Interview: Michael Eisner
Entertainment Executive

We hear your dad required two hours of reading every night. Could you tell us about that?

Michael Eisner: Well, I had to read two hours for every hour of television I wanted to watch. So if I didn't want to watch any television, then I didn't have to read. But when I was growing up, Hopalong Cassidy was popular, and Milton Berle. Dad was pretty unrelenting. Of course, we found ways around that.

What did you like to read?

Michael Eisner: I liked Jack London. This started when I was about five, so I read the things you read in nursery school and kindergarten. When I got older I liked adventure stories, the Hardy Boys, just the stuff that everybody else was reading at that time.

Did you think reading was fun?

Michael Eisner: Not particularly, no. My wife tells me that was her life. She came from a small town in western New York State, with a lot of snow in the winter.

I came from Manhattan, and when you're made to read so you can watch this new technology called television... honestly, to me reading was kind of a chore. Not that I still feel that way, and not that I should have felt that way but, you know, it wasn't a punishment, but it was a necessity to be able to get done what I wanted to get done. Therefore, as a kid I would have rebelled against that. Maybe that's why I went into television.

I was just being facetious. I'm saying that, because I was forced to read at a very young age in order to do something that I wanted to do, which was watch Hopalong Cassidy, maybe in some twisted way that was how I ended up becoming an usher at NBC.

What did you want to do?

Michael Eisner: Well, I think I'm very different than most of the people that are invited to the Academy of Achievement. My sister would have been invited, I would have been the sibling that was left home.

My sister was a competitive ice skater, and very accomplished, and an A student, and I was kind of just breezing my way through grade school. I loved athletics, I played baseball, and basketball and soccer and stuff like that. I was interested in just existing. I didn't have major goals. I watched Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave it to Beaver, and Doris Day movies, and went to college, co-ed college, joined a fraternity and had periodic battles with my father, and built myself into being influenced by a lot of my teachers. Became very interested in the arts, even though I was a pre-med. Maybe I just didn't like the sight of blood, I don't know, but I moved in that direction.

When did you realize TV was a strong attraction for you?

Michael Eisner: I'd like to say I had this vision. I was an English major and a pre-med at college. There was a very attractive girl that was in the theater department; I decided I'd write a play to impress her. I was interested in doing that, that was fun.

I needed a summer job, I became an usher at NBC, because I came from New York. I loved being an usher, I loved handing out tickets for The Tonight Show. I thought it was great being near Jack Paar then, later, Johnny Carson. I just had a good time. I loved the concept of creating intellectual property. I thought I'd be a writer. I wrote a lot of plays, all very mediocre, all written in about two days. Went to Paris to be Ernest Hemingway, stayed a week and came home, and went to work, and just had one job after another in this area of creating ideas. And seeing the effect that one could have culturally, if you really paid attention.

How long was it from being an usher to running a company?

Michael Eisner: I was an usher and then I went back to school, and then I came back, wrote a novel -- or tried to write a novel -- gave up on that. Realized I liked being with people, I became a clerk at NBC. I wrote what time the commercials came on the air. I did traffic for NBC Radio, meaning I'd say what freeway was clogged up, made up names of roads, basically names of girlfriends that I was with the night before, the week before. "There was a log jam on the Throgsneck Bridge on Breckenridge Street..." You know, Breckenridge was actually the name of my wife, but I figured out I could have some fun in the entertainment business. Went to CBS, put the commercials in the children's programs, saw every children's program for a couple of years, worked on the Ed Sullivan Show. Wrote about 300 letters trying to get a job anywhere, finally got the job at ABC. And I think when I was about 27, became in charge of daytime television at ABC, having never seen a soap opera in my life, and children's programming. From there I had various different level jobs at ABC. I always went into an area that was in last place, with a philosophy, "You can't fall off the floor." And was lucky, was at the right time and the right place, with the right ideas, and each one of these areas became number one.

