Given that Eisner was badgering him to cut costs, Roth seemed annoyed that David Vogel insisted that he honor his promise to let him make some adult films with larger budgets. After the success of Dalmatians and George of the Jungle, Disney’s live-action version of the popular cartoon series, starring Brendan Fraser, Vogel told Roth that “I’ve honored my part of the bargain.” So Roth gave him the moribund Hollywood Pictures label, which he would run along with the Walt Disney label. Just two weeks into his new position, Vogel got a call from Jeremy Zimmer, an agent representing M. Night Shyamalan in September 1997. “Night’s written a spec script,” Zimmer said. “We’ve already sent it to New Line. If you can clear your lunch schedule, you should read it. You won’t be wasting your time.”
Vogel knew this was agent-speak for a hot script. Vogel had been following Shyamalan’s career since reading his first script, Praying with Anger, and then had attended a screening of his film Wide Awake, made by Miramax. They’d had lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, and Shyamalan had complained about Harvey Weinstein’s heavy-handed editing of Wide Awake, lamenting that it wasn’t the film he wanted to make. Shyamalan promised Vogel he’d show him his next project.
Vogel spent the lunch hour reading the script for The Sixth Sense. It opened conventionally enough with the shooting of an esteemed child psychologist, Malcolm Crowe, by a demented former patient. Crowe seeks to atone for his failure with this patient by treating a troubled young boy named Cole Sear. Sear’s disorder is that he “sees” ghosts as if they are real people. Caught up in the suspense of whether Crowe can cure the young Cole, and whether Cole and Crowe are in jeopardy, Vogel was unprepared for the script’s startling final revelation: that Crowe is, in fact, already dead, murdered in the opening scenes. He is one of the ghosts that Cole sees.
Vogel had often said that a film executive could hope to read a spec script that was perfect once or twice in a career. The Sixth Sense was perfect. Vogel called Zimmer at 1:30 P.M., the minute he finished reading. “I want it,” he said.
“New Line has already made an offer,” Zimmer said. It was reportedly $2 million, plus Shyamalan could direct.
Vogel’s mind raced. How could he close this deal? He couldn’t get into a bidding war—$2 million for a spec script was already off the chart. “I’m going to say some things on the phone,” Vogel said, “but at some point you either let me buy this or the deal is off the table.” Then he offered a guarantee that if Shyamalan brought the project in on a $14 million budget, it wouldn’t be killed by the studio, and he agreed when Zimmer asked for a “pay and play” provision, which guaranteed Shyamalan the right to direct.
Zimmer accepted. Vogel’s head was spinning. Joe Roth was out of town, so he couldn’t immediately consult him. He had never green-lit a project on his own before, let alone given a director commitment to the screenwriter, a rare promise. When he outlined the deal terms to the senior vice president of business and legal affairs, Phillip Muhl, he was initially floored. “I’m getting this bargain basement!” Vogel argued. “This script reads like perfection beyond perfection, and it’s the most controllable deal.” Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, already under contract to Disney, were set to produce, and they were great with kids. Vogel said Shyamalan would likely hire a talented but less expensive actor for the lead—Kevin Spacey, maybe—for $1 million. He’d easily bring this in for $10–$14 million total. “If this is not the moment in my career to try this,” he told Muhl, “then it never will be. This is what you wait for.” That night, Vogel took Shyamalan to the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles to celebrate.
When Joe Roth returned, he read the script and said he liked it “okay.” But Vogel could tell he wasn’t enthusiastic. Eisner wasn’t going to like the $2 million price tag. Vogel realized that by unilaterally negotiating the deal, he had gone way out on a limb. Yet he had no way of knowing that as far as Roth was concerned, he’d gone too far.
