Frank Wells, every mention
35 scenes · ← back to Frank Wells
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 21Ben Gilbert 9Michael Ovitz 5
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Frank Wells comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 8:50 David Rosenthal I'm not talking about Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
- ▶ 12:20 David Rosenthal Arguably the greatest two-person management team in media company history, Michael Eisner and Frank Wells.
- ▶ 12:36 David Rosenthal So first the board goes after Frank Wells.
- ▶ 12:39 David Rosenthal Frank had been the president of Warner Brothers and had since retired.
- ▶ 12:55 David Rosenthal So Frank is their first call.
- ▶ 13:04 David Rosenthal Frank says, I'm interested, but I can't do this alone.
- ▶ 17:54 Ben Gilbert So, Frank is offered the top job, and Michael's offered number two.
- ▶ 18:00 Ben Gilbert Then there's a second iteration where they're sort of offered co-CEOs, and Michael basically tells Frank, hey, look, if I'm gonna do this, I'm CEO, or I'm, I'm chairman, I think is even what he says, and you're number two, because we need…
- ▶ 18:33 Ben Gilbert And Frank, this tells you everything about who Frank is and sort of how, how the company would work for the next decade.
- ▶ 18:41 Ben Gilbert Frank says, okay, that's, that makes sense to me.
- ▶ 19:00 David Rosenthal Michael Eisner and Frank Wells are introduced as the new CEO and president of the Walt Disney Company.
- ▶ 20:31 David Rosenthal And then Eisner and Wells turn their attention to the parks.
- ▶ 20:39 David Rosenthal One of the first things they do that ends up, I think, really setting up all the following success that Eisner and Wells and Katzenberg have is they raise the ticket prices at Disneyland and Disney World.
- ▶ 21:11 David Rosenthal So parking at Disney World and Disneyland when Eisner and Wells come in to run the company is still only a buck.
- ▶ 22:03 David Rosenthal Eisner and Wells turn around and they take all these quick profits from the parks and they start investing them into building the live action studios and running the paramount playbook.
- ▶ 24:31 David Rosenthal So as part of the deal, when they brought Eisner and Wells in,
- ▶ 24:46 Ben Gilbert Okay, so flashback to the day that Michael and Frank take over.
- ▶ 26:27 David Rosenthal But at some point, and I don't know, was it, was it Katzenberg, or was it Eisner and Wells who realized, like, hey, there actually is an opportunity here?
- ▶ 37:51 David Rosenthal It's inspiring new generations of children, their parents, and Eisner and Wells not only embrace all of it, they extend the flywheel even further.
- ▶ 38:45 David Rosenthal So, Eisner and Wells and Katzberg, they're like, well, we can do the same thing with home video.
- ▶ 50:56 David Rosenthal But that aside, I mean, man, by the time we're in the mid-nineties here, Disney and the Eisner-Wells-Katzenberg dream team is just
- ▶ 54:50 David Rosenthal First, on Easter Sunday, 1994, Frank Wells is shockingly and tragically killed in a helicopter crash while heliskiing.
- ▶ 55:08 David Rosenthal For the company and the management team, for all that Michael Eisner was, Ben, as you said, like, the creative executive, and had to be the public face of the Walt Disney Company and the Disney Renaissance, Frank was, like, the guy behind…
- ▶ 55:40 Ben Gilbert And Frank was kind of the, the peacekeeper, the, the one who could always relate to everyone, be the intermediary, calm people down when they were hot about something.
- ▶ 56:31 Ben Gilbert In the hospital while they're feeling the loss of Frank Wells, there's a lot of decisions that need to get made, and there's a lot of, like, personnel clashes that needed to get sort of through, but what can Michael do?
- ▶ 57:03 Ben Gilbert One version of it is that Jeffrey was promised the number two job at the company if Frank ever moved on or, you know, retired or anything.
- ▶ 1:40:57 David Rosenthal Everyone, everyone believes it's gotta be an external candidate that is gonna come in and take over Disney, just like Wells and Eisner came in 20 years ago.
- ▶ 1:46:19 Ben Gilbert There's that whole first chapter that sort of ends with Frank Wells passing, Katzenberg leaving, the end of the great Disney animation era.
- ▶ 1:46:36 David Rosenthal He and Wells and Katzenberg
The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:09:09 David Rosenthal And those three men, Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, would pull off probably the greatest media company comeback in history.
CAA (with Michael Ovitz) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:53:20 Michael Ovitz Before Frank Wells died, he tried to get me to come over.
- ▶ 1:53:23 Michael Ovitz I was closer to Frank Wells than Michael Eisner was.
- ▶ 1:53:28 Michael Ovitz Frank Wells was part of a trifecta at Warner's.
- ▶ 1:53:32 Michael Ovitz It was Frank Wells, John Callie, and Ted Ashley.
- ▶ 1:53:35 Michael Ovitz So Wells and Eisner, Wells wanted me to come and be the third part of the trifecta, because that worked for him for 20 years.