Finally, I guess in my 30s, became in charge of all ABC programming. Got pretty lucky, we did a lot of interesting things at ABC, whether it was Roots, or Rich Man/Poor Man, or Happy Days, or Laverne and Shirley. When I was running children's programming, we did Schoolhouse Rock and After School Specials and a lot of things that were kind of putting more content into what we were doing, not just frivolous, bubblegum kind of stuff.

Gulf and Western and Paramount must have thought I knew what I was doing and they hired me to come as President. And about a year or two after I was there we got lucky with Saturday Night Fever, and Grease, and Heaven Can Wait, and Ordinary People, and Elephant Man, and Terms of Endearment, or whatever.

All along, I was getting more interested in writing, and more and more interested in these cultural phenomena. I didn't even know Saturday Night Fever was a musical. To me it was a story I read in New York magazine called "Tribal Rites of Saturday Night," all about this kid who lived in Brooklyn who was the star in his area. But his area was destined to go nowhere, and he left his friends and he walked across that Verrazano Bridge and went to Manhattan, the Big Apple. I thought that was a great idea for a movie, and didn't really know that the Bee Gees were going to change the world, as far as music was concerned. I've been involved with that a couple of times in my career, where you do something that you believe in and it just creates a cultural phenomenon all over the world. Whether it's dealing with John Travolta, or Happy Days, or now we're doing Home Improvement, we just opened The Lion King. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and so forth. It's just intellectually stimulating and I enjoy it. I enjoy being with people and I don't know how I got here.

What personal characteristics do you think are important to success, and have been most important to you?

Michael Eisner: Hard work, I think, is important. Being born to parents who care. I don't think necessarily being born to parents of means. Whether it's somebody who walked across Europe out of Poland, or who grew up in the inner city of the United States, or actually was a middle class, or upper class environment. The genetic accident that you want is that you're born from parents who care and support you, and they're there for you, kind of give you the confidence to fail. Succeeding is not really a life experience that does that much good. Failing is a much more sobering and enlightening experience. And how people around you react when you fail is very important. So, to me, the genetic accident of my birth, I think, is the single most important thing. In my own genes, I have a very strong sense of work; I enjoy working. Maybe that, again, is delivered to me environmentally. I was extremely lucky in that I met somebody right after I got out of college who I married. That became very important. I had somebody who was interested in what I was doing, but didn't believe any of my baloney. Constantly said to me, "Don't believe what people write about you." Kept me level-headed. Delivered for me three sons who became the center of my life. Whenever the heady experience of achievement and reward is presented to you, you have three children and a wife who say, you know, "Dad, can we go to the movies?" or "Dad, we're going to do this." They could care less.

I think the combination of picking your parents well and then having the same luck with the family that surrounds you gives you a kind of an enclave in which you can succeed. It's very competitive. Sometimes people let the best of themselves come forward, and sometimes people let the worst come forward, at least in American business. The one place I always felt that I could trust, maybe like E.T., was when I got home. They're my staunchest critics and my biggest supporters.

So, I don't know what advice I would give anybody. I believe in the emotional and the psychological side of one's life. I'm psychoanalytically oriented, because I was an English major, I probably shouldn't be. Most people that talk about achievement talk about the non-internal drives. You don't hear much about people suppressing their dark side and letting their light side come out.

I manage a creative company, and I've always managed creative people, since I'm 23 or 24 years old, even in college, writing scripts. You have to have a lot of understanding, and you really have to deal with people who have a lot of things going on in their life that don't relate to what you think they're relating to. When somebody gets mad in the workplace, or somebody yells at you, or blames you for something, maybe they're dealing with their own frustrations, their own sense of failure. And I think understanding that makes you a better manager. Therefore, I put up with a lot. I go for the talent, and put up with a lot of peculiar behavior, none of which I judge, as long as people are basically ethical and moral. I don't know if that answers the questions, but it's a roundabout way for me to say that the ingredients that make for achievement are not necessarily a Harvard education. They're not necessarily winning an award. It may be the sibling who's in the back room who's actually just watching, and studying, and who has an understanding of the drives and the motives.