Since Roth’s presentation at Sun Valley two years earlier, Disney’s live-action film strategy had undergone a fundamental shift. Gone were the modest “singles” and “doubles” of Eisner’s Paramount and early Disney days; gone was the philosophy of the Katzenberg manifesto. In their place was a star-driven, blockbuster mentality that had swept Hollywood since the success of Paramount’s Titanic and Warner Bros.’ Batman and its sequels. The theory was that audiences, especially overseas, wanted action- and special effects–packed vehicles with major stars that could be mass-marketed and quickly recoup their admittedly high costs. Fees for major stars soared to $20 million a picture, plus profit participation. Studios catered to stars with production deals that gave them office space, support staffs, cars, and other perks as well as multi-million-dollar fees in return for “first looks,” or options, on their film projects. Rather than swim against this tide, Disney had embraced it—reluctantly, on Eisner’s part. Internal Disney documents show that by mid-1996, Disney had more than forty such deals costing Disney about $50 million a year in overhead. Among the beneficiaries were producers Jerry Bruckheimer ($5.6 million a year) and Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall ($6.6 million); directors Michael Mann ($2.5 million) and Martin Scorsese ($1.7 million); television personality Oprah Winfrey ($1.8 million); and smaller deals for actors John Cusack, Michelle Pfeiffer, Diane Keaton, Sandra Bullock, Tim Allen, and Robert Redford.
One of the few of these deals to yield significant results was the agreement with Jerry Bruckheimer. With his understated manner and casual good looks, Bruckheimer had long worked in the shadow of the flamboyant Don Simpson, a key producer for Eisner since his Paramount days. Their last collaboration for Disney was the action thriller The Rock, starring Nicolas Cage, which grossed $139 million in the United States in 1996, shortly after Simpson died of a drug overdose. Since then, Bruckheimer had emerged as the embodiment of the expensive, action-packed “event” film producer. He’d come into his own with Con Air, another prison escape thriller starring Cage, and then Armageddon, about a meteor that threatened Earth. Costing $140 million before marketing and advertising, Armageddon was the most expensive film Disney had ever made. But it was family-oriented, modestly budgeted hits like the live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians and George of the Jungle, both of which happened to be David Vogel’s projects, that produced nearly all of the studio’s profits. Eisner proclaimed that 1997 was the most profitable year ever for the live-action studio.
But was it? An internal Disney study reached a different and much more sobering conclusion: Because of soaring overhead costs evidently ignored by Eisner, 1997 was not the most profitable (1988 was), and wouldn’t have been profitable at all if not for the huge success of 101 Dalmatians and George of the Jungle. Particularly grating to Eisner was that Kundun, which opened in December 1997, grossed less than $6 million in the United States, although at least Eisner could assure the Chinese that, as he’d predicted, the film was a box-office failure.
The studio’s dismal performance in 1996 had caused a loss that year of $180 million, and at the time the internal memo was written, the 1998 slate was on course to lose over $100 million. “Over the last seven years, the live action business has destroyed approximately $575 million in value,” the memo starkly concluded. “Expensive films like Armageddon, even with aggressive revenue assumptions, have difficulty achieving a positive return as the impact of high up-front investment more than offset future cash flows.”
Pressed by Eisner, Roth produced a five-year cost-reduction plan that called for staff reductions, a smaller slate of films, and merging Hollywood into Touchstone, reserving the Hollywood name for some releases. Despite the success of Dalmatians, Vogel had fallen out of favor with Roth, who proposed getting rid of him. Roth predicted that merging the studios alone could save $40 million, even as it marked a retreat from the ambitious production schedule launched in the heady days of the Katzenberg era.
Eisner replied in a letter dated April 6, 1998, that expressed some of his frustrations. “I would save Vogel,” he wrote. “
David (even with his drawbacks) can be helpful in relieving some of your burdens.” But he criticized Roth’s spending and failure to move more quickly to cut costs. “Everything is reaching for the sky. And overhead is still a big problem. We really have got to move on this. A $260M live action overhead for the year is really off the map. What is Miramax, $40M? I think you would have to agree the entire industry is out of control, but we are joining right along. We have to get off the train. We are spending $166 million in cash on development this year…the target we gave the board was $80 million…. It is certainly against the strategy of singles and doubles I am comfortable with, or better said, what the ‘old’ business was like. I understand the new market of event films, but aren’t we also now into event overhead and event development? We really have to bring our cost down almost $350 million a year to get back into smart business.”
