James B. Stewart

I listened to this on audiobook, so I'll discuss the content and the production separately.

Content:
Maybe it's because I'm a trained historian, but I found myself mumbling, sometimes shouting at my kindle: "according to who?" "says who?" "you can't know that was what happened!" There was just too much dramatization in this non-fiction book, too much certainty about people's thoughts, beliefs and conversations to which the author was not privy. I couldn't relax and trust it. Some dialogue is show more needed to break up non-fiction, sure, but that should be clear transcriptions of interviews about the incidents (preferably from more than one point of view), or recordings from the time. If the author is going to insist upon dramatizing conversations and phone calls (including stage directions!), it needs to made clear upon whose information the author is crafting his scenes - without such attribution, the reader can neither trust the information as truth, nor enjoy it as biased gossip.
I hate to say this (as someone who directed audio books for seven years) but I might have to get a print copy out of the library to see if it works better on the page than in audio - perhaps Stewart used footnotes to attribute/explain the liberties he took with dramatizations (though it should be in the main text.)

Audio production:
The production is not great. Every gap between sentences, paragraphs and even chapters has been viciously removed, often disturbing the flow of the narration and allowing no space for the reader to reflect and absorb. I, personally, found the Lawlor's accent and timbre a little strident for long listening, but that's subjective. What was disturbing was Lawlor's raging case of 'tag lag' - when a narrator allows the emotion of dialogue to continue into the tag so, " "Oh no!" she said." becomes " "Oh no," she said!" It's not a problem on occasion (though a good director aims not to let any slip through) but it's constant in this book (and probably made worse when the listener is pissed off by the dramatization anyway!)

All in all, I think this book probably suffered for being made into audio :( show less

Fun, quick, trashy read. The book moves quickly because it focuses on the characters and their interactions, but we lose sight of the larger business and cultural forces at work.

Also, the authors are far too credulous in their approach to Shari Redstone. In my opinion, based on the evidence they provide, she's just as bad as all the other malicious actors trying to exploit Sumner Redstone in his last days. It's just that she ultimately wins out.

The biggest sticking point is that Sumner show more Redstone -- as long as he was cogent -- repeated over and over again that he did not want Shari Redstone to succeed him. But after Shari seizes control in a household coup, she claims (without any public evidence) that her incapacitated father now supports her.

But that's pretty hard to swallow. For example, Frederic Salerno, a member of the Viacom board, was willing to support Shari if he could meet with Sumner and confirm a change of heart. Shari claims that a meeting was offered but refused (p. 170); Salerno claims that he repeatedly requested a meeting but was not permitted one (p. 174). So which is true? Our authors side with Shari, but it's not clear to me at all on what evidence they make that judgment.

Repeatedly our authors paint Shari in a very positive light when any critical thought suggests alternative motivations and judgments:
* p. 167: our authors do not drill down into rumors that Shari potentially promised to pay off the household staff when she staged her coup. ("[an email] from Octaviano asking for financial help for him and his wife to open a laundromat")
* p. 266: "Shari had no intention of trying to force through a merger," when all Shari had done (and would do in the future) was aimed at creating a merger of CBS & Viacom.
* p. 305: "Afterward Shari worried that she'd been too hard on Moonves. Should she send him a text?" -- but she never actually sent the text, so how do the authors know that she thought about it? Shari must have told them in an effort to soften her image.
* p. 340-1: "By most objective measures, Shari was proven right about the merger and her choice of Basksh as chief executive," but on just the next page "[according to] the stock price, the merger had failed to stem the company's decline." So maybe Shari was wrong about her choice, if by the "most important measure" it was a failure?
* p. 343: why wasn't Shari there at her father's death? Listening to him die on speakerphone is not really the touching scene the authors portray it as.

Anyway the book is full of these moments where the emails and text messages quoted seem to directly contract the positive image of Shari that the authors try to spin. Nevertheless an overall fun read. show less

I'm a pretty big fan of Disney content. For the past year and a half, I have been diving more into Disney history, specifically, Disney Theme Park history. Defunctland, Expedition Theme Park, Podcast: The Ride and Jenny Nicholson are just some of the creators where I've been watching/listening to hours of content. One name that keeps popping up, especially in context to the Disney from my childhood (1990's) is:

*cue dun dun dun noise* Michael Eisner.

