BY BEN WINTERS
So here’s a
question for you: Can a guy who brokered peace in Northern Ireland in
1990, as well as led the Senate Democrats through the Reagan-Bush era
restore functionality to Disney?
Only
time will tell, but the media doesn’t seem too confident. The appointment
of George Mitchell as new chairman of the board of the Walt Disney company
“is not sitting well with many of the investors crusading to change
Disney management, nor with corporate governance experts,” wrote
Laura M. Holson and Carl Hulse in the New York Times on March 5. Mitchell,
who usurped 20-year vet Michael Eisner (above), received a stinging vote
of no confidence from Disney’s board. Critics “complained
that not only does Mr. Mitchell have negligible corporate experience,
but they say he is too closely allied to Mr. Eisner and his appointment
does little to address investor discontent with Mr. Eisner’s management
of the company.”
That
discontent has been swirling for months, thanks largely to the efforts
of Roy Disney, nephew to Walt and arch-foe of Eisner; the Disney heir
thinks the Disney chair had systematically screwed up the Magic Kingdom.
As reported widely in the days before the shareholder meeting on March
4, Disney was busy behind the scenes “luring hundreds of dissident
shareholders to the company’s annual meeting in Philadelphia as
part of a campaign to oust Michael Eisner.” That quote is from Alex
Armitage’s Bloomberg News article on the campaign, as is this one,
in which a travel agent describes the breadth of Roy Disney’s far-reaching
efforts to organize support against Eisner: “They’re coming
in from all over, from the U.S., Mexico and Canada; there’s even
a couple from Paris…They feel the direction Disney is taking is
not the right one.”
But
clearly Heir Disney’s effort to organize angry shareholders against
Eisner was successful in that the board promptly stripped Eisner of his
chairmanship, right? Not if we can trust the press release immediately
put out by Roy Disney—and his partner in the campaign, Stanley Gold—in
which they call “the decision by The Walt Disney Company Board of
Directors naming George Mitchell as Chairman, while allowing Michael Eisner
to remain CEO, 'a blatant rejection of shareholder will, a betrayal
of trust and a significant step backwards for substantive governance reform
in America’s capital markets.’” So the tragedy in the
Mouse House continues—and we’ll see how the fella who brokered
the Good Friday accord handles the stormy period ahead.
WAIT…NEITHER
DOES MINNIE
Still
not convinced that things are out of control in the Magic Kingdom? How
about this story, as reported in the Miami Herald: “The Walt Disney
Co. has quietly shelved a life-size statue of Mickey Mouse inspired by
singer Janet Jackson [from Walt Disney World]. The statue inspired by
Jackson was clad in a tight black outfit similar to one she wore in 1990
after the release of her album Rhythm Nation 1814.” A Disney spokesman
is quoted saying that “[c]onsidering all the controversy it drew,
we talked it over for a couple of days and decided it would be best to
replace hers with a new one.”
But
Minnie Mouse doesn’t even have breasts!
WHAT
DOES MEL GIBSON THINK?
Michael
Riedel, New York Post theatre columnist and possibly the most hated man
on Broadway, didn’t invent the charge—he just repeated it.
It was Thane Rosenbaum, writing in the Los Angeles Times, who noted that
the new Fiddler on the Roof revival on Broadway doesn’t have a heck
of a lot of Jewish talent behind it. “The show…returns with
a sparkling fresh look, a young vibrant cast…but in some profound,
perhaps even intentional way, an absence of Jewish soul,” Rosenbaum
wrote. “The sensation [watching the production] is as if you’re
sampling something that tastes great and looks Jewish but isn’t
entirely kosher.”
So
Riedel, who never met a flame he didn’t fan, runs a column titled
SHTETL SHOCK, joyfully recounting Rosenbaum’s piece, and also noting
that the actress playing Yente had been fired—which was tough, in
that she was the sister-in-law of lyricist Sheldon Harnick, “and
the mother of one of the show’s co-producers, Aaron Harnick.”
All
of which is to say that Fiddler director David Leveaux, who had already
written an angry letter to the LA Times about Rosenbaum’s column,
was in no mood to run into Riedel at a party. So he yelled at him—and
when Riedel yelled back, Levaux punched him.
Riedel
recounted it to Page Six, his own paper’s gossip column: “After
listening to Leveaux rant, a fed-up Riedel finally responded, 'David,
you know what the real problem is? You Oxford-intellectual, elite directors
are ruining our great Broadway musicals’…the next thing I
know, I was on the floor looking at my broken watch.”
Now,
see, that’s the kind of excitement that’s missing in American
theatre.
IS
IT ART, JUST BECAUSE IT HANGS THERE IN THE SKY?
Some
congressman’s press secretary is doing a damn fine job, and the
result might be a new lease on life for the Hubble space telescope—which,
it now turns out, is a much more artistically agile space telescope than
any of us realized.
In
mid-February, NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe canceled a planned
service mission on the Hubble, condemning it to a lingering death. In
the first days of March, a group of congressmen—led by representative
Mark Udall of Colorado, where scientists at Colorado University are frequent
Hubble users—introduced “a joint resolution with seven co-sponsors
asking for an independent panel to review O’Keefe’s decision.”
On March 4, a rash of stories appeared about how “new images from the Hubble Space Telescope show an expanding swirl of illuminated interstellar dust reminiscent of the painterly skyscape of Van Gogh’s [painting] Starry Night.” That’s from Wired, but the same basic piece appeared all over, including on CNN and the AP wire, along with beautiful accompanying photos demostrating the breathtaking majesty of space—and making a compelling argument for the the Hubble program.