The Hole in the Mouse House

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From the Daily News:

The Hole in the Mouse House

When beleaguered Michael Eisner steps down as head of the Walt Disney Co. at the end of September, he won't have to worry any more about maintaining the studio's losing streak at the Oscars.

In the 77 years since the Academy Awards have been handed out for Best Picture, and in the 21 years that Eisner has been at the helm, Disney is the only major studio that's never won one. That is, unless you count the three recent wins by Disney-owned Miramax, which I don't.

Since taking over as CEO at what Variety calls the "Mouse House," Eisner has presided over five Best Picture nominees. Before that, the studio had only made the finals once, for 1964's "Mary Poppins." But in the old days that Eisner was hired to end, Disney wasn't in the business of making the kind of dramas that win awards.

It had won plenty of Oscars for the animated features and cartoons it did better than anyone else. But in the early 1980s, Hollywood studios were moving into a new age of corporate expansion and Disney had to shed its family-only credo or risk obsolescence.

I'm amused to read histories of the Eisner era that credit him with coming up with the idea of having a separate division for adult-oriented films. The year before Eisner arrived, I attended a small press conference at Disney's Burbank studio to hear his predecessor, Ron Miller, announce the startup of Touchstone Pictures for that precise purpose.

What I most remember about that announcement is my reaction to it. It seemed spectacularly unlikely that Disney, under any name, would make movies you couldn't take your kids to. They might as well have announced they were going to produce a line of condoms.

Certainly, the first Touchstone picture - Ron Howard's "Splash" - was tame enough for family viewing. It was also a major hit, grossing $62 million on an $8 million investment, and launched the careers of Howard and his stars, Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannah. But it wasn't enough to save Miller's job. The former football star and son-in-law of the late Walt Disney was thrown out by the studio's board of directors and replaced by Eisner.

Eisner's career at Disney has been measured by far more than its movie production, but in the beginning, it was all about the movies. Eisner, with his then creative right-hand, Jeffrey Katzenberg, took Miller's PG gamble and raised him an R.

Touchstone's first blatantly adult film was 1986's "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," about which I wrote in the L.A. Times: "I don't know which made the bigger noise this year, Bette Midler audibilizing an orgasm in 'Down and Out in Beverly Hills,' or old Walt spinning in his grave."

But the studio was in the mature-movie business to stay, and its success at it added luster to Eisner's fair hair on Wall Street. Movies released by Touchstone - and later by a third division, Hollywood Pictures - were mostly broad commercial attractions. Under Katzenberg, though, Disney's movie operation got into the Oscar race with 1989's "Dead Poets Society," 1991's animated "Beauty and the Beast" and 1994's "Quiz Show."

It was between the roaring success of "The Lion King" and the coming success of "Quiz Show" that Eisner began to show signs of losing a life-long battle with his ego. Katzenberg, who had urged Disney's purchase of Miramax in 1993, got too much of the credit for the company's public success, and the man Eisner had once referred to as his little brother he now referred to as a "midget" and let him go.

Katzenberg has gone on to co-found DreamWorks and has seen three of the young company's films win Best Picture Oscars - "American Beauty," "Gladiator" and "A Beautiful Mind." Meanwhile, Disney has had to settle for nominations for "The Insider" and "The Sixth Sense," and for a trio of Best Animated Feature awards for "Spirited Away," "Finding Nemo" and "The Incredibles."

Now, Eisner is leaving with an Oscar record of 0 for 21 years, and I can imagine Katzenberg recalling the old saying, "Don't look down at people on your way up because you may pass them again on your way down."

And the winners weren't ...

5 movies were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar while Michael Eisner headed Disney:

# "Dead Poets Society" (1989)
# "Beauty and the Beast" (1991)
# "Quiz Show" (1994)
# "The Insider" (1999)
# "The Sixth Sense" (1999)

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