Two hours is crazy, right? I think you'll be surprised. Let's not make this too stupid. It's going to be hard for him. No kidding. Want to ask you about your last couple years at Disney. Tough period.
I looked at my job as like a manager of a baseball team. These are temporary jobs. Eventually, you're going to fail. I think the hardest moment was dealing with Harvey Weinstein.
Yeah. Because he lied about everything.
You were critical of Disney's decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel.
Well, I did it with the advice of my wife who said, 'Don't do it.' 3 million people contacted me the next day.
Really? 3 million. What did you think of Disney's settlement with President Trump?
Well, I didn't like any of that. I didn't like, I thought the CBS settlement was ridiculous.
You negotiated with a couple Premier League clubs for... Right.
We did. We really were the Wrexham strategy. Three years before Wrexham, Ryan Reynolds got ahead of us.
By the way, I should acknowledge as we were hearing cars in the background, you very intentionally chose an office the level above the street for a reason, right?
Well, yes. Do you know Neil Diamond's song 'Beautiful Noise' about the cans and the garbage cans and the noise and how it gets him to sleep and so forth? I grew up on the third floor in Manhattan. The street I'm on here is maybe the only street that I can think of that is like New York. There's 17 restaurants and coffee shops and everything on the street. You can walk to your dentist. You can walk to your doctor. You can walk to stores. You don't have to drive except to get here. And it's not that far from where I live. And everybody, you know, I took this office. There's a high school. If you stick around till the end of the day, they're all screaming and walking up and down. Every fire engine goes by. I can go right to sleep. That to me is the most comfortable is hearing that sound. When I moved here and it was quiet at our house, I thought it was a little strange. So, I have intentionally come to where everybody can, we don't have a commissary, but everybody can go and stay on the street. Nobody has to drive anywhere. And it's much more productive than being in some high-rise in Century City or being in Burbank, being with a studio lot. I did try to buy the Culver Studios and didn't, which was stupid because then Amazon came in and spent a fortune, but that's why I'm here. So, hearing the noise, I don't even hear it.
So, we were with you last week at Portsmouth. How did it go in Portsmouth?
It went great. I'm there not just to see a game. I'm there to talk about all the players and also all the capital expenditure, the investment in the training ground, in the changing rooms, and Fratton Park. But the game itself, we played well. They were very aggressive and fortunately it was a draw. We played terribly the week before and we just came alive. Fratton Park, which is the historic stadium, it's just a fantastic place. You're close to the pitch. We renovated it.
Now, preceding you buying Portsmouth, I know you scouted teams for a while with your wife, sister, one of your sons. What was involved with that?
Well, I figured having, you know, been involved with ESPN, buying Capital Cities/ABC, having the Los Angeles Angels, the Mighty Ducks, we started. I knew how important sports was to broadcasters, to everybody. The NFL, I think, is 97% the number one show that week. You can't buy a league, but you could get involved with a team. And I like the idea, the Mighty Ducks was, you know, from our movies that we made, it was a silly name, people mocked us, then they didn't when we won the Stanley Cup.
Well, and for a while you guys were, I think, making up 80% of the NHL's merchandise sales.
We did well, it was a new franchise. And the Angels, you know, the previous owner, Gene Autry, had never won the World Series, and we did it with scrappy young players. But anyway, I thought a great asset and fun asset in the family that plays together, stays together. I thought it'd be great for my family. And we looked all over the world. We first looked at MLS here. It seemed overpriced to me at the time. We looked at teams in Europe. It seemed like the only real center of soccer, football as it were, was the UK. We looked at teams in the UK.
You negotiated with a couple Premier League clubs for... Right.
We did, but in the end of the day, I just wanted to build from scratch. We really were the Wrexham strategy three years before Wrexham. And I thought, geez, I didn't want to be in England and be Hollywood and we would just concentrate on sports. Ryan Reynolds got ahead of us smartly and went to Northern Wales, we went to Southern England and we're building a team up from scratch and, you know, we're patient. When I went to Disney, the idea of the family playing together stays together. We made a commercial in my first couple months with a family around a breakfast table and three kids, one in an infant chair and they're rushing to get ready and the father runs off, the mother runs off to their jobs, the kids run off to school and they leave the kid sitting there alone. And then the thing is the family that plays together stays together. They all run back having forgotten this kid. The next shot is them at Walt Disney World. We took a lot of grief because some people in the population thought we were actually considering leaving a kid alone in a kitchen. But it set the standard of the idea of family together having a good time.
