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Disney's Lost Opportunity with Moore Film Seen Minor

Fri Jun 25, 8:15 PM ET
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By Peter Henderson

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Michael Moore's gain will be Walt Disney Co.'s lost opportunity when anti-Bush film "Fahrenheit 9/11" opens this weekend, distributed by rivals after Disney shunned the controversial movie.



But many Disney investors said that from a financial perspective they were not concerned by the company's decision.

Showings of the film, which mocks President Bush (news - web sites) and criticizes his policy in Iraq (news - web sites), have sold out in New York theaters and the movie is set to open on 868 screens on Friday, a record for a documentary.

Lions Gate (news - web sites) Entertainment Corp., which is distributing the movie with IFC Films, saw its stock climb about 3.5 percent on Friday. IFC is co-owned by a division of media major Viacom Inc. .

Investors in Disney, which dwarfs Lions Gate, generally were not worried about Chief Executive Michael Eisner's decision to avoid the political movie, which filmmaker Moore hopes will help unseat Bush in the November election.

"Certainly as a shareholder I'd like Disney to make more money than less, but I think Disney and Eisner made the correct decision," said Jack Liebau, whose Liebau Asset Management owns Disney stock.

Liberal activists, however, said they hoped to make such investors -- and Disney management -- sorry for shunning Moore's film.

"I think they are going to regret it, and it is sort of satisfying to see corporate cowardice come with a price tag," said Eli Pariser, campaign organizer of Moveon.org, which has 115,000 members pledged to see the film.

"Bowling for Columbine," Moore's previous film, won a best documentary Oscar last year and took in more than $130 million in box office, DVD and television rights revenue, including $58 million in worldwide theater ticket sales.

James McGlynn, a portfolio manager of the Summit Everest fund who has been building a small stake of Disney shares in the last few months, said that represented a great return on investment in percentage terms but a small profit for a company like Disney.

"It is not as if they are giving away 'Harry Potter (news - web sites)'," he said.

Family-oriented Disney ran the risk of a financial backfire if it annoyed customers or the government officials who set the rules that the media conglomerate plays, said investor Hal Vogel, who does not own Disney shares.

"The mandate of any large company, especially those with sensitive regulatory issues before the government, is to make sure they are an entertainment company and not a political propaganda company, and this is propaganda," he said.

Disney allowed Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the brothers who head its Miramax unit, to distribute the $6 million film on their own under a complicated deal which required them to give a cut equivalent to Disney's share, had it distributed the film, to a charity.

Disney on Friday did not say what that charity was.

Disney, which absorbed $100 million box office bomb "The Alamo" and still pleasantly surprised Wall Street earlier this year, is too big to see much effect from a documentary hit, analysts said. It would need to take in $20 million in net profit to add a penny per share to earnings.

Analyst Paul Kim of Tradition Asiel said a box office showing on the lines of Columbine would add only $10 million to $30 million to Disney.



Further, he saw Eisner's decision as just one move in his contentious contract negotiations with the Weinsteins, who funded "Fahrenheit" to Disney's unpleasant surprise.

Disney's strained relations with the Weinsteins has added momentum to criticism from dissident shareholders that its management, and Eisner in particular, have bungled ties with important creative talent, including its failure to renew a lucrative deal with Pixar Animation Studios Inc.

"There is a mix of Hollywood vanity, there is a mix of politics, and there is a mix of egos. From a financial standpoint, it is relatively meaningless," said Kim.

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Slim-Fast Drops Goldberg Over Anti-Bush RemarksBy Martin Kasindorf, USA TODAY

(July 15) - Comic Whoopi Goldberg's sexual puns on President Bush's name at a John Kerry fundraiser got her canned Wednesday as spokeswoman for Slim-Fast weight-loss products.
Waving a bottle of wine, Goldberg launched her double entendres in New York City last Thursday at a gala that raised $7.5 million for Kerry's campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Other performers at the event called Bush a "cheap thug" and a liar. A Bush campaign spokesman called the concert a "star-studded hate fest." Calls for boycotting Slim-Fast shakes and snacks spread through conservative Web sites.
The West Palm Beach, Fla.-based maker of diet aids said Wednesday that it is pulling the 8-month-old ad campaign that features Goldberg calling herself "a big loser." Terry Olson, Slim-Fast general manager and vice president of marketing, said the company regretted that Goldberg's remarks "offended some of our consumers."
APThe ad campaign featuring Whoopi Goldberg began eight months ago.
Unrepentant, Goldberg said in a written statement Wednesday that "just because I'm no longer in those (commercial) spots, it doesn't mean I will stop talking. While I can appreciate what the Slim-Fast people need to do in order to protect their business, I must also do what I need to do as an artist, as a writer and as an American - not to mention as a comic."
The Kerry campaign distanced itself from Goldberg. "Our campaign has made it clear that those comments were inappropriate and crossed the line," said Chad Clanton, a Kerry spokesman.
"I only wish that the Republican re-election committee would spend as much time working on the economy as they seem to be spending trying to harm my pocketbook," Goldberg said.
Slim-Fast is a unit of Unilever. Unilever executives have donated $3,000 to Bush and $1,250 to Kerry for 2004's campaign. Slim-Fast founder F. Daniel Abraham, who sold the company to Unilever in 2000, is a major donor to Democrats and has given $2,000 to Kerry this year.
Slim-Fast's parting ways with Goldberg over political outspokenness is reminiscent of the Florida Citrus Commission's firing of singer Anita Bryant as a celebrity hawker of orange juice in 1977. Bryant had led opposition to a Miami-Dade County ordinance banning discrimination against gays.
Contributing: Jim Drinkard, Theresa Howard

