It's a Small World After All, Mr. Eisner

Michael D. Eisner, long one of the most feared men in Hollywood and now the most powerful, picked up the phone on Thursday night and called three industry executives, one after the other, who have made it clear in the last 10 months that they dislike him very much.

It was the first indication of how Mr. Eisner, who last week announced the merger of the Walt Disney Company and Capital Cities/ABC Inc. into the world's largest entertainment company, may intend to wield his new power.

His three chief critics -- Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen and Steven Spielberg -- had publicly called Mr. Eisner "Machiavelli," a "liar" and various unprintable names after he forced Mr. Katzenberg out of his job as the chairman of Walt Disney Studios last year. To compete with Disney, the three formed their own studio, Dreamworks, which then signed a multimillion-dollar agreement with Capital Cities/ABC to produce TV shows for the ABC network.

So last week, when Mr. Eisner, the chairman of Disney, surprised Wall Street and the media industry by announcing Disney's $19 billion planned acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC, no executives may have been more stunned than the Dreamworks trio.

And no individual may have had more qualms than Mr. Katzenberg, whom Mr. Eisner had pushed aside after nearly two decades of working side-by-side and who is considering suing Disney for tens of millions of dollars in compensation. Clearly, Mr. Eisner now had the upper hand.

"Michael," Mr. Katzenberg recalled saying during the call Thursday night, "my feelings about this are that you and I had 19 unbelievably great years together. And now we've had 10 awful months. Let's not make it 11."