Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [190]
Most people, when they were given the contract, just signed it and returned it, and gave up intellectual property rights to literally everything they’d thought of. Actually, the way the contract was worded, if you left ESPN and later wrote a memoir about your days at ESPN, Disney still owned it. I directly called the general counsel of Disney, who had sent the contract around, and I said, “Look, I have a personal-services contract with you, but that’s the entirety of our agreement; there’s no other part of it. I’m not going to sign anything that supersedes it.” And the general counsel said something along the lines of “Well, yes, you are going to sign it,” and I said, “No, actually, I’m not, and if you want to have me assign my intellectual properties to you, my price starts at $700,000 a year, so we can just go on from there.” He got so angry that he actually started swearing at me over the phone. I just laughed at him because there was no way I was ever going to sign that contract.
So Olbermann and I challenged it, and it just went away. They never followed up on it because they had no grounds. Olbermann and I were the only guys in the newsroom who stood up and said, “You’re an idiot if you think we’re going to sign this thing.” But that was the way Disney operated. I mean, they have this ridiculous top-down mentality that I think is a highly destructive element.
JUDY FEARING:
Disney was all about synergy. In its purest form, synergy can help both sides. So an example of good synergy is when ESPN takes a week where they telecast from Disney World. We would go down and do a lot of live remotes, whether it be radio, dot.com, or SportsCenter. It made for a great backdrop. We also did promotions to get fans to go to Disney, and I thought that worked well for each other. But when one division tries to get the upper hand, then it’s out of whack. Right after the takeover, some people at ESPN were trying to figure out a way to help Disney but they weren’t staying true to our brand. If there’s a movie about bugs, you can’t start looking for them on a baseball field for promotion. When you compromise what your brand is like that, you only have yourself to blame.
When we were acquired by Disney, there was a lot of concern about what was going to happen to us, but I always thought Steve was our greatest buffer. A lot of people out in Burbank were afraid of him. Not Eisner, but a lot of his staff, and as much as he could, Steve wasn’t going to let anybody push him, or us, around.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Bob Iger, for all his accomplishments and successes, is a very insecure guy. One of the reasons he survived under Eisner was that there was a certain meekness where he would actually never stand up to Eisner. Other executives stood up to him, guys like Katzenberg, guys like me. You remember Sports Night [ABC sitcom], don’t you? Well, early on after Disney’s acquisition of Capital Cities, we were down in Orlando at Disney World for our first annual budget meeting with the Disney guys. All the executives get into this room, like thirty of them, and it’s kind of an inquisition where you go into all the financial numbers. One of the ideas Eisner had, because he was always famous for inventing synergy, was that he wanted to put Sports Night on an ESPN network. I had absolutely no interest and did nothing about it. So a while later, he brought it up again, and for the second time I said that I didn’t think that it was a good idea. Well, then he suggested it again, practically demanding that we do it. So I finally said, “The real reason I won’t put Sports Night on ESPN is because SportsCenter is funnier than Sports Night.” It was a pretty sarcastic,