

Peter and Rochelle Schweizer note. The voice of Pocahontas’s father, Chief Powhatan, was even supplied by American Indian activist Russell Means, whose celebrated speech entitled “For America to Live, Europe Must Die” aptly summarizes his political commitments.

In 1992, Eisner had boasted to shareholders that, “Disney is judged by a higher standard and we should be.” Five years later, some powerful groups fed up with Eisner’s sleaze and greed decided to call his bluff. In June 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott Disney’s products, a response that soon was adopted by other conservative religious denominations such as the Assemblies of God. Support came from other quarters, too, as was seen when the Texas State School Board dumped $46 million in Disney stock.

Eisner struck back with a television blitz. Appearing on 60 Minutes, he derided the Baptist boycott as “ridiculous” and “nuts,” and wanted to say worse. “Because I’m on 60 Minutes,” he confessed, “I have to act proper and not get crazy and excited and annoyed.” Before the program’s end, Eisner restated his belief that, “We are totally onto an ethical compass, a moral compass.”

But conservatives aren’t the only critics of Eisner’s management and vision of Disney. The United Methodist Church has assailed Disney for paying low wages to foreign workers. Business Week named Disney’s board of directors as the worst in America, in part because of Eisner’s cronyism-in addition to seven current or retired Disney executives, the directors have included Eisner’s personal architect, his personal attorney, and the principal of his children’s elementary school. Yet Eisner’s apparent sense of fellowship does not always extend to Disney’s employees. In June 2000, Salon magazine reported on “union-busting” at Disney’s animation studio, exposing “a deal that would essentially allow the studio to cut salaries and freeze out the cartoonists’ own local, eliminating the animators’ collective muscle.”

These days, the Magic Kingdom no longer looks so enchanted.

“People need to keep in mind that Disney is a business. It was never intended to be a business that promoted family values,” Peter Schweizer observed, when contacted for this article. “The change in Disney is a mirror of the changing times we have in our society.”

What I would say, however, is that Walt clearly had things that he did not want to do-because he felt that they would affect the integrity of the film or would not help the health of the family . . .

Schweizer added.

Walt was not as concerned with promoting a Judeo-Christian view as he was with not encroaching on the values that many American families had. I think Disney today is much more activist. They recognize, as Walt did, the power of their films, but they also believe that they have some kind of a commitment to change mores and values.

As Schweizer suggests, the creeping of politics into Disney entertainment is beginning to detract from what Walt most esteemed-the magnificence of his art. Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times critic, has expressed disgust that “the antic physical comedy of early Disney shorts has increasingly given way to well-meaning but preachy stories.”

Noting that animated characters are now routinely “spokescharacters for the disenfranchised,” Kakutani added,

Even as Disney animators have cutesified classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, they have also injected a strain of solemnity and pretension into a genre of film once renowned for its irreverence and wit.

Faced with a growing chorus of investors and critics skeptical about Disney’s future, Michael Eisner defended his corporate leadership in July 2001.

“You ask what is the soul of the company and what is our direction?” he told reporters.

I’m trying to be the bridge from what Walt Disney made and created, to whoever will be the next person after me that maintains that same philosophy of “Let’s put on a show.” Let’s be silly. We’re a silly company. Let’s never not be a silly company.

Eisner need not worry: so long as he is in charge, Disney’s reputation for silliness seems assured.