And Disney at that point hadn't really done any marketing. And this was a hugely successful... This was the beginning. This was the beginning of us really pushing.
Well, we also made a deal. They hadn't made a movie in a long time that you could make a ride out of it. So, we made a deal with George Lucas for Star Wars, for Raiders of the Lost Ark. We made a commercial that my wife hinted to me at a dinner about, now that you've won the Super Bowl or now that you've achieved your greatest goals, what are you going to do next? And we would say at that moment, I'm going to Disney World or I'm going to Disneyland, which had a little trouble with Warner Brothers because they tried to steal it for a movie coming up and we were able to convince them not to do that. And that became quite an important piece of our marketing.
I want to go back to Portsmouth momentarily before moving on. Take me to May of 2017, Portsmouth Guildhall and the pitch that you kind of had to give.
Well, we had gone all over and most of the places were for sale or they were interested. Portsmouth really wasn't. But we learned that it was owned by the fans and the CEO, not the board, was kind of interested in us and he said, 'Come on down.' And we got in his car. We got there and we drove around and Eric, my son, said to me, 'Dad, this is it. Now or never. How much more are we going to fly all over the world looking for a team?' And then we went to the game, the match, and it really was like the Final Four in the US. But every game is like that. And I'm sure if you were there photographing it, you would get that sense. It's just an unbelievable feeling. The pitch is close to the fans. It's an island city in England. They have a long history. 1890s. They've been in the Premier League. They had three owners that went broke. Big history there. It's a naval city. Henry VII left from there. Watched a ship go down off the coast. D-Day from there. So it's the second most bombed city outside of London because of the Navy during the Second World War. There's so much history. They're so passionate, very working-class city.
What were some of the issues you recognized upon taking over and how have you gone about trying to resolve those?
Well, it was attractive because there was no value. So, we were able to get in there. I didn't realize how much we'd have to spend bringing it back, but what I like is looking for something to, you know, instead of buying up here, buying down here and then getting it up there.
And you spent way more bringing it back than you did on purchasing the actual team.
By multiples. Yes. Yeah, we did. And we did a lot of due diligence and we were underestimating. We had to build a whole new stand, sprinkler systems, exits, get rid of safe standing or standing, food was awful, everything, you know.
Because there were, I think, 18,000 people can go to a game. At the time because of some of the issues with the stands they were thinking that could have to be reduced to 10,000.
Yeah. Every year it got reduced because of the safety issues. But it was more than that. It was bringing it back, making a fan zone, which we did, which I think I walked in and they saw me walk in. That was brand new. We're still working on things that I learned at Disney.
Well, when the fans were running it, the management was doing great, but I had them come up and go to the Disney University to learn the obvious, which is how to take care of the public. And we've worked on that. We've worked on everything to do with dealing with the public. And of course, we've improved the squad.
How do things stand today with the team and kind of the revitalization of it relative to where you were expecting it would be at this point?
Well, I didn't expect to win the World Series for the Angels. I didn't expect to get in the Stanley Cup for the Ducks. Nobody expected that. We've been at it for seven or eight years. The pyramid in English football. The pyramid starts with a Premier League with 20 teams and then there's 72 teams in the EFL below the pyramid and we're now in the league just below the Premier League, the Championship. It's very exciting and very expensive. Everybody loses money. Parliament has made a law with an administrator who's going to adjudicate how the money gets determined. Right now, the Premier League in the media takes 96% of the revenue for 20 teams, and 4% goes to the other 72 teams, which means the other 72 teams are all losing money and going broke except for the ones that are owned by super billionaires and eastern monarchs and things like that. So, the economics are very difficult, but they'll get better.
How have you gone about figuring out the role your family plays in all of it?
Well, my kids are deferential to me. I wish they weren't.