I think maybe the best education, or the best foundation for business is probably reading Shakespeare, rather than reading some MBA program out of some great business school. I think I'd rather have an English major than an economics major.

Somehow, everything that I've been involved in and the people who I feel most strongly about are those that have the most common sense. It's not that difficult. What brings people down I find are the very human things. The lack of common sense, not the lack of understanding some arithmetic table, not the lack of understanding what exactly the information highway is. But the lack of understanding of why somebody is unhappy, or happy, or motivation.

Why do you think it is that people who seem to have all the preparation and training for a given field sometimes fail?

Michael Eisner: Nobody is what they appear to be, let's start there. People are very complex. Most of the things that people are, they don't express. We express them in entertainment and drama, that is where we have the advantage. We are able to exercise our own inner understandings -- or lack of understandings -- through the dramatic process: theater, movies, television, books, poems, essays. And by doing that you kind of understand that people are complex. They're complex when they haven't achieved, and they're complex when they have achieved. And I happen to work for a company that's a big advocate of the family environment. Without it, I think you're more likely than not to not have these demons that create very anti-social behavior. If you have a strong mother and a strong father... unfortunately, there are too many situations where that doesn't occur, and that's where we have to work to try to reduce that. And I think you have a better shot of achieving if you have that strength. Most of the people that I hear about, whether they come from the inner city, whether they come from foreign countries that don't have a democratic process, where they've struggled beyond anything you can hear, there's at least one parent (if not two) that are there behind them. As I listen to the various achievers talk about their lives, it seems to be a very consistent thing. You know, it's usually not a friend of the family, it's usually not the church, it's usually not the government. It's usually a parent. More than not it's a father, which is interesting to me, but also a mother.

What does the American Dream mean to you?

Michael Eisner: When I speak, I speak a lot about the creation of the American intellectual product. There is no question that the reason that it is the most successful export from the United States -- in all areas, whether it's literature, fine arts, architecture, movies, television -- is, to me, the democratic process. We never think about what the government thinks. We made Reds. We made a movie about Golda Meir. We've made many, many movies that you would think somebody would say, "What does the government think?" We never think about what the government thinks. The point I'm making is, you just don't care. And it's one of the few countries in the world where you do not care. And we do take it for granted, which is healthy. You should always take good things for granted, good parents for granted, good children for granted. But you have to understand, it has to be protected. And our system of government, the system that precludes tyranny also includes the ability to be creative and therefore for me, the American experience is the right to express myself.

Now, I happen to also have the benefit that I did not swim to the United States from Cuba, or from South America, or from Asia. I have no idea which one of my grandparents, or great-great-grandparents came to the United States. They all came from the same experience as everybody else, but my family has been in New York, or Savannah, Georgia, or New Jersey for many generations. I just take for granted that I have the right to succeed here. It's never been a question. I didn't get granted it as a teenager during puberty, for instance. I know a lot of people that have escaped oppression, a lot of people in the entertainment business, a lot of people in Hollywood or New York. And, of course, they are more patriotic than anybody that was ever born here.

But it's the same story, it's that openness, that freedom of expression.

Can you talk about some setbacks you've had?

Michael Eisner: I don't happen to put it in my biography, but I'm an advocate of, not only allowing myself to fail, but allowing the people that work for me to fail. And no fear of it; they won't be fired because of it. If they don't fail, then they probably will never succeed. You can't succeed unless you've got failure, especially creatively. The question is, don't make the same mistake twice. American business kind of promotes permanent decisions made by temporary managers, who fail and then get fired, and then the next guy comes in and makes the same mistake. You know, so we encourage movies that are made that bomb, television shows that bomb, Broadway plays that bomb, books that bomb...because only out of that will you be able to have the really big successes. There's nothing worse than the middle. Mediocrity is the bane of my existence. I'd rather have the most celebrated failure, along with the most celebrated successes, than just a constant life of mediocrity.

Have there been disappointments?

Michael Eisner: Oh, my God. I worked at ABC, when we were fifth among three. I was at ABC when they used to say, put the Vietnam War on ABC, it will end in 13 weeks. I knew how to succeed. I knew how to buy out contracts, and to deal with actors and producers. But ABC never knew how to do it, because we turned it around to be number one, because we didn't know how to deal with success. We just were paralyzed by success.