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Kerry Calls Ad Group a 'Front for the Bush Campaign

After weeks of taking fire over veterans' accusations that he had lied about his Vietnam service record to win medals and build a political career, Senator John Kerry shot back yesterday, calling those statements categorically false and branding the people behind them tools of the Bush campaign.

His decision to take on the group directly was a measure of how the group that calls itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has catapulted itself to the forefront of the presidential campaign. It has advanced its cause in a book, in a television advertisement and on cable news and talk radio shows, all in an attempt to discredit Mr. Kerry's war record, a pillar of his campaign.

How the group came into existence is a story of how veterans with longstanding anger about Mr. Kerry's antiwar statements in the early 1970's allied themselves with Texas Republicans.
Mr. Kerry called them "a front for the Bush campaign" - a charge the campaign denied.
A series of interviews and a review of documents show a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove.

Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family - one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove's, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush's father's presidential library. A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Mr. Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group's television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael S. Dukakis in an oversized tank helmet when he and Mr. Bush's father faced off in the 1988 presidential election.

The strategy the veterans devised would ultimately paint John Kerry the war hero as John Kerry the "baby killer" and the fabricator of the events that resulted in his war medals. But on close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements.
Several of those now declaring Mr. Kerry "unfit" had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.

In an unpublished interview in March 2003 with Mr. Kerry's authorized biographer, Douglas Brinkley, provided by Mr. Brinkley to The New York Times, Roy F. Hoffmann, a retired rear admiral and a leader of the group, allowed that he had disagreed with Mr. Kerry's antiwar positions but said, "I am not going to say anything negative about him." He added, "He's a good man."

In a profile of the candidate that ran in The Boston Globe in June 2003, Mr. Hoffmann approvingly recalled the actions that led to Mr. Kerry's Silver Star: "It took guts, and I admire that."

George Elliott, one of the Vietnam veterans in the group, flew from his home in Delaware to Boston in 1996 to stand up for Mr. Kerry during a tough re-election fight, declaring at a news conference that the action that won Mr. Kerry a Silver Star was "an act of courage." At that same event, Adrian L. Lonsdale, another Vietnam veteran now speaking out against Mr. Kerry, supported him with a statement about the "bravado and courage of the young officers that ran the Swift boats."
"Senator Kerry was no exception," Mr. Lonsdale told the reporters and cameras assembled at the Charlestown Navy Yard. "He was among the finest of those Swift boat drivers."

Those comments echoed the official record. In an evaluation of Mr. Kerry in 1969, Mr. Elliott, who was one of his commanders, ranked him as "not exceeded" in 11 categories, including moral courage, judgment and decisiveness, and "one of the top few" - the second-highest distinction - in the remaining five. In written comments, he called Mr. Kerry "unsurpassed," "beyond reproach" and "the acknowledged leader in his peer group."

It all began last winter, as Mr. Kerry was wrapping up the Democratic nomination. Mr. Lonsdale received a call at his Massachusetts home from his old commander in Vietnam, Mr. Hoffmann, asking if he had seen the new biography of the man who would be president.

Mr. Hoffmann had commanded the Swift boats during the war from a base in Cam Ranh Bay and advocated a search-and-destroy campaign against the Vietcong - the kind of tactic Mr. Kerry criticized when he was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971. Shortly after leaving the Navy in 1978, he was issued a letter of censure for exercising undue influence on cases in the military justice system.

Both Mr. Hoffmann and Mr. Lonsdale had publicly lauded Mr. Kerry in the past. But the book, Mr. Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," while it burnished Mr. Kerry's reputation, portrayed the two men as reckless leaders whose military approach had led to the deaths of countless sailors and innocent civilians. Several Swift boat veterans compared Mr. Hoffmann to the bloodthirsty colonel in the film "Apocalypse Now" - the one who loves the smell of Napalm in the morning.
The two men were determined to set the record, as they saw it, straight.

