L.A. Bookshops Battle to Satisfy Local Demand for ‘DisneyWar’

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The day after “DisneyWar” hit the bookshelves at Brentano’s Century City store, sales were so heavy that managers had to keep copies behind the counter just to keep up with phone orders.


That’s pretty much how it’s been at bookstores all over Los Angeles as James B. Stewart’s chronicle of dysfunction in the upper ranks of Walt Disney Co. management has attracted the interest of showbiz executives and others intrigued by tales from the Mouse House.


While hard sales figures are not available, booksellers reported quickly running out of their initial orders. As of late last week, the title ranked 14th in sales on Amazon.com.


Simon & Schuster Inc., the Viacom Inc. unit publishing the book, had scheduled the nationwide release of 200,000 copies for March 7. But the publisher decided to release it Feb. 7 in New York and Los Angeles after portions were leaked to Disney executives, who complained of Stewart’s use of anonymous sources and disgruntled former Disney employees.


That, along with advance news stories in major newspapers revealing selected tidbits from the book, has been fueling the interest.


Jade Finlinson, manager of Book Soup in West Hollywood, said the initial 16-copy stock of “DisneyWar” was quickly snapped up after arriving the week before last. Another 100 copies have been ordered.


“People have been calling and calling about it,” she said. “We’ve got all the business scandal books that are big in the news the big stories. It’s a bigger deal than the others because it’s close to home.”


Abbott Alexander, manager of Dutton’s Books in North Hollywood, about three miles from Disney’s Burbank headquarters, said he has sold 10 copies and received another batch Tuesday night brisk sales for a small independent chain.


“We have a lot of animators from DPS Film Roman, an animation house up the street, who come in on their lunch hour every day,” Alexander said. “They buy anything related to animation or Disney lore.”


Chief Executive Michael Eisner initially cooperated with Stewart, whose research began before last year’s effort to oust him as chairman and chief executive. He was stripped of the chairman’s title after last year’s annual meeting.


While the book, written in narrative form, is expected to do well in Los Angeles and New York, the fascination with Disney may not extend to buyers in the rest of the country.


It’s a question being raised about other so-called business narratives, especially considering that a slew of titles about the collapse of energy giant Enron Corp. failed to generate high sales.


The late 1980s and 1990s were the heyday of the business narrative, following the savings and loan and insider trading scandals. “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco” by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, “The Predators’ Ball” by Connie Bruck, and Stewart’s earlier book, “Den of Thieves,” all made the bestsellers lists.


But in an era of 24-hour cable news, the Internet and aggressive newspaper and magazine reporting, potential readers of these tell-all books could feel they already know the story. That’s certainly true with Disney, which is among the most widely covered companies in the world.


Stewart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor, will do well with the book if it can captivate readers and provide original material, publishing insiders said.


“People are looking to see if it’s a harbinger of a revival,” said John Mahaney, executive editor in the business book imprint at Crown Publishing, a division of Random House Inc., Bertelsmann AG’s book publishing arm. “You may see a deluge of similar books. I think there will be a lot of proposals circulated for business narratives now.”


Marion Maneker, editorial director of HarperBusiness, a unit of News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers Inc., said the imprint was on the lookout for books like Stewart’s but that the threshold was high.


“We’re looking for writers and stories we feel we can actually get people excited about,” he said “In the sense of a business narrative, that genre’s heyday was many years ago, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be another book of that sort. But it will be its own book.”

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