Hollywood – An hour before the Monday lunch crowd would arrive, Michael Eisner, former chief executive of Walt Disney Co., and Billy Crystal, comic and memoirist, had the entire back dining room of Spago restaurant in Beverly Hills to themselves – along with the crew and cameras of CNBC’s “Conversations With Michael Eisner” and a mini-entourage.
The two faced each another in a dining booth. Eisner confessed he was “obsessed” with Crystal’s stage production “700 Sundays,” a comic and dark exploration of how his father had affected his life.
Crystal called the attention “thrilling.” For this third episode of his primetime talk show on the business network, Eisner had chosen Crystal, along with Bob Iger, Eisner’s replacement at Disney; ABC talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and Sharon Stone, who ended up canceling her appearance just days before, even though the former mogul had spent the previous weekend preparing for the interview by watching her movies (“I’ve never seen so many orgasms in five hours in my life,” he said.) The show airs Monday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.
“He does his homework,” Crystal said. “I was on the ‘Today’ show with a kiddie book. That was 32 pages I wrote! Katie had not read it! What would have been so hard?”
Eisner said he’s comfortable out of the boardroom and on this side of the cameras.
“I’m only doing what I think is fun and interesting,” he said. “Once the camera rolls, I forget there are people around, I’m just into a conversation.”
In his role as host, Eisner books his own guests, who have included Goldie Hawn, Regis Philbin, Bette Midler and Martha Stewart who, like Crystal, responded in thoughtful and practical ways.
The show’s strength, Eisner said, comes from the personalities of the guests and the host. “If I get too many restraints on my personality, I’m going to end up being just another talking head. I’d rather err and be me. If being me isn’t attractive or interesting enough, then I’m not going to continue being me on the air.”
Some might say he’s lucky to have that choice. Eisner’s second show averaged 66,000 adults between 25 and 54, up from 39,000 for the premiere. If he were the executive in charge of his own show, he said he didn’t know whether he’d keep it on the air.
Eisner, 64, fell into talk show hosting after the long-running “Disney wars” resulted in his resignation in September. Talk show host Charlie Rose asked him what he would do next.
“I said, ‘Maybe I’ll do what you’re doing.”‘ The next month, Rose asked him to fill in as a guest host. He booked his old friends, actor John Travolta and media mogul Barry Diller. Soon after, CNBC offered him his own show. “I said I’ll try six and see if I like it.”
So far, he says he likes much of it. “What I don’t like is coordinating the schedules.” Normally, Eisner’s monthly show is taped in New York.
And he hopes to reschedule Stone, because she represents today’s equivalent of Elizabeth Taylor in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which he and his friends were wild for in their teens.
“I was interested in a woman who 10 years ago represented beauty to the world in the same way a woman did 50 years ago. I wanted to ask her, did she understand what that meant?”