Well, I'm not 25 years old. They're going to have to take it over. And my son in New York, because it's closer, Eric, is much more involved with the team. But my other two sons are involved, but we're, I don't know, 6,000 miles away. We do Zoom calls all the time. They're interested, but when it comes to the finances, it's difficult. They actually own the team, the three of them own the team. And I've done that from the beginning. I loan them the money to pay for the deficit. It's a mess. It's complicated financially, but I think we'll come out of this tunnel into the bright lights of not only being in the Premier League, but being sustainable, and that's a word used meaning you don't lose money.
So, speaking of family, and you alluded to grandparents, when I was talking to you and your wife earlier, I want to take you way back and talk a little bit about family. But first explain who your maternal grandfather Milton was.
Well, he was my maternal grandfather. He came from Washington DC. Poor. I don't know how poor. He said he was poor. I don't know how poor he was, but he certainly worked his way through Georgetown Law School. And eventually was the CEO and not the founder but I'm not exactly sure but they invented the safety razor, you know, avoid the 5 o'clock shadow. And we used to, I used to go to Yankee Stadium with him and he had a little, they didn't have boxes but they had a little section that was cordoned off and he'd not watch the game, Mickey Mantle, etc. And he'd point out to right field to the Gillette, their company ad, say, 'Michael, look at the ad, look at Gillette, avoid this 5 o'clock shadow.' So he was very proud that he had worked his way up to actually having an ad in right field for Gillette Razor Company.
What do you remember from Cedar Knoll Farm?
Well, he was self-made and he had a farm an hour outside of Bedford Hills, outside of New York in Bedford Hills and we lived in a building on the back of it in the summers and weekends. And I don't even know how you know the name Cedar Knoll Farm, but that was the name and my first car was a hand-me-down which I took to college and had Cedar Knoll Farm written on the side. So that was my grandfather's property.
One of the things that I found remarkable about you as part of preparing for it is, you know, you grew up well off. There are so many people that grow up well off and make very little of themselves. What do you think it was about your upbringing that instilled hard work and didn't kind of dampen motivation?
Well, everybody has a wrong idea of this. There are 350 million people in the country. There's a very small number of people that are brought up well off comparatively speaking. So most of the people that make it are in the 350 million people that are not well off. And the same percentage maybe of people that are well off make it, but it's a much tinier number. So everybody figures that if you're well off, you're going to be sitting by a swimming pool drinking a margarita and being a cast off.
Yeah. But I grew up with a lot of those folks. You know, they just kind of coast along, do enough to get by.
There are a lot of people on the other, there are a lot of people, the majority on both sides that just coast by. It is the unique, whether it's environmental, family, IQ, emotional aggressiveness, picking the right spouse, all of those things go into it. But the people that say to me how did you make it because you, because a lot of people who had a wealthy family never bothered to work, and I said, well, I just don't find that true. I know a lot of people that I grew up with are doing very, very well.
Although that is a conversation I'll have often with folks that we profile who were, you know, first generation wealthy because they're then parents and they have unlimited resource, the ability to create whatever opportunities they want for their children and what the balance is between that and dampening motivation. You know,
You know, you just don't know. You don't know if you have a child that you've worked with that ends up at Harvard and Yale Law School and then fails and then you have another child who maybe on the spectrum or has a learning difficulty and ends up Elon Musk. You just don't know. You don't know if somebody who comes from the Kennedy family or the Rockefeller family becomes a governor and the president or somebody from a family of immigrants, first generation of immigrants. So it's just not the cliche.
For every hour that you wanted to watch TV growing up, you had to read for two hours.
I did, but I found a way to cheat on that. But in any event, everybody, there's a different story in every family. It's obviously better to have a family that has a mother and father that has an image of what a mother is, what a father is, what masculinity is. It is always better to have a family that encourages, like a lot of immigrant families, education, starting at the bottom, not being afraid, like a lot of wealthy people. I can't start in the mail room. I got to start as a vice president. That kind of attitude. All of that stuff I've heard my whole life in various different places. And there is no answer to that. It's obviously better to have a solid family. A single mother in the ghetto is not good for her children. No question about that. That doesn't mean every single mother who has a child in the ghetto, that child can't be president of the United States.
What do you think you learned from your mom?
How to put up with my father.
