It was a day that Michael Eisner would undoubtedly like to forget. Sitting in a Los Angeles witness box for four hours last week, the usually unflappable chairman of the Walt Disney Co. struggled to maintain his composure. Eisner's protēgē turned nemesis. Jeffrey Katzenberg, his former employee, was seeking $ 500 million in his breach-of-contract suit against Disney, and Eisner was trying to defend his, and his company's integrity. At one point Eisner became flustered when Katzenberg's attorney, Bertram Fields, asked if he recalled telling his biographer, Tony Schwartz, "I think I hate the little midget." Later Eisner recalled that the same day, he had received a fax from Katzenberg meant for Fields, thanking the lawyer for "managing" a magazine story that praised Katzenberg at Eisner's expense: "I said to Schwartz, 'Screw that. If he is going to play this disingenuous game, I simply was not going to pay him his money.'"
Last week's revelations were the latest twist in a dispute that has entertained Hollywood and tarnished Disney's corporate image. The dash began five years ago, when Katzenberg quit Disney after a 10-year reign as studio chief, during which he oversaw production of such animated blockbusters as The Lion King. Disney's attorneys said that Katzenberg forfeited his bonus—2 percent of profits in perpetuity from all Disney movies, TV shows and stage productions from 1984 to 1994, as well as their sequels and tie-ins—when he left. The company ultimately paid Katzenberg a partial settlement of nearly $ 117 million, sources say. But talks broke down over how much Disney owed, and the dispute landed in court.
Industry insiders never expected that Disney would push it this far. The last Hollywood accounting dispute that aired in public was Art Buchwalds's lawsuit against Paramount for profits he claimed to be owed from the 1988 Eddie Murphy hit Coming to America. Paramount chose to fight Buchwald in court—only to wind up paying him $1 million after embarrassing revelations about its business practices. After that, studios made a practice of quietly settling such claims. But Disney under Eisner would rather fight than settle. And he and Katzenberg are both proud, combative types whose business disagreement deepened into personal animus.
So far, Disney's image—as well as Eisner's—has taken a beating. In his testimony last week Eisner repeatedly responded to questions by saying "I don't recall" or "I don't know". Katzenberg, by contrast, offered a stack of notes and memos that appeared to bolster his claim. (The Disney executive who negotiated Katzenberg's deal, Frank Wells, died in a helicopter crash five years ago. )
The trial has also offered a devastating glimpse into the Magic Kingdom's business dealings. Internal documents detail sensitive Disney financial information. One Hollywood lawyer calls a memo sent to Katzenberg from a former Disney top accountant "a road map to riches" for writers, directors and producers eager to press cases against Disney. The company declined requests to comment on the case. The next phase of the trial could be even more embarrassing. As Katzenberg's profit participation is calculated, Eisner will have to argue that his animated treasures are far less valuable than Katzenberg claims. No matter how the judge rules, Disney will look like a loser.
At the end of the first paragraph, the pronoun "I" in the quoted sentence "I said to Schwartz" refers to ______.
A. Eisner
B. Fields
C. Schwartz
D. Katzenberg
Naples: the butter-side-down of Italian cities, where even the truth has a strangely fictitious tinge. One day a car rear-ended one of the city's minibuses. The bus driver got out to investigate. While he stood there talking, his only passenger took the wheel and drove off. Neither passenger nor bus was ever seen again.
Then there was that busy lunch hour in the central post office when a crack in the ceiling opened and postal workers were overwhelmed by an avalanche of stale croissants. As the cleaners hauled away garbage bags of moldy breakfast rolls, the questions remained: Who? Why? And what else could still be up there?
But Naples actually isn't so funny. Italy's third largest city, with 1.1 million people, has a much darker side, where chaos reigns, bag snatching and mugging, clogged streets of stupefying confusion, where traffic moves to mysterious laws of its own through multiple intersections whose traffic lights haven't functioned for months, maybe years—if they have lights at all. Packs of wild dogs roam the city's main park. Nineteen policemen on the anti-narcotics squad are arrested for accepting payoffs from the Camorra, the local Mafia.
To many Italians, particularly those in the wealthy, industrialized north, none of this is surprising. To them Naples means political corruption, wasted federal subsidies, rampant organized crime, appallingly large families, and cunning, lazy people who prefer to do something shady rather than honest work...
Nepolitans know their reputation. "People think nothing ever gets done here," said a young professional woman. "Sometimes they say, 'Surely you come from Milan. You come from Naples? Naples?'"
Giovanni del Forno, an insurance executive, told me about his flight home from a northern Italian city, the plane waited on the tarmac for half an hour for a gate to become available. "And I began to hear the comments around me. 'Well, here we are in Naples,'" he said with a wince. "These comments make me suffer."
Neapolitans may complain, but most can't conceive of living anywhere else. The city has the intimacy, tension, and craziness of a large but intensely devoted family. The people have the same perverse pride as New Yorkers. They love even the things that don't work, and they love being Neapolitans. They know outsiders don't get it, and they don't care. "Even if you go away", one woman said, "you remain a prisoner of this city. My city has many problems, but away from it I feel bad. "
This is a city in which living on the brink of collapse is normal. Naples has survived wars, revolutions, floods, earthquakes, and eruptions of nearby Vesuvius. First a wealthy colony founded by the Greeks (who called it Neapolis, or "new city"), then a flourishing Roman resort, it lived through various incarnations under dynasties of Normans, Swabians, Austrians, Spanish, and French, not to mention a glorious period as the resplendent capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
It was a brilliant, cultivated city that once ranked with London and Paris. The Nunziatella, the oldest military school in Italy, still basks in its two centuries of historic glory; the Teatro San Carlo remains one of the greatest opera houses in the world. The treasures of Pompeii grace the National Museum. Stretched luxuriantly between mountains and sea along the curving coast of the Bay of Naples, full of ornate palaces, gardens, churches, and works of art, with its mild climate and rich folklore, Naples in the last century was beloved by artists and writers. The most famous response to this magnificence was t
A. Naples has a high incidence of traffic accidents
B. anything extraordinary can happen in Naples
C. people there love to store food for years
D. everything appears to be on the wrong side