I've failed. I've made movies that are terrible. I've had problems financially, not personally, but in various parts of the company. I've had executives who have had monstrous problems and dealing with failure and hardship. I've been lucky. Although I've had age-appropriate problems with illness and death, I haven't had tragic problems. So that kind of tragedy I'm happy to keep outside the door.

It's not my own failure that I now have to deal with. I have to allow people that work for us to fail. As a matter of fact, I have a policy that I'll never fire anybody, until they've succeeded. And that sometimes creates a problem, because if a person is really unqualified and you stay with them too long, you may have to change that policy, which I have on very rare occasions. But I don't want anybody in my company to think that they are in jeopardy of leaving during a failure. So, as bad as they may be, and as many people call me up and say, get rid of this person, I just will work with that person until they succeed, and then we'll make our change.

Do you regard risk-taking as an important component of achievement?

Michael Eisner: When you're trying to create things that are new, you have to be prepared to be on the edge of risk. First of all, research will tell you, which I do not believe in at all, that people want what they saw yesterday, and that's fallacious. They don't know what they want. They want something new, and different, and unusual.

When you go from new, and different and unusual, whether it's architecture, or paintings, whether it's a Michael Graves building, or an Oldenburg, or Jasper Jones, or Eric Fischl, or whomever, whether you have a playwright who is willing to take a risk, or a playwright who's not, makes all the difference between success and failure.

Are you self-conscious about the fact that your company is moving towards this superinformation highway and inducing people to stay home instead of going out to the movies?

Michael Eisner: No. I'm an advocate of getting out of the house. I've never wanted a date and my parents in the same room. I think that people are not -- as long as there's some sanity and we finally encourage people to put in gun control, and we deal with our problems on the street and we make it safe to go out -- even if it's not safe, people are not going to stay home. But the safer it is, the more numbers of people will go out.

So, there is a parallel track that we're on as a company, and I'm on personally. And that is, outside the house: sports, arts, Broadway, hockey, Disney theme parks, regional centers, movie theaters, concerts. That's all valid, and more of that will exist. And then there's the whole concept of inside the house, which is movies on demand, information on demand, and of course, education on demand.

I think they'll move in a parallel way. I hope, and I have a suspicion, that our company will be the pioneers. We are nowhere near ready. We are not in the papers, we do not do symposiums. I've only done one, I think, in my career. We are not the spokesmen for the information highway. And I think we may actually be the flagman on the information highway before it's all said and done.

That's my hope. Now, we'd better get moving, I guess. But I'm sitting back, and I'm studying, and I'm listening to everybody else talk about it. I don't quite get it yet. I'm a subscriber to Compuserve, and America Online, and Internet. I'm watching the experiments in Orlando and elsewhere. I'm meeting with all the telephone companies. I'm reading as much as I can. Pretty boring. It's pretty monotonous, it's pretty heavy, it's pretty technical, which is not my field, but I think we'll be there.

Do you ever get a sense of vertigo with all these things that you're in charge of?

Michael Eisner: I don't know if I get a sense of vertigo. I think I get much more credit than I'm due, and will eventually get much more blame than I probably will be responsible for. That goes with the interest in my industry.

I've always believed in the team; I love teams. I hated singles at tennis, I love doubles. I love team sports. I love being a cheerleader. I love surrounding myself with people that are much better than I am. That's the key. It makes you look good. It doesn't make you look weak to have strong people around you. I've never really had a chance to sit back and enjoy our successes. Maybe someday . It's not my style to sit around and do the garden and think about The Lion King, or whatever.

But I really am isolated from any possibility of vertigo because, as I said earlier in this conversation, my children don't know about it, they don't care about it. My wife is interested in family, things like that, and we just don't pay attention to it. This is probably the only kind of an industry function I've been to in years. It's just not my interest.

Well, thank you for talking with us today. It's been a pleasure.