Disney wanted records to remain sealed until after March 2nd.....
http://www.forbes.com/reuters/newswire/2004/02/24/rtr1274629.html

Whoomp. That's a big one, if the documents have what I'm guessing they have. Roy and Stan's lawyers will be all over those unsealed documents. Expect another press release from them on the subject soon.

[Dragnet theme]

Busted!

-Demigod

This is just going to make the best book, isn't it? :cool:

How could anyone EVER think that $140 million is proper compensation for 2 years of work? It'll be very interesting to see how the board was able to justify it...or better yet, how they can't justify it!

I may have to go back and up my proxy vote estimate again!

Miceage has the memo firing Ovitz up -- all I can say is wow. First of all, what the critics in the industry were saying about Ovitz was correct-- power hungry little man who had nothing in his past that said he could run a publicly owned company. More worried about his name in the press and what other people were doing then his own performance and job.

But it also shows that how much a hypocrite Eisner can be.

The letter quite clearly points out that Ovitz was a complete incompetent from the outset, and that he engaged in some pretty questionable behavior. It will be interesting to see how they justify paying him all that money. (I wonder if he ever did pay back the House of Blues?:rolleyes: )

For the entertainment industry, Ovitz behavior wasn't that bad -- if your head of CAA. But it is bad, if your head of Disney.

More evidence that he's not a good judge of hiring the top people necessary to make his job easier. Certainly, he gets lucky sometimes.
I would bet that Ovitz put up that number, and there was no further negotiation. His last "win" at Disney. (IIRC, it was a stock giveaway originally worth less than $140 mil (about $95 million?), but as soon as his letting go was made public, the stock price increased.)

CNBC has been showing the actual document, as well as screens of excerpts. Bob Pisani of CNBC reports from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Today he said it's a slow news day in the corporate and stock world, and traders have been amusing themselves today passing that letter around. They apparently get similar sounding letters from the places they work, too.

I found on Google newsgroups a post to rec.arts.disney from the 1995 annual report, someone typed it in and posted it. In part mentions how Michael Ovitz came to the hospital the summer of 1994 to visit Michael Eisner and see to it all the tubes and machines and medications were the right ones, etc., something a friend would do and Eisner specifically mentions that in his letter to shareholders in that year's annual report. Well, fast forward to what is being released from the court about that case, and that the news media is jumping all over it.

When I look and read between the lines, as ill informed as I am about things sometimes, it sounds to me Michael Eisner hired his friend to be with him at Disney, be a rainmaker of sorts, as well as start learning the ropes of the corporate entertainment business. Maybe Michael Eisner thought anyone with enough background could do that sort of job, but he was wrong and didn't seem to really know his friend as well as he thought he did. Ovitz it sounds like just wanted to do what he'd always done, but from a cushy corporate title and perks position at Disney. It sounds as if the two were never on the same page, so to speak, about anything, and that Ovitz resisted learning the ropes and truly being of any help at Disney. It's gotta hurt that Eisner was so "blind"about the man, or that sometimes good friends remain that way best by being apart most of the time, y'know. But the waste of time and resources to learn that mistake's lessons, breathtaking.

Lesson to be learned: When hiring your friends to work with you in the corporate world, don't take them for granted, but run them through the same rigid screening criteria as for anyone else, to make sure they can do the job and not just be buddies with a cushy title.