Word: royed
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...ideas, they constantly wondered aloud, "What would Walt have done?" During the 1970s, Disney's top executives allowed the creative side of the company to wither while they focused their attention on real estate development, which seemed a surer bet. This outraged the largest individual stockholder, the late Roy Disney's son, also named Roy, who owned 3% of the company. "I remember thinking that if that pattern went on much longer, the company would become a museum in honor of Walt," says Roy, now 58. "Movies were the fountainhead of ideas, the impetus for all the rest. Without Fantasia...
...company's image. In 1984 the Touchstone label produced Disney's first hit in more than a decade, Splash, in which Daryl Hannah played a frisky mermaid. But by then the company's profits and stock price were already plunging. The same day that Disney released the film, Roy Disney made a splash of his own by resigning from the board to launch an effort to oust the top management. He sensed an outside takeover looming, which he aimed to fend off. Meanwhile, Manhattan Raider Saul Steinberg, hearing a tip about Disney's turmoil, began to buy a huge chunk...
Flustered and unfamiliar with the ways of Wall Street, Miller's regime wound up paying Steinberg $52 million in greenmail to sell back his Disney stock and let them alone. But the company's weakened condition gave Roy Disney the leverage he needed to push for a new slate of leaders. One of his informal advisers had been Frank Wells, a former vice chairman of Warner Bros., who had taken time out from show business to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents (he had to turn back 3,000 ft. below the summit of Mount Everest...
...when Roy Disney proposed a new management with Eisner as chairman and Wells as president, some company directors objected. According to Journalist John Taylor in his 1987 book, Storming the Magic Kingdom, they saw Eisner as an idea man who would be too inexperienced as an administrator and financier to handle a large corporation. The directors came close to rejecting Eisner in favor of an older, more buttoned-down candidate. But then Roy Disney's attorney, Stanley Gold, made an impassioned speech to the directors: "You see guys like Eisner as a little crazy . . . but every great studio in this...
This time creativity carried the day, and the Eisner-Wells team took charge in September 1984. The Disney board ousted Miller, while voting Roy to the post of vice chairman. The Eisner-Wells duo flew immediately to Fort Worth to enlist support from Sid Bass, whose family was amassing a stake in the company (currently 17%). Bass was so impressed with Eisner and Wells that he promised to hold the stock for five years, an unusual commitment that would make Disney far less vulnerable to further takeover troubles...