Animation remained a separate division, run by Peter Schneider reporting to Roy. Although Schneider largely escaped Eisner’s criticisms for overspending, there, too, costs were soaring, and there was no disguising the fact that Disney’s new golden age in animation was waning. Pocahontas, Hunchback, and Hercules, the three immediate successors to Lion King, paled by comparison, both critically and commercially. Internal Disney documents show that by 1997, Lion King had generated nearly $1 billion in profit, including international, home video, and merchandising; Hercules eked out less than $30 million, and lost money if overhead was taken into account.
Cost increases were even more alarming. Lion King had total costs including overhead of $74 million; Hercules cost $179 million. Of that amount, “artist labor” amounted to over $100 million, thanks to the competitive bidding for artists by DreamWorks. Budgets for the forthcoming Mulan, Tarzan, and the computer-generated Dinosaur were all above the $100 million level—the cost of a Jerry Bruckheimer action film.
Animation’s ambitious production schedule was hurriedly scaled back, but it didn’t save that much in overhead costs, since so many animators had been signed to lucrative multiyear contracts to keep them from defecting to DreamWorks. Many idle animators were assigned to Roy’s Fantasia project, which was now called Fantasia 2000, aiming for a release date to celebrate the new millennium. Progress on the film had been painstakingly slow, as Roy and his creative team sifted through the vast archives of classical music. According to Eisner, some years earlier, he met backstage with Leonard Bernstein after a performance of the New York Philharmonic. Smoking a cigarette and draped in a cape, the maestro looked frail to Eisner, but he was enthusiastic, especially when Eisner suggested a segment using music from the Beatles. But Bernstein had died in 1990. In his place, Roy recruited James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera’s principal conductor and music director, as the film’s music adviser.
Although Roy had spurned Eisner’s Beatles idea as inappropriate for a film featuring classical music, Eisner kept close tabs on the film’s progress, and after a trip to his son Eric’s high school graduation, insisted that Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” be one of the compositions featured in a segment. “Everyone can relate to ‘Pomp and Circumstance,’ ” he said at a meeting with Roy and the animators, noting that he’d just heard it at his son’s graduation. Roy said nothing, but everyone could tell from the strained look on his face that he didn’t like the idea. Eisner proceeded to outline a plot for the segment: all the classic Disney heroes and heroines—Cinderella and Prince Charming, Ariel and Eric—march in a wedding procession carrying their future babies, which they would present in a ceremony. There was dead silence in the room. “Okay,” Roy finally said, with notably little enthusiasm.
When Eisner left, the animators were in an uproar. “Pomp and Circumstance” might have been classic graduation music, but the animators (and many critics) deemed it mediocre even by Elgar standards. Roy hated the idea. The mass wedding procession seemed like something out of a Korean religious cult. And showing the hallowed Disney characters as married with babies implied they had engaged in sex. The very thought was unsettling. Still, Roy reluctantly concluded they would have to try to implement Eisner’s idea.
Several animators were assigned the task, and came up with a mythological Greco-Roman setting for the ceremony, with classical architecture and gardens. Various characters paraded by carrying babies or pushing them in perambulators and strollers. When they unveiled the segment to Roy and the other animators, there was stunned silence. “This is an appalling abuse of the characters,” one animator said. “It’s terrible.” The animators flatly refused to continue work on the segment. Roy and Schumacher finally conveyed the news to Eisner, who reluctantly gave up the idea of the babies. “I don’t care what you do with it, but you have to use ‘Pomp and Circumstance,’ ” he finally said. Roy concluded it was the price he’d have to pay to get the film made.
Just as the original Fantasia had been a commercial fiasco, Eisner knew that a sequel featuring short episodes of traditional animation set to classical music would never be another Lion King or Beauty and the Beast. The success of animation had spilled over into so many other Disney businesses. The theme parks and especially the Disney stores needed new hit characters, and they weren’t getting them. The only bright spot was Pixar, which had created Buzz Lightyear and Woody in Toy Story. But Pixar’s success was a double-edged sword, since Disney didn’t own the company.
