Dangerous Liaisons

The model for the modern studio was already in place in the 1930s. Walt Disney was the first to exploit revenue streams other than ticket sales from his cartoon creations; Mickey Mouse was first licensed to watch manufacturers in 1932. Disney also was the first to realize the size and potential of children as an audience; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938) was the first film to make $100 million (US). He repeated this successful formula over the years: take a story in the public domain, sanitize it, and give it a happy ending. When television arrived, the other studios banded together to fight it, but Disney made an alliance with abc. The result was Disneyland, a one-hour prime-time advertisement for his product, which later became The Wonderful World of Disney.

Given the predominance of Disney as a cultural force, it is instructive to see how the company operates. In Disneywar, James B. Stewart capably documents the arbitrariness of the studio world. For more than two decades, Disney has been run by former Paramount executive Michael Eisner, who emerges in the book as a blend of ego and wrath, a man who tried to accommodate both his business and artistic instincts. “We have no obligation to make art,” Eisner announced in a mission statement to employees while he was ceo at Paramount. “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement.”

On the back-cover blurb, Eisner’s rise and fall is framed in Shakespearean terms, his Disney tenure compared to Lear, Henry iv, Richards ii and iii, and Macbeth. But his actual battles more closely resemble a five-year-old fighting over a toy. Some of the bitterest fights were with Jeffrey Katzenberg, his one-time protege. When Katzenberg left Disney, the company had to pay him a $280-million settlement after a lengthy court battle. Eisner then hired his close friend, agent Michael Ovitz. Within months, they were no longer friends, and Ovitz left the company with a $140-million payout. At the time, Eisner’s own compensation was topping $50 million annually in salary and options.

Katzenberg, who hadn’t endeared himself to Disney’s animators, was the subject of an unflattering in-house cartoon that serves as a central metaphor for the whole town. In the drawing, Katzenberg and the animators are depicted standing around a conference table, their penises presented on the table. Katzenberg’s is microscopic. “Who has the biggest?” Katzenberg asks. “You do, sir,” the animators chorus.

Disney’s dream of a world created in its own image extends to the realish-life town of Celebration, Florida, near Disney World. It is the fulfillment of Walt’s unbuilt city of Epcot (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). Disney reserves the right to veto decisions made by local political groups at Celebration, it runs its own utilities, and, under the terms of its deal with the state, it can build its own airport and nuclear plant. Celebration’s Leave It To Beaver planning ethic evokes the nostalgic America that so many citizens carry within them, a version that has tremendous power despite its many fictions. Disney has been instrumental in constructing and propagating those fictions of a utopian past, and is now recycling them as life, a postmodern reality carried to extremes. As the critic Robert Hughes noted, “It’s not that Disneyland is a metaphor of America, but that America is a metaphor of Disneyland.”

As reality and entertainment increasingly merge, what is the future of film, and what does it mean for the public? The “reality” that we see on screen will steadily decrease. Over 70 percent of the shots in The Lord of the Rings trilogy were digital. Russell Crowe’s face was digitally fixed onto a stuntman’s in Gladiator, a common practice now. After actor Oliver Reed died during that shoot, his face was digitally superimposed on another body. Several stars have been laser-scanned, their skin, facial expressions, and bodies digitally stored, ready for stunts or perhaps for scenes when the actor must look younger. The animation of people (Tom Hanks in The Polar Express, for example) may become more commonplace, actors becoming their own Sleepy and Grumpy. The line between animation and live action will continue to blur.

Other lines will blur as well, among them the line between advertising and entertainment. The Bond film Die Another Day had twenty merchandising partners who collectively invested $120 million in advertising that sold both their own products (which were featured in the film) and the film itself. Disney has a ten-year merchandising deal with McDonald’s. A film’s merchandising potential will increasingly be part of the studio’s decision to go ahead with a project or kill it.

There are other, de facto alliances. Wal-Mart is the largest seller of dvds and videos in the United States, having sold over $5 billion in 2003 , the single largest source of revenue for the studios that year. The chain often alters the packaging, and occasionally the content, of some films to suit its “family values” image. The parade of sequels (Mission Impossible 3), remakes (The Longest Yard), and adapted television properties (Bewitched, The Honeymooners) will lengthen, as they provide recognition and relative safety for both studios and retailers. For some of us, there will be the opportunity to view the banal TV and film offerings of our childhood in perpetuity.

The lines between video games, live action, and animation, between reality shows and fiction, will become finer as computer culture gradually replaces traditional Hollywood culture. Movie theatres will be usurped entirely by home viewing (box-office grosses in 2005 continued their long decline, and one poll showed that 73 percent of moviegoers prefer to watch at home). Grownups, as Walt Disney noted, will be increasingly expendable as an audience. But who needs an audience? At some point we will be the stars in our own films, animated, heroic, misunderstood, and triumphant, though it’s unlikely we’ll see a cut of the profits.