Yeah. I mean, you learn a lot from your relationship with your parents. My father always said to me, 'Never tell your mother a secret. Trust me, she's married to me. I am going to find out everything you say to her. So, don't tell her anything you don't want me to hear.' So, I learned that. He also said to me, or she said to me, what, I can't remember. I just say yes no matter how angry he gets, whatever, I say yes and then an hour later I do what I want to do.
In what ways was she more ambitious and goal-oriented than your dad?
Well, if she had been a contemporary mother, she'd run General Motors.
Because she just was very organized and very smart and had a lot of aggression. Just in her era that was pretty much impossible and she didn't want to do that. She wanted to be supportive of, you know, what you learn by going to the movies, you know, in those days.
Your father Lester was away at war the first few years of your life flying transport planes in the Air Force. How do you think that impacted your family?
I was pretty young. I do know that he started an airline in Ecuador. I do know that he bought two DC-3s for $20,000, $10,000 each to start this airline. I do know that he loaned $10,000 to this guy Tony Blowner, haven't thought of that name in 70 years, as his partner. I do know that my mother was not wild about being in Ecuador and I do know that we were thrown out of Ecuador during a revolution and we lost the two planes and he never got paid back for $10,000. And I do know that it was cheaper for Ecuadorians to fly to Quito inside the plane if they were dead. So they would be flying dead people in seats because it was cheaper than going in a coffin. I do remember that.
I don't know if this is correct or not, but I read he was never quite comfortable in the fatherly type role.
No, that's not true. You may know that because I called him by his first name because my sister was old and could never, he said, pronounce daddy or dad, right? So, we called him by his first name. So, all my friends thought he was my stepfather, but he wasn't. He was my father. But I don't think he wanted to get older. I don't think he was a Peter Pan character, but we did call him by his first name.
You mentioned his mom's passing. How do you think that kind of influenced his life?
I think if you're 10 years old and your mother dies, your life is forever influenced. I don't know the answer. He didn't, I wasn't his, I was his son. wasn't his... but I know he had a... they were married 50 years and, you know, they were close to both their sides, their parents. And most people that write memoirs or do these interviews will tell you that they were beaten, they were thrown out the window, they were never given the right amount of food, they were ignored. I don't know, I didn't have that. I'm sorry but I can't make it more theatrical.
I wasn't looking for that. You wrote a wonderful book about camp obviously and the impact it had on your life. You went to camp in some way, shape or form till you were, I think, 22. But tell about this boxing match he set up for you when you were 7 years old.
Barry, Rupert and us and them and we started. He turned his chair facing away from the round table. Never said a word in the entire meeting. Not a word. Then he sued us. So, we sued him and I met him at the Mayfair Hotel in New York 6 months later and I settled the lawsuit with him in 5 minutes.
I want it out. He wanted 100%. I said, "You have to buy the movies." He said, "Yes." And that was that.
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas bring you Raiders of the Lost Ark. What do you recall from the first time you went to see Lucas on his ranch?
Well, everybody had passed on Raiders because the scene opening Raiders with a ball looked like it would cost as much as any movie ever made, just that scene. And I thought the script was fantastic. And we made the deal and I went to meet Stephen and George and tell them we have a $17 million budget and you got to bring it in at that. Today it would cost, you know, $200 million. And Steven said, "I can do a budget at any price." And he said, "We'll take the scene when the plane goes to Malaysia, where it was going over the Pacific. If you want, I can build a plane. I can get a plane. I can do it on the plane. I can go there. Or I think what I'll do is I'll just have a little piece of the end of the wing and a door and Harrison Ford will walk through the door. The engines will start, you'll hear a plane take off, and the next thing they'll do is there'll be a map showing going across the Pacific." And I said, "Well, fine." And that scene is in the movie. And he did the movie on budget. And history was made. And I've talked to Stephen about there was some movie that he wanted to do where the whole thing was going to be from one camera and it was all going to be about somebody like a $6 million man who was stuck in a bed and everything in the movie was from his point of view. It was a very good script. I could not understand how you could have one camera and he explained how he would do it and he made it seem so simple. You know, there's nobody like him.
What was Harvey Weinstein like to work with?
