A few weeks ago, at a Las Vegas video convention, Jeffrey Katzenberg, chieftain of the Disney movie jungle, was joined onstage by an adult lion to tout The Lion King, the most successful film in the company's history. Suddenly the beast wrapped its paw around Katzenberg's thigh. The audience gasped, the trainer scrambled, and the wiry mogul wriggled free, raising his arms in victory.
As it turned out, Katzenberg escaped the jaws of a lion but got devoured by a mouse. Last week the empire that Mickey built announced that Katzenberg, 43, was resigning Sept. 30, when his contract with the company expires. Chairman Michael Eisner, 52, had rebuffed his longtime protege's plea to succeed the late Frank Wells as second-in-command. And rather than stay as czar of all the % rushes -- supervising Disney's huge, 40-film-a-year slate, including the bijou animation unit -- Katzenberg walked. Joe Roth, the former movie boss of 20th Century Fox who was running the Caravan unit at Disney, assumes Katzenberg's responsibility for the live-action films. Roy Disney, Walt's nephew, and Peter Schneider will be in charge of animation.
"Michael never wanted a No. 2 person," says Richard Frank, who runs the TV unit at Disney. In fact, Eisner, who underwent a successful quadruple-bypass operation two months ago, was looking not to share power but to disperse it -- to impose a system not of hierarchy but lowerarchy, with division heads getting more power. "We're a large, multifaceted, multinational company," Eisner says. "We just all felt we had to decentralize, to run it in the divisional route."
That's a pretty dry way to describe the termination of one of Hollywood's most successful professional marriages, which in the decade since the two men came to Disney pushed company revenues from $1.4 billion to $8.5 billion. And if last week's climactic conversation were dialogue in a Disney script, Katzenberg would tell the writer to punch it up. It went like this:
Michael: Hi!
Jeffrey: Hi!
Michael: How ya doin'?
Jeffrey: Great. It's too bad we can't work together.
Michael: Yeah.
Katzenberg calls it "the most pleasantly comfortable and unstressful conversation we've had with each other in a year."
Still, the last week was an emotional bath for both men, who have worked together for 19 years, ever since Katzenberg joined Eisner at Paramount Pictures. "Bittersweet is a good way to describe our parting," says Eisner. "I wished that Jeffrey were 10 years younger and didn't have the normal and natural ambition to move on." He felt he was at an executive-clock- ticking moment, and those things happen.
Hollywood went seismic over the news. The town regards Katzenberg as the most demanding boss and the keenest people pleaser in the business. People wondered why Eisner, if he didn't want Katzenberg to run Disney's business side as Wells had, didn't simply redefine the job and take the younger man on as a junior partner -- instead of what he will surely become, a ferocious competitor.
"I think Jeffrey should have been given anything he asked for, based on his mountain of accomplishments at Disney," says Steven Spielberg, who is co- owner with Katzenberg of Dive, the scalding-hot new Century City eatery. ! "But I don't think he's feeling bitter about it. He's looking forward to an exciting future."