The man that was Chairman and CEO of the show more Walt Disney Company during the Disney Renaissance, Euro Disney, the fall of Disney after the Renaissance, the acquisition of ABC, Fox Family (which became ABC Family and the creation of Go.com. A mix of success and failures. Plus, he enraged Jeffery Katzenberg so much that Shrek's Lord Farquaad's appearance is rumored to be based off of Eisner.


Regardless of how much truth is in this rumor, the resemblance is definitely there.

He's a bit of a joke in most of the Disney Park groups I'm in. As the man responsible for Euro Disney, Alien Encounter and many cost cutting measures, it's not surprising. I wanted to know more about Michael Eisner and what happened from the start of his career at Disney to the end, but wasn't sure where to start. Then, I saw Lindsay Ellis' video essay of the 2017 Beauty and the Beast movie (a remake I REALLY didn't like of a movie I love). She used this quote from Michael Eisner in her essay: "We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective." At the end of the essay, she mentioned this book as one of her sources in her video. She also mentioned listening to the audiobook version of this title. I decided to check it out, opting for the eBook version of this title instead of the audiobook.

The story of Michael Eisner's tenure at Disney is full of drama. Reading about how Eisner got the company back up from its late 70's, early 80's slump, with the help of other employees, including Katzenberg, Frank Wells and other talented people. Talented people, who, for the most part, Eisner isolated and iced out of their jobs. Who ended up leaving to go work at other companies. The more and more people Eisner lied to and betrayed, the more and more his control and micromanagement over different departments grew. Throw in some lawsuits and successful and failing projects and you've got one interesting story.

James Stewart was granted access to different departments and people within Disney to write a book. His narration sometimes borders on sensationalist. It's hard to tell if it's fact or embellishment. Eisner is written as a very charming and manipulative individual, which both seems like an exaggeration, but also has to have some truth to it, based on how many former Disney executives are now at different companies who do not have a great view of Eisner. There's a lot of interesting stories and tidbits about how Eisner ran Disney, putting choices made by the Disney company into a narrative that makes sense. The choices themselves do not (see EuroDisney and Go.com), but the reasons why they were made does. Personally, I just wasn't as big a fan of the embellishments made to the narration. The number of people that Stewart describes as "stunned" or "shocked" got to be ridiculous. The story has plenty of intrigue and drama and could probably stand on its own.

At 593 pages, it will probably only appeal to the hardcore Disney fans. The ones who watch or listen to many hours of Disney content. Who want to know more about what on Earth could've been going through Eisner's mind during his tenure at Disney. And, if he could've predicted what would happen when he pissed off Jeffery Katzenberg so much that he, along with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg, created one of Disney's biggest competitors- Dreamworks Pictures.

So, all in all, if like me, you want to learn more about Disney during Eisner's tenure and more about Eisner himself, I recommend this book. Just take some of the embellishments with a grain of salt. show less

A pretty fascinating recounting of the last two or three decades of Disney history, although it suffers somewhat from predating the Iger-era. I would have loved to hear about Pixar's acquisition, but what's in the book is more than enough drama.

Eisner is pretty vividly portrayed as a guy who was a big shot of creativity and energy that the company needed at a crucial time, but who was best when kept in check and when a string of hits staved off the infighting that later consumed the company. show more From the mid-90s on, the company culture comes across as deeply perverse and it's amazing that it continued to survive as well as it did (largely thanks to the Pixar deal, the ascendancy of ESPN, and Bruckheimer's event-films).

The sections of the book covering the early years were the most interesting to me, if only because it described the process by which some of the company's best work was done. Later on, the book shifts significantly toward corporate intrigue and chronicling how executive after executive fell victim to Eisner's paranoia (or worse, adopted it for themselves). Even Iger doesn't come off as spotless, though the whole thing has a similar premise to Mad Men: people trying to be good in a morally-perverse environment, and deciding which parts of their personal morality they can sacrifice to survive.

The prose itself is workable, but the research is impressive and piecing it together into a coherent story must have been endless amounts of work. Not a great book, but worth your time. show less