APLarry Thurlow appears in ad criticizing John Kerry's Vietnam war record.
"It was the admiral who started it and got the rest of us into it," Mr. Lonsdale said.
Mr. Hoffmann's phone calls led them to Texas and to John E. O'Neill, who at one point commanded the same Swift boat in Vietnam, and whose mission against him dated to 1971, when he had been recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Mr. Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show."

Mr. O'Neill, who pressed his charges against Mr. Kerry in numerous television appearances Thursday, had spent the 33 years since he debated Mr. Kerry building a successful law practice in Houston, intermingling with some of the state's most powerful Republicans and building an impressive client list. Among the companies he represented was Falcon Seaboard, the energy firm founded by the current lieutenant governor of Texas, David Dewhurst, a central player in the Texas redistricting plan that has positioned state Republicans to win more Congressional seats this fall.

Mr. O'Neill said during one of several interviews that he had come to know two of his biggest donors, Harlan Crow and Bob J. Perry, through longtime social and business contacts.
Mr. Perry, who has given $200,000 to the group, is the top donor to Republicans in the state, according to Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan group that tracks political donations. He donated $46,000 to President Bush's campaigns for governor in 1994 and 1998. In the 2002 election, the group said, he donated nearly $4 million to Texas candidates and political committees.

Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush's top political aide, recently said through a spokeswoman that he and Mr. Perry were longtime friends, though he said they had not spoken for at least a year. Mr. Rove and Mr. Perry have been associates since at least 1986, when they both worked on the gubernatorial campaign of Bill Clements.

Mr. O'Neill said he had known Mr. Perry for 30 years. "I've represented many of his friends,'' Mr. O'Neill said. Mr. Perry did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. O'Neill said he had also known Mr. Crow for 30 years, through mutual friends. Mr. Crow, the seventh-largest donor to Republicans in the state according to the Texans for Public Justice, has donated nowhere near as much money as Mr. Perry to the Swift boat group. His family owns one of the largest diversified commercial real estate companies in the nation, the Trammell Crow Company, and has given money to Mr. Bush and his father throughout their careers. He is listed as a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

One of his law partners, Margaret Wilson, became Mr. Bush's general counsel when he was governor of Texas and followed him to the White House as deputy counsel for the Department of Commerce, according to her biography on the law firm's Web site.

Another partner, Tex Lezar, ran on the Republican ticket with Mr. Bush in 1994, as lieutenant governor. They were two years apart at Yale, and Mr. Lezar worked for the attorney general's office in the Reagan administration. Mr. Lezar, who died last year, was married to Merrie Spaeth, a powerful public relations executive who has helped coordinate the efforts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In 2000, Ms. Spaeth was spokeswoman for a group that ran $2 million worth of ads attacking Senator John McCain's environmental record and lauding Mr. Bush's in crucial states during their fierce primary battle. The group, calling itself Republicans for Clean Air, was founded by a prominent Texas supporter of Mr. Bush, Sam Wyly.

Ms. Spaeth had been a communications official in the Reagan White House, where the president's aides had enough confidence in her to invite her to help prepare George Bush for his vice-presidential debate in 1984. She says she is also a close friend of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, a client of Mr. Rove's. Ms. Spaeth said in an interview that the one time she had ever spoken to Mr. Rove was when Ms. Hutchison was running for the Texas treasurer's office in 1990.
When asked if she had ever visited the White House during Mr. Bush's tenure, Ms. Spaeth initially said that she had been there only once, in 2002, when Kenneth Starr gave her a personal tour. But this week Ms. Spaeth acknowledged that she had spent an hour in the Old Executive Office Building, part of the White House complex, in the spring of 2003, giving Mr. Bush's chief economic adviser, Stephen Friedman, public speaking advice. Asked if it was possible that she had worked with other administration officials, Ms. Spaeth said, "The answer is 'no,' unless you refresh my memory.''

"Is the White House directing this?" Ms. Spaeth said of the organization. "Absolutely not.''
Another participant is the political advertising agency that made the group's television commercial: Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, based in Alexandria, Va. The agency worked for Senator McCain in 2000 and for Mr. Bush's father in 1988, when it created the "tank" advertisement mocking Mr. Dukakis. A spokesman for the Swift boat veterans said the organization decided to hire the agency after a member saw one of its partners speaking on television.

About 10 veterans met in Ms. Spaeth's office in Dallas in April to share outrage and plot their campaign against Mr. Kerry, she and others said. Mr. Lonsdale, who did not attend, said the meeting had been planned as "an indoctrination session."
What might have been loose impressions about Mr. Kerry began to harden.

"That was an awakening experience," Ms. Spaeth said. "Not just for me, but for many of them who had not heard each other's stories."

The group decided to hire a private investigator to investigate Mr. Brinkley's account of the war - to find "some neutral way of actually questioning people involved in these incidents,'' Mr. O'Neill said.

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