In the course of renegotiating the Disney relationship with Pixar, Roth presented Eisner with a proposal that would both solve the issue of succession and address the faltering performance of the animation division. It was admittedly bold: Disney should buy Pixar (as it could have done years earlier) and merge its own animation division into it. “Make it all digital,” Roth urged. “That’s the future.” As part of the deal, Eisner should make Steve Jobs, Pixar’s chairman, president of Disney. “Jobs is a darling of Wall Street,” Roth argued, “and you’d get John Lasseter, the greatest creative mind that’s come out of Disney.”
That idea went nowhere.
By late 1997, Peter Schneider and his top deputy, Thomas Schumacher, were increasingly absorbed by the stage production of The Lion King, Disney’s second venture in live Broadway theater, even as they struggled with running the animation division. Beauty and the Beast had opened at the Palace Theater, but now Disney had finished renovating the New Amsterdam. Elton John was also developing a popular musical version of the Verdi opera Aida, but Eisner insisted on Lion King as a musical. He was convinced that anything Lion King would be a success.
Schneider and Schumacher insisted that the $20 million show had to be different, original, and not just another variation on Beauty and the Beast, which cost $14 million to mount. Schumacher brought in Julie Taymor, a director he knew after trying to hire her for a Los Angeles arts festival, and asked her to come up with some ideas. She had never seen the film or heard the sound track. At a meeting in Orlando, she introduced the concept of elaborate puppets and masks, so that humans could play the animal characters. Language and music would dominate, especially African music. “What’s so visual on the screen will be replaced by music,” she suggested. And she wanted to add to the story to include Simba’s “lost years,” when the young lion would leave the wilderness and confront the big city. “Julie, we’re simply not going to do this,” Schumacher said, insisting that the show remain true to the original. But he loved the look, the music, and the images she suggested.
For Schneider and Schumacher, working on the Broadway version of The Lion King was the most fun they’d ever had. They knew it was a success at the first preview in Minneapolis. Before it began, Schumacher announced there were some problems with the sets, and there would be some pauses. But there was a sense that something original was being born. The music started, and the first animals started parading down the aisles toward the stage, and the audience went wild, cheering and applauding.
The Lion King garnered an avalanche of rave reviews when it opened in the refurbished New Amsterdam in November 1997. “A gorgeous, gasp-inducing spec
tacle,” Time reported; Vincent Canby in The New York Times called it “one of the most memorable, moving and original theatrical extravaganzas in years…. ‘The Lion King’is told with a theatricality that frequently takes the breath away, and with a sophistication that has little to do with the usual Disney cuteness.”
The day after the opening, the New Amsterdam box office set a record by selling $2.5 million in advance tickets.
At that spring’s Tony Awards, the big rivals for the top prize of Best Musical were the lavishly produced Ragtime and Lion King. Ragtime was the favorite, in part because of lingering resentment on Broadway toward Disney. Schneider and Schumacher had booked a car so they could make a quick getaway the moment Lion King lost. Eisner didn’t come, partly to avoid questions about Ovitz, partly because he didn’t expect it to win.
Ragtime swept the awards for best book, actress, and score, but then, at the end, Schneider and Schumacher were stunned when Lion King won as Best Musical. They raced to the stage, but the show was running late, and all they could say was a few thank-yous before the broadcast ended. They ran off the stage, and couldn’t stop laughing. Backstage, surrounded by reporters, Schneider said, “We’re thrilled and shocked.”
In some ways, the Broadway production of The Lion King marked the pinnacle of the Eisner years at Disney. It was both a critical and commercial success, both wildly original and entertaining.
It was so exhilarating, so successful, that Schneider wondered what could come next. It was in the nature of the creative process that you couldn’t simply repeat yourself and succeed, at least not for long. Even as The Lion King played to sold-out crowds, Eisner pressed Schneider about the next show, Aida, which was having problems in development. He worried about feature animation. If Schneider had a criticism of the Disney culture, of both Katzenberg and Eisner, it was that they never knew how to celebrate or enjoy success in a true, meaningful way. It was never enough. There was always tomorrow to worry about.
DisneyWar Page 39