He was just a pig. He was rude. But he was a closet intellectual. He looked like a truck driver. He acted like a truck driver. He had great independent film taste. And nobody at Disney would deal with him but me. And he just couldn't tell the truth. He didn't stick to the contracts, but he made Shakespeare in Love and all these great movies. And we bought the company. We did not have a small movie division. We bought the company for $70 million. But he turned into wanting to make hundred million movies.
He brought you Lord of the Rings, didn't he?
He did bring me Lord of the Rings and I passed on Lord of the Rings stupidly because the budget was so astronomical and I just didn't think he was... I was wrong.
Yeah. But the reality is nobody bets a thousand and you were right more than you were wrong which is why you've had all the success you had.
I could tell you the three things or four things I passed on that became big hits but mostly we were right.
Wait, what were they? I'm curious.
I don't... I know. Private Benjamin. I didn't pass on it, but I didn't like the third act. I asked... Goldie Hawn. Yeah. I asked, well, first I thought Goldie looked heavy. And I told it to her agent and he said, "Why doesn't she come in and talk to you?" She came in and talked to me and the first thing she said is, "You know, I was pregnant." Oh, no. I just had the baby or something. So, I was... and I did not like the third act. And they went and sold it to Columbia. It didn't matter. Goldie Hawn in a uniform. You didn't even need a third act. So, I was wrong about that. I can't remember what the others were.
What interactions did you have with Johnny Carson over the years?
Not much. He was not on ABC, right? I saw him once. He was telling me how it's interesting in today's world that why does he not support a political party more? He says 50% of the country is one way and 50% is the other. Why should I have a show that only goes to 50% of the country? Which is a good piece of... and that's the way Disney was. We supported both equally, Democrats and Republicans. We want everybody to go to Disneyland. We don't just want Republicans or whatever. But today, too, I think too many, even though I'm the one that was the first one out to support Jimmy Kimmel, I think it probably would have been better if he went after Democrats as well as going after Republicans. Maybe he does, but...
Because it broadens your audience, doesn't get people that disagree with you to turn off.
If you're going to be an entertainer, you want everybody. And you can certainly be critical and have an edge, but you got to do it that way to everybody.
Warren Buffett, that was obviously instrumental in your deal to acquire Capital Cities ABC. What do you recall from the kind of chance encounter you guys had that led to what was one of the biggest, the first or second biggest acquisition in corporate history at the time?
No, it was the biggest. And I knew him. I would go to his conference, his investor meeting. And I knew ABC having worked there for 10 years very well. And at one point we were going to buy them very early before Capital Cities. Capital Cities bought them. A year before we did buy them, I had a conversation and wouldn't step up to what they wanted. And I... let's see how did this work. I was at Sun Valley. I was walking through the parking lot and I saw first Larry Tish in the parking lot. And he said, "Why don't you buy CBS?" And we didn't really want to buy CBS. They didn't have ESPN. But I don't know. Let me think about it. Yeah. And then I bumped into Warren and I said, "Larry Tish just offered me the company." And he said, "Why don't you buy ABC?" And I said, "Okay." And he was playing golf with Tom Murphy who was five cars away or 10 cars away. "Come over Tom, Michael wants to buy Capital ABC. I think we should sell it." Tom said, "Let me think about it." Warren said, "No, no, what do you think?" He said, "I think he said $18 a share. I can't remember exactly." Okay. I'll sell to $80 a year. And then I went and told our CFO. I went back to here. I called him up and said, and I'm making this up because I can't remember, 17.50 or something. He said, "No, Michael, it's 18. And you did this to me a year ago." Because I did the same thing. So I said, "Okay, okay, okay." And I got in the plane, picked Sid Bass, our largest shareholder up, went to New York, and announced the deal closed on Good Morning America on Monday, 3 days, no due diligence. And then Tom told me I bought... he sold it way too cheap, which he did because ESPN was just exploding.
Then you and Warren spent quite a bit of time together over the years. You and Jane would have dinner, I think, with Warren and Susie.
We did, but he was... when we announced it, there's nobody like this guy. We all announced that Warren was there and he became our largest shareholder. And I said to him after the ceremony right there, "I hope you continue being a larger shareholder." He said, "I never make a decision to sell and buy the same thing on the same day." And I knew right then he